Rwanda genocide vs. The Holocaust

Well that is a rather tall order you're asking and the answer to that would be rather lengthy, not easily answered on a message board like this one. But I'll give it a stab or two. The Holocaust in Europe versus the Rwandan Genocide were two very different events really, not a lot of similarities. In a nutshell, the Holocaust was a slow and gradual genocide while Rwanda's genocide essentially burst onto the scene within a very short period of time. The former involved a sort of slow "ethnic cleansing" that didn't start with mass killings, while the latter involved mass killings immediately. The former involved ethnic groups that had existed for thousands of years, while the latter involved ethnic groups that didn't really exist for even 100 years but were "manufactured" by the country's colonial rulers.

The Holocaust happened from 1933 and possibly somewhat earlier, up until 1945 and targeted certain minorities that were regarded as scapegoats for economic problems in post-World War I Europe, and those minorities were often regarded as "not fitting in" with the majority of the European populace. The minorities were targeted with the German government and puppet governments in the countries they occupied (particularly Poland) gradually taking away the civil and economic liberties of these minorities, isolating them into certain buildings and neighborhoods in the cities (known as ghettos) but then eventually moving them out into the countryside into camps where they performed forced labor until they died or killed in gas chambers. Total deaths from the Holocaust were estimated at 11 million.

The Rwandan genocide on the other hand, happened over a 3-month period, with deaths somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million, the majority of them being ethnic Tutsis killed by ethnic Hutus. But unlike the ethnic groups in the Holocaust, Hutus and Tutsis were not real ethnicities in my opinion, rather they had been created by Rawanda's colonial rulers (Belgium) as a sort of divide and conquer strategy. The German and Belgian governments, when they conquered and colonized Rwanda, basically classified everyone as a Hutu, Tutsi or Twa based on how their faces looked - how dark their skin was, the size of their nose, the length of their neck, the amount of livestock they owned and other factors. Even after Rwanda became independent, these manufactured ethnicities didn't disappear, the locals continued to identify themselves based on what their parents had been classified as and it just was accepted to be the country's ethnic makeup. Tutsis had always been favored by the Belgian conquerors over Hutu and Twa people but only made up around 15% of the population while Hutus made up 80% or more. After it was believed that a Tutsi was behind a plane crash where the country's Hutu president was killed, a massive backlash, i.e. "ethnic cleansing" occurred against all the Tutsis in Rwanda by the Hutus, despite the fact that most had nothing to do with the president's death. The genocide ended when a Tutsi-led government managed to take over the country essentially (too complicated to explain here).

Does that do it for you? Somebody might claim I have some of the details of the Rwandan genocide wrong but that is the gist of it.