Man, those Hutus are a pretty sorry bunch

There are a lot of things you need to understand about the two tribes and the vast history that goes along with them before you can call anyone cowardly. I'm not saying that what happened wasn't wrong, but there is a lot of background information that people would have to know before blaming anyone in particular for the killings.

What the Hutus did was wrong. There are two sides to each story and you need to understand what drove the Hutus to their unforgiveable murderous rampage. mind you it wasn't the first time they slaugtered Tutsis as Jean mentions in the film.

Michel Micombero didn't like the Hutus much either. He was Burundi's Tutsi dictator who wiped out 300,000 of them in 1972, targeting all those with any kind of education. This set the stage for over 30 years of Tutsi dictatorship punctuated by massacres such as those of 1988.

In 1993, Burundi got a Hutu president. The Tutsi army assassinated him in October of that year and then massacred more tens of thousands of Hutus.

On April 7, 1994, two more Hutu presidents were assassinated. Three in six months, all at the hands of Tutsis.

Through the 60s, Tutsi exiles from Rwanda tried odd invasions and terrorism. They became known as "inyenzi" or cockroaches, those who work at night and disappear in the day.

Paul Kagame was a general-major in the Ugandan terrorist formation that took power in 1986 and was known as Pilate, as in Pontius. His career in Uganda was very bloody. He was getting training in the US when he helped arrange for a so-called mutiny of Tutsi exile members of the new Ugandan military. They invaded into Rwanda, and according to a former member of this Tutsi army, killed 30,000 people that first year. In February 1993, they displaced a million people.

During this time, the Western powers were telling Rwandan President Habyarimana to surrender to this army of Tutsi exiles. Habyarimana was nevertheless skillfully playing the limited card the Western powers were giving him and his party swept the elections held against the RPF, the Tutsi army, in local elections in the demilitarised zone. He was successfully pulling the Hutu opposition parties away from the RPF. Thus, Kagame decided to eliminate Habyarimana and took out the Burundian president in the process. Habyarimana's plane fell into his own presidential compound. An RPF defector described his involvement in the murders.

The RPF were also loose in Kigali massacring people as they were given part of the capital by Dallaire and the UN as part of the so-called peace process. After they seized power, they swept twice into the Congo and an estimated 3 million were killed. This is all thanks to the angelic Tutsis and their leader, the African Hitler, Paul Kagame.

A shocking number of Hutu civilians were indeed implicated as participants in massacres...this cannot be downplayed and has to be acknowledged (as it's probably unprecedented in human history). Even before the genocide there must have been some sort of a culture of violence and a willingness to resort to mob justice in cases of (supposed) infractions committed by individuals. I am always tempted to look for such precursors, as becoming desensitized to violence cannot happen overnight. There may have also been a lack of strong inter-communal bonds. I remember reading (in some tourist guidebooks) that the Rwandans tend to be very reserved and private people (though this may simply reflect the change in mentalities in the aftermath of the genocide). Being introverted is of course not wrong in any way, but in the Rwandan case there was probably a shocking absence of an overarching patriotism and general feelings of intergroup solidarity.
However, I don't believe that there could be a "killer gene" within a certain ethnic group...though the millions of decent Hutus still have to cope with a very heavy stigma (which is unfortunately not totally unjustified).