The 600: The Soldier’s Story

On the night of April 6th, after extremists downed the plane carrying the Hutu President of Rwanda who was participating in the peace talks, the Army and the militias began targeted assassinations of moderate Hutu leaders, and prominent Tutsis, and then indiscriminate massacres of Tutsi civilians across the country at an alarmingly fast and brutal pace. This small battalion held out for several days against surrounding army forces that were 10,000 strong, before the relief forces of the RPA arrived from the Head Quarters, 83 kilometers away, to save them. The soldiers of the RPA, while under fire from larger forces, still had to deal with the barbarity of the Genocide, discovering mass killings, raped women, and sometimes their own relatives who had been killed by the perpetrators of the Genocide against the Tutsi. Nevertheless, many continued to fought on. They performed daring rescues of thousands of civilians around Kigali that were trapped in churches, the stadium, and their homes as they faced certain death. These young, well disciplined, politically-educated army were willing to make the ultimate sacrifice to save Rwanda from one of the worst events in human history.