1921 Under a League of Nations mandate, Rwanda and Burundi, formerly part of German East Africa and occupied by Belgian troops during World War I, fall under Belgian rule.
1931 Identity cards specifying the ethnic group of the bearer are introduced, a policy continued until 1994.
1946 Rwanda becomes a UN trust territory and is administered as a Belgian colony and part of Congo.
1959 The last great Tutsi king, Mutara Rudahigwa, dies. The Hutu peasant massacres and revolts that follow cause the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis.
1960 The Belgian Congo becomes independent, and Rwanda becomes a republic.
1961 The Hutu parties achieve victory in Rwanda’s first legislative elections.
1962 The independence of Rwanda is proclaimed.
1963 In Nyamata, the Rwandan army carries out the first widespread massacres of Tutsis.
1973 Major Juvénal Habyarimana carries out a military coup d’état. Large numbers of Hutus fleeing poverty and drought flood into Nyamata, where renewed and repeated massacres occur.
1978 Juvénal Habyarimana is elected president.
1990 The Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front, which has been assembled from Tutsi militias operating out of Tanzania, Uganda, Burundi, and Zaire, gains its first military victories in Rwanda. Hutu extremist militias, called interahamwe, are organized by the Habyarimana clan.
1993 A peace agreement is signed in Arusha, Tanzania, between Habyarimana’s regime and the RPF.
1994
April 6, 8 p. m. Habyarimana is assassinated when his plane is brought down by a mysterious missile on its approach to Kigali Airport.
April 7, early morning. Assassinations begin of political figures who did not fully support Habyarimana’s dictatorship; the victims include Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyamana, a Hutu.
RPF forces immediately begin their drive toward the capital, Kigali, where Hutu interahamwe militias have started slaughtering Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The genocide begins; it will continue for about a hundred days. In Nyamata, small-scale violence breaks out, definitively separating the two ethnic communities on the hills.
April 9. In Nyamata interahamwe troops launch the first raids to loot and burn houses abandoned by Tutsis and to murder rebellious Hutus; local farmers help them, but without receiving specific orders.
April 11. After waiting four days for directions from the government, Hutu soldiers from the base at Gako begin systematic killings in the streets of Nyamata. On the hills, the local authorities and interahamwe assemble the farmers, and their planned attacks on Tutsis begin.
April 14–15. In Nyamata approximately five thousand Tutsi refugees are massacred by machete, first in the church, then in the Sainte-Marthe Maternity Hospital.
April 15. Some five thousand refugees are massacred in the church in Ntarama, thirty kilometers from Nyamata.
April 16. Organized hunts for Tutsis begin in the marshes of Nyamwiza and on the hill of Kayumba—wherever Tutsis have sought refuge.
May 12. Tens of thousands of Hutu families start fleeing toward Congo on the Gitarama road. The genocide in Nyamata is over. May 14. The RPF reaches Nyamata and begins to look for survivors in the marshes.
July 4. Kigali center falls to the RPF, which installs a new government with a Hutu president and General Paul Kagame as minister of defense. The RPF was eventually reorganized into the regular Rwandan army.
July 15. Half a million Hutu refugees begin to cross the border into Congo; eventually some 1.7 million Hutus fill the refugee camps of eastern Congo.
October 3. The United Nations Security Council endorses a report describing the massacres committed in Rwanda as genocide.
1996
November. Rebel forces opposing President Mobutu Sese Seko’s regime invade eastern Congo, supported by Rwandan forces. Tens of thousands of Hutu refugees are killed, and some two million refugees eventually return to Rwanda. Most interahamwe
either were killed during this Rwandan offensive or joined the return and gave themselves up to the Rwandan government, but some still live in Congo, in bands of looters or mercenaries, mostly in the Kivu region on the border.
1997
May 17. Troops of the Rwandan army sweep through Congo, driving out Mobutu and bringing Laurent-Désiré Kabila to power in Kinshasa.
1998
April 24. In Nyamata six condemned prisoners are publicly executed on the hill of Kayumba—to this day, the sole official executions there.
2002
January 1. The Third Republic is proclaimed in Rwanda, consolidating the regime of President Paul Kagame, who has been the strong man of the RPF from the start. August. Gaçaça courts begin operating in Nyamata.
2003
January 1. A presidential decree is issued concerning those convicted of crimes of genocide. It authorizes the release of elderly and sick prisoners and allows probation—in conjunction with three days of communal labor per week—for convicts in the second and third categories (lower-echelon killers and their accomplices) whose confessions have been accepted and who have already served at least half their prison sentences.