Word: hutu
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Musuhura refugee camp was literally a purgatory, a place of suffering and expiation, where 40,000 Rwandan Hutu like Joseph Havamungo, 29, and Nereciana Mushankwano, 20, wandered amid the huts strung together of relief-agency donated blue plastic sheeting, trash-can fires and hastily dug pit latrines and sought to scavenge the one thing that could sustain life in this place: hope. They were between countries. Host Tanzania didn't want them, and if they returned to Rwanda, they feared Tutsi would seek revenge for the genocide perpetrated by Hutu extremists just two years before. The landscape around the camp...
...called an inkwano--the price a prospective bridegroom must pay the bride's family. Since this was a refugee camp, though, and personal survival, never mind personal wealth, was hard to come by, the bridal price was below market: one cow, payable in some distant future when Rwandan Hutu would have cows and land to graze them on. A Catholic priest presided over the ceremony, attended by the other refugees from Havamungo's Rwankogoto village and sealed in the eyes of the community by the Bourgemeister, who wished them bountiful loins and strong children...
...refugees onto the roads back to Rwanda, Joseph and Nereciana, holding hands as two links in a 40-mile chain of humanity, could go with hope, believing--despite rumors that Tutsi were waiting at the other end of the Rusumo bridge over the Kageva River to castrate returning Hutu males--that God would watch over them and return them to safety. There were some positive signs: the Red Cross had set up biscuit and water stations to feed the procession of 400,000, some of whom had wrapped plastic bags around their bloody feet. "The camp was so terrible...
...genocide, and the concurrent civil war during which the Tutsi minority took control of the country, devastated the infrastructure and exterminated the professional class. There were fewer than a dozen doctors within Rwanda's borders in 1997, and no more than 100 nurses. Hospitals were destroyed by retreating Hutu forces, as were power plants, factories and government buildings. The country that had once been a bastion of orderly if somewhat squalid agrarian capitalism was reduced to Stone Age living standards. In 1993, before the genocide, 53% of households were below the poverty line; by 1997, that figure had risen...
...fallow, the last few harvests still rotting on the stem. This wave of humanity could have precipitated a disaster had not the new Tutsi government headed by Paul Kagame secured international aid and, even more miraculously, somehow managed to bridge the bloody tribal divide. There were Tutsi reprisals against Hutu, but for the most part the reintegration of Hutu refugees into Rwandan society went smoothly...