Rwanda

Series

The Rwanda collection contains 59 tapes with edited and unedited footage, including amateur footage, raw and background footage, documentaries, event recordings, oral history interviews and testimonies, television programs and news reports, documenting crimes against humanity and genocide committed in Rwanda in 1994. The collection features an aggregate of television news and reports, the majority coming from Western media, about the state of affairs in Rwanda in the months following the assassination of Rwanda’s President Juvénal Habyarimana when an estimated 800,000 people were mass murdered and another 2 million were displaced. It also includes a number of documentaries which reflect on the history of Rwanda, the conditions advancing the genocide, and the failure of the international community to prevent and contain the killings. Some of the documentaries provide interesting archival footage about the Hutus, the Tutsis, and their Belgian colonial past, while others include raw footage of revolting killings, massacre sites and the living conditions of refugees in Rwanda’s neighboring countries. The collection also has a considerable amount of raw footage and unedited interviews, mostly shot by journalists and investigators of USCR (US Committee for Refugees), RSF (Reporters Without Borders), ICTR (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda) and UNTV (United Nations Television) to document and provide evidence of the planned massacres and genocide. It also includes amateur footage with recordings of various events and meetings, as well as interviews with victims of the massacres, genocide perpetrators, and country officials. Overall, the collection offers crucial first-hand material testifying to the genocide, including numerous interviews with those involved in the massacres, site visits, exhumations, damage reports and other footage documenting grave human rights violations.

Not Expected

Not Restricted

59 Beta SP NTSC tapes.

Processed by Alexandra Lăzău-Ratz, February – March, 2011; revised by Anna Kövecsi and Csaba Szilágyi, April, 2011.