This text analyzes the events leading up to genocidal conflicts in Rwanda during 1994 and discusses the country's prospects in their aftermath. In tracing the political machinations that preceded the genocide, the author argues that there was a carefully orchestrated plan which set the killings in motion. For Prunier, therefore, the Hutu-Tutsi conflict was not the result of insatiable bloodlust and ancestral hatreds, but an act of political mass murder. Accordingly, he delineates the leading political actors and explains their role in events of 1991-1994.