Born Then1994
Life during the Rwandan genocide
Be born in a place it hit, a few years before it began, and see what it did to five ordinary lives.
What it meant for ordinary people
Over about 100 days in 1994, Hutu extremist militias and soldiers killed hundreds of thousands of Tutsi and moderate Hutu, often with machetes, after organised incitement on radio. The genocide ended when the Rwandan Patriotic Front took Kigali; about two million Hutu then fled abroad.
Deaths: about 500,000 to 800,000, most of them Tutsi.
How hard it hits each person in the game (risk of death, of being conscripted, of leaving) comes from scholarly estimates.
Around the same time
- Bracero program and Mexican migration to the United States 1942–2007
- Apartheid 1948–1994
- Division of Germany 1949–1990
- Vietnam War 1955–1975
- Korean economic miracle 1962–1996
- Brazilian military dictatorship 1964–1985
- Colombian armed conflict 1964–2016
- Cultural Revolution 1966–1976
- Green Revolution in India 1966–1985
- Ujamaa villagization in Tanzania 1967–1977
- Martial law under Marcos 1972–1986
- Migration to the Gulf 1973–2025
- Cambodian genocide 1975–1979
- The Emergency in India 1975–1977
- Dirty War in Argentina 1976–1983
- Iranian Revolution 1978–1982
- China's reform and opening 1978–2015
- Soviet–Afghan War 1979–1989
- Iran–Iraq War 1980–1988
- One-child policy 1980–2015
- Ethiopian famine of 1983–85 1983–1985
- HIV/AIDS epidemic in southern and eastern Africa 1985–2015
- Collapse of the Soviet Union 1991–1998
- Rwandan genocide 1994
- 1997 Asian financial crisis 1997–1999
- Second Congo War 1998–2003
- War in Afghanistan (2001–2021) 2001–2021
- Iraq War 2003–2011
- 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami 2004
- Mexican drug war 2006–2025