Year 10 Legal Studies: Genocide in Rwanda

In just 100 days in 1994, about 800,000 people were slaughtered in Rwanda by ethnic Hutu extremists. They were targeting members of the minority Tutsi community, as well as their political opponents, irrespective of their ethnic origin.

Warning: Contains graphic images.

During the Rwandan genocide of 1994, members of the Hutu ethnic majority in the east-central African nation of Rwanda murdered as many as 800,000 people, mostly of the Tutsi minority.

The violence that shocked the world in 1994 did not come from nowhere. While the CIA looked on, its allies in the Ugandan government helped to spread terror and fuel ethnic hatred

Lying still under the bodies of executed relatives, the siblings played dead to stay alive. Regine Bategure, today aged 41, and her brother Emmanuel Nkaka, 37, vividly remember the time they got caught up in the violence that erupted in Rwanda in mid-1994, resulting in a genocide that ended up killing 800,000 people.

A new book documenting testimonies from three survivors of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, as well as Rwanda's transformation journey was on Friday launched at Kigali Genocide Memorial.

The United Nations deployment to Rwanda seemed like a straightforward peacekeeping mission back in 1993. A lightly armed force of approximately 2,500 peacekeepers would help implement the Arusha Agreement, a 1993 peace accord that ended the civil war between Rwanda's Hutu government and the Tutsi liberation movement, the Rwandan Patriotic Front. Instead of overseeing national reconciliation, U.N. soldiers became eyewitnesses to genocide.

WATCH THIS: Twenty years on from the horrific Rwandan genocide, Dateline looks at the efforts to reconcile the past and find hope for the future.