Word: hutu
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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...
...ghoulish places where Romanian orphans were warehoused. He moved on to Somalia and the Sudan--where famine was used as a weapon of mass destruction during civil war--and he photographed in the refugee camps. In 1994 he worked in Rwanda and Zaire during the unsupervised ferocities of the Hutu massacre of the Tutsis and the regional chaos it set in motion, including what may have been the largest refugee exodus in history. Two years later he went to Chechnya when Russia made its first ham-fisted attempt to suppress the breakaway republic that it has recently bombed into submission...
...debacle, which had been badly managed by both the U.S. and the U.N., Washington didn't want to get involved in another complex conflict in Africa." Of course, while the solutions were complex, the numbers were devastatingly simple: 800,000 people were killed in one month in Rwanda as Hutu mobs butchered their Tutsi neighbors...