Word: hutu
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Bizimana has some scars of his own. In the old Rwandan regime, he was director of education. As a member of the majority Hutu tribe, he was expected to join in the Hutu militants' three-month campaign of genocide against Tutsi and moderate Hutu. Bizimana refused and toward the end sought refuge in a hospital. When the Tutsi-majority Rwandan Patriotic Front seized power in July 1994, he chose not to flee. Both decisions nearly cost him his life. Even today, a uniformed armed guard escorts him everywhere. Bizimana has tried to come to terms with the cataclysm, but there...
...some the answer is as intractable as it is frightening. The animosity between Hutu and Tutsi, many Westerners believe, grew out of fierce and ancient tribal hatred. But Rwandans like Bizimana, who each day grapple with explaining the unspeakable, resist this orthodox notion of tribalism. "The genocide philosophy was created in the colonial period to divide people who shared a common culture," he says. In the 1920s, Belgian colonial authorities classified Rwandans into different tribes. One group of families, whom the Belgians called Tutsi, was given the advantages of Western culture, such as access to schools. The rest were labeled...
Bizimana refers to Hutu and Tutsi as "small political and economic" groups. "You cannot call them tribes," he says. Yet even if tribalism is an inadequate term, it does speak to an emerging and explosive phenomenon in other parts of the world. Fragmentation, Balkanization, the dissolution of states: at a time of blurry borders and contested nationhood, ethnicity may become the most common--and easiest--organizing principle for nation builders. In the next century, conflagrations of apparent tribalism will not be set off by old ethnic rivalries as much as by contemporary political struggles--struggles that power-hungry leaders will...
That was clear enough after Thursday's massacre; Michaels is worried about how far the Hutu-Tutsi conflict could escalate. Will Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni, a Tutsi, send troops on behalf of his friend Paul Kagame in Rwanda? Will Kabila? There are rumblings that Tanzania favors the Hutu side, as may Angola. "No one is sure who will intervene," Michaels says, "and if so, on whose side. This could very quickly get out of control...
...rebuilding of Congo has stalled. The Hutu militia that escaped the advance of Kabila's forces have again set up shop in the country's isolated eastern tip. The enemies of Paul Kagame--and of Central Africa's stability--remain...