Genocide In Rwanda 

     We never encountered a single example of extraordinary achievement that occurred without the active involvement and support of many people (Kouzes & Posner, 2008).

 

     Resisting the prejudice and violence around them, Rwandan leaders risked their lives to save their Tutsi neighbors, showing the power of moral courage and bravery during a time of severe chaos and devastation (Mascarenhas, 2014). The book “The Student Leadership Challenge” speaks to the fact that leaders transform values into actions, visions into realities, obstacles into innovations, separateness into solidarity, and risks into rewards (Kouzes & Posner, 2008).

 

     It had been shown how leaders dropped the ball so to say when it came to supporting and protecting all of the citizens in Rwanda, before the mass killings. To have a delay because leaders would not agree to call the mass killings Genocide is unacceptable. People take on the role of a leader every day. Leaders are not only the people seen campaigning for office or leading the meeting in the boardroom such as the case in Rwanda 1994.

 

     Ordinary people that did something in extraordinary times. They were part of the same society that the killers were in. They were part of the same 100 days when everybody else decided to go along and kill people as part of their job, every day. The situation caused these people to react.  Their job, instead, was to save the others. They said these are the same people yesterday, and they are not my enemy today just because the government is telling me that. Rwandans rose to the occasion to risk everything they had including their lives to save neighbors, friends or strangers in the face of injustice and violence (Mascarenhas, 2014). 

 

     The level of leadership that took place during the genocide may never fully be understood. Leaders took on roles as the protector of others. Once captured, members of the Tutsi group would torture and promise that the torture would stop if they told where others were hiding and who was helping them. There are numerous accounts of people choosing death rather than send harm to those that had assisted them. This is another example of leadership and empowering others to act. Rwandans looking at themselves as Rwandans and not Hutu’s nor Tutsi’s was the foundation of renewal in Rwanda.