CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS IN RWANDA AND IN THE DISTRICT OF NYAMATA

IN RWANDA

1921.	A League of Nations mandate grants Belgium control of Rwanda.
1931.	Identity cards indicating the bearer’s ethnicity are introduced. They will be in use until 1994.
1961.	Hutu political parties triumph in the country’s first legislative elections. Rwanda is declared a republic.
1973.	Major General Juvénal Habyarimana overthrows the country’s first president in a coup d’état. Habyarimana will win elections allowing him to hold the presidency for the next twenty years.
1990.	The Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) organized at the Ugandan border achieves its first military victories against Habyarimana’s troops.
1994.	April 6, 8:00 p.m. The Hutu president Habyarimana is assassinated when his plane is shot down over the Kigali airport.
	April 7, early morning. The first assassinations of key democratic figures, among whom is the Hutu prime minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana. Interahamwe militias invade Kigali neighborhoods. The genocide begins and will last for one hundred days. Tutsi-led RPF troops immediately begin to press into the interior of the country.
	July 4. The RPF takes central Kigali.
	October 3. The United Nations Security Council adopts a report classifying the massacres committed in Rwanda as genocide. According to current estimates, between eight hundred thousand and nine hundred thousand Rwandans were killed during the genocide.
1996.	November. RPF troops carry out deadly attacks on Hutus encamped in the Kivu region of eastern Congo, forcing the return of two million Hutu refugees to Rwanda.
2001.	The Rwandan government establishes the gaçaça courts.

IN NYAMATA

1994.	April 7–8. Clashes between Hutus and Tutsis erupt, permanently dividing the two communities on the hills.
	April 11. After four days of uncertainty, soldiers from the military base at Gako along with interahamwe militias begin systematic killings in the streets of Nyamata. On the hills, the local authorities muster farmers to carry out attacks on Tutsis.
	April 14–15. Nearly five thousand Tutsis taking refuge in the church in Nyamata are massacred by machete. A similar number are killed in the church in Ntarama, among whom Ernestine Kaneza.
	April 16. Organized hunts for Tutsis begin in the marshes and forests where Tutsis have sought refuge.
	May 14. RPF troops finally reach the hills and begin searching the marshes for survivors. Fifty-one thousand corpses, out of a Tutsi population of fifty-nine thousand, are strewn in Nyamata’s marshes, forests, and churches.
1996.	The Hutu refugee population returns to the hills from the Kivu region. Many killers and interahamwe are swiftly imprisoned at the penitentiary in Rilima, around twenty kilometers from Nyamata. Among the first to be tried, Joseph-Désiré Bitero, the leader of the interahamwe, receives the death penalty.
2001.	Trials begin for members of the Kibungo Hill gang, who receive prison sentences ranging from twelve to fifteen years.
2003.	A presidential decree frees forty thousand prisoners, including all the members of the gang except for Joseph-Désiré Bitero and Élie Mizinge.
2006.	The gaçaça courts open in Nyamata, lasting until 2010. During the trials, Ignace Rukiramacumu will be sentenced to three years of work reeducation (travaux d’intérêt général) and Fulgence Bunani to life imprisonment for the murder of Ernestine Kaneza.