Word: bahutu
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Hatreds rooted in a tribal past bloomed into butchery as the Bahutu of Rwanda set out to eliminate their former Watutsi masters. Poisoned arrows zipped through the Congo's Kwilu province in the latest chapter of that sad nation's four-year history. In the Sudan, black secessionists battled the Arab government of Dictator Ibrahim Abboud. And last week, in Gabon, mobs hurled stones and bottles at the French troops who had restored bold, autocratic President Leon Mba to power last month after an abortive, 42-hour coup...
...weak is the Congolese control of its borders that last week 3,000 spear-wielding Watutsi tribesmen exiled in the Congo's eastern reaches mounted an attack on their neighboring homeland, Rwanda, out of revenge for the recent genocidal slaughter there of thousands of Watutsi by the ruling Bahutu tribe. They were driven back by the Belgian-officered Rwanda army at a cost of 300 Watutsi dead...
...centuries the giant (average height: 6 ft. 6 in.), Watutsi ruled the more primitive native Bahutu as their slaves. The tables were turned in 1960 when the Belgians staged an election in which the 1,500,000 Bahutu wrenched control from their longtime feudal masters, who numbered only about 250,000. The Bahutu wreaked a savage reprisal; after Rwanda won its independence in July 1962, some 86,000 Watutsi streamed into neighboring Tanganyika, Uganda, Burundi and the Congo's Kivu Province...
...Watutsi tribesmen vowed revenge. Bands of night-time raiders called inyenzi ("cockroaches") began attacking Bahutu villages. The week before Christmas, thousands of Watutsi refugees suddenly invaded Rwanda from three countries. Although they advanced to within a few miles of the Rwanda capital, Kigala, the Watutsi were finally repulsed in a bloody battle...
...that, the Bahutu set about exterminating their enemies once and for all. Even Watutsi families who never left the country were massacred. Children were impaled, the forearms of Watutsi men were cut off, and the men sent into the jungle to die. Hundreds more were tossed into the Ruzizi River, which carried maimed bodies 125 miles until they bobbed up in Lake Tanganyika...