The world geography project felt like just another assignment to the high school sophomores despite its ambitious scope. Their teacher, Tim Walz, had asked his 1993 Nebraska class to predict where the next genocide would occur in the world.
The roughly 20 students read history books, scholarly reports and encyclopedias to make their prediction: Rwanda. The division between the Hutu and the Tutsi ethnic groups, two students recalled saying in a presentation, mirrored the conditions that preceded other genocides the class had studied.
Even so, some of the students in Alliance, Neb., were surprised to learn in April 1994 that a genocide against the Tutsi had begun in Rwanda.
“We didn’t really expect it to happen,” Travis Hofmann, who took Walz’s class when he was a teenager, told The Washington Post on Tuesday.
The lessons Walz, then in his late 20s, taught about war, colonialism and totalitarianism led the Alliance High School students to their prediction, Hofmann said. Walz, whom Vice President Kamala Harris selected as her running mate Tuesday, told the New York Times in 2008 that he wanted his students to “make the intellectual leap to figure out the reasons” behind mass murder.
“You have to understand what caused genocide to happen,” Walz told the newspaper. “Or it will happen again.”
The classroom project offers a glimpse into Walz’s view of international affairs, which he continued to explore when he began a career in politics in 2006 — first in the House of Representatives and now as Minnesota’s governor. He has condemned the Chinese government’s human rights abuses, called the humanitarian crisis in Gaza “intolerable” and has signed legislation in support of Ukraine.
If Harris and Walz are elected in November, they would probably lead the United States amid two major regional conflicts — Ukraine’s war with Russia and Israel’s war against Hamas.
Teaching social studies at Alliance High School was one of Walz’s first jobs after he taught in China for a year in 1989. Some of his students, living in a small farming city about 330 miles northwest of Lincoln, Neb., were familiar with world events through books, newspapers and radio and TV news.
In a second-floor classroom in 1993, Walz taught his class how a country’s geography influenced its culture and values, two of his former students said. He also taught them the cultural, political and economic rifts that contributed to genocides.
Hofmann said his teachings included the Holocaust, when Nazis and their collaborators killed 6 million Jews in Europe; the Cambodian genocide in the 1970s, when Cambodia’s Communist Party killed as many as 2 million citizens; and the Armenian genocide in the mid-1910s, when the Ottoman Empire killed about 1.5 million Armenians.
Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, told The Post that the initial warning signs of a genocide include a group dehumanizing another community of people and historical grievances — real or imagined — that make one group believe another has stolen their land, wealth or power. Genocides can also be preceded by economic or political instability that opposition groups promise they’ll solve, helping them gain power, Bartov said.
Thomas Kühne, a history professor at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., said groups can only commit genocide if they have a strong and organized military. But the warning signs alone don’t mean genocide will definitely occur, Kühne said, so trying to predict and prevent the next mass murder is difficult.
“That’s a science in itself,” Kühne said.
Nonetheless, Walz assigned his class of high school sophomores the task of identifying those warning signs to find countries at risk of genocide near the end of the 1993 school year. The students considered Rwanda, Yugoslavia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and former Soviet republics, Lanae Hall, a student in the class, said in an email to The Post on Wednesday. But it was Rwanda that they homed in on.
The class found that there had already been spates of telltale violence between Hutu and Tutsi groups, Hall said. And the Hutu had been using dehumanizing language, calling the Tutsi cockroaches and snakes over the radio waves. More than a decade later, when Walz was in Congress, the New York Times reported that he gave the class “high marks” for their argument.
When the school year ended, students left that prediction in the classroom. Some went boating and fishing at the Box Butte Reservoir. Hofmann worked part-time jobs changing the marquee at a local movie theater and serving chicken and biscuits at KFC.
Then in April 1994, students heard the news that Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down, igniting simmering ethnic tensions and beginning the Rwandan genocide.
Hall said they were “horrified, grieved, chilled to the bone.”
“We wouldn’t have wanted to be right,” Hall said. “We didn’t want it to happen.”
In the next three months, the Hutu killed 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
Hofmann and Hall continued learning from Walz in high school, going on summer trips to China that he organized.
In 1996, Walz relocated to Mankato, Minn., where he continued teaching. Walz’s former students there said he continued to make an impact on them, creating Mankato West High’s first gay-straight alliance and coaching the school’s football team to its first state championship in 1999.
Walz also kept exploring the impacts of genocide. He wrote a thesis about improving Holocaust education while pursuing a master’s degree in educational leadership in 2001 at Minnesota State University at Mankato, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported. After he was elected governor of Minnesota in 2018, he declared April to be Genocide Awareness and Prevention Month.
One challenge likely to land on the next administration will be finding a way to end the fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, where some world leaders have accused Israel of committing genocide, accusations Israel has denied.
Walz told PBS News last month that he supports a two-state solution and also raised concerns about Israel’s tactics.
“The atrocities of Oct. 7 are painful and they’re real, and Israel’s right to defend itself is real,” Walz told the news channel. “But also, the situation in Gaza is intolerable. The humanitarian crisis must be brought to an end.”
While Hofmann said he hasn’t stayed in touch with Walz since he graduated high school, he has thought about Walz’s lessons when violence has erupted worldwide, such as when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Hofmann and Hall are now 47, have children and have relocated — Hofmann to Glendale, Ariz., and Hall to Hastings, Neb.
Both said they never expected Walz to ultimately run for vice president when he was their teacher, but in retrospect, his passion for world issues and helping others was an early indication he might have been headed there.
“It wouldn’t be like in the top 10 occupations that I would have picked happening,” Hofmann said. “But at the same time, if it came up then at the end of the school year … you could sit back and be like, ‘Yeah, I could see that.’”