Features: DVD
FRONTLINE marks the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide with a documentary chronicling one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century. In addition to interviews with key government officials and diplomats, the two-hour documentary offers groundbreaking, eyewitness accounts of the genocide from those who experienced it firsthand: from Tutsi survivors who recount the horror of seeing their friends and family members slaughtered by neighbors and coworkers; to the diplomats on the scene who struggled to convey the severity of the crisis to their superiors in Washington; to the UN peacekeepers stationed amid the carnage who were ordered not to intervene. Through these accounts, FRONTLINE illustrates the social, political, and diplomatic failures that enabled the slaughter of 800,000 people to occur unabated and unchallenged by the global community.
Editor's Note
In April 1994, the small central-African nation of Rwanda was host to one of the most brutal genocides in 20th-century history. Spurred on by the racist propaganda of a rogue political party, extremists in the majority Hutu ethnic group slaughtered 800,000 members of the minority Tutsi ethnic group in the span of 100 days--and mostly by machete. Largely misinterpreting the genocide as the result of a centuries-old tribal rivalry while failing to recognize its postcolonial roots, the rest of the world stood idly by, both unable to understand the conflict and unwilling to commit to intervention. This episode of PBS's FRONTLINE series revisits the still-wounded nation on the 10th anniversary of the genocide and explores the various political failures that allowed such a tragedy to take place, interviewing Rwandan government officials, foreign diplomats, UN Secretaries-General Kofi Annan and Boutros Boutros-Ghali, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and, most hauntingly, both Tutsi survivors and their Hutu assassins.
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