Plane crash

On this date, at almost this very hour, fourteen years ago, a plane carrying Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira was on its way back to Kigali from a regional summit of heads of state in Tanzania. As the plane approached the Kigali airport and prepared to land, it was attacked by two missiles, exploded into flames and crashed into the garden of the presdential palace. Both presidents on board were killed.

Within hours, an interim government led by Hutu extremists took power and the events that would come to be known as the Rwandan genocide began. Over the next hundred days, between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Rwandans were killed. Philip Gourevitch, author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, reports, "The dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust. It was the most efficient mass killing since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

The most efficient mass killing since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Think about that. Only the atomic bombs used in World War II were able to kill more efficiently than the machetes and clubs wielded by common men in Rwanda in 1994.