GOMA
Mass Exodus from Rwanda 1994
Between April and June 1994, an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed in the space of 100 days. It was the largest genocide in Africa’s modern times. Most of the dead were Tutsis - and most of those who perpetrated the violence were Hutus. Driven by fear, hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees from Rwanda overwhelmed a tiny border crossing and flooded into the town of Goma, Zaire. Within days, the greatest mass flight of people in modern times, within days more than two million Rwandans poured into Zaire. Many described the scene as hell on earth, deaths among the refugee community reached 2,000 per week as the refugee population increased and the health situation worsened. In the cholera camps it was hard to tell the sleeping from the dead.