Word: hutu
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...Hutu and Tutsi have lived in eastern Zaire for generations, many of them immigrating to the region to till the sparsely populated hillsides in the 1930s, and still more being driven across the border by violence at the time of Rwandan independence in 1959. Since then Hutu of Rwandan ancestry have outnumbered both Tutsi immigrants and indigenous tribes. This imbalance, along with a government decree stripping Rwandan immigrants and their descendants of Zairian citizenship, spawned tension that flared into fighting in 1993. That conflict pitted Hutu against indigenous Hunde tribesmen and was marked by gruesome rituals, with Hunde sometimes eating...
Then came the exodus of more than 1 million Rwandans in 1994. Militiamen and members of the defeated Hutu army, furious at losing their war with Tutsi rebels, soon joined with their Zairian Hutu brethren and began killing Zairian Tutsi. Their objective, observers believe, is a "Hutuland" on Zairian soil that would provide a safe haven for refugees and a base for ongoing armed incursions into Rwanda...
Unarmed Tutsi civilians, most of them landholders, are bearing the brunt of the ethnic cleansing. Despite decades of peaceful coexistence with local Hutu, at least 50,000 Tutsi have been forced to flee since 1995, most to squalid refugee camps just across the Rwandan border. In the Masisi highlands, two small groups of Tutsi remain. Desire Gaspira, 40, a veterinary nurse born in the area, is among them. "Before, Tutsi and Hutu worked together," he said last month. "We drank together. We were brothers. Now we are enemies." In nearby Goma a Tutsi aid worker explained the dilemma facing...
...Hutu threat intensifies, indigenous tribes have been fighting back. North of Goma a militia calling itself the Bangalima, after a famous tribe of warriors from the central Zairian rain forest, recently launched a series of attacks on Zairian army posts and local Hutu. Avid fetishists, often fighting naked and using charms that they believe turn enemy bullets into water, the Bangalima fighters have sworn to drive all Hutu from Zaire. A letter received last month by the local representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees threatened a "bloodbath" in the refugee camps if all 750,000 Hutu were...
...chaos in eastern Zaire illustrates the distrust and hatred infecting a region traumatized by Rwanda's and Burundi's civil wars. Neither the Tutsi minority, victims of genocide in 1994, nor the Hutu majority, disfranchised in both their former homelands, has been willing to negotiate. Both feel they have an ancestral right to govern and are intent on pursuing that goal by any means. Ironically, the Hutu quest for a homeland in Zaire conforms to the most radical solution yet proposed to solve the crisis: redrawing the borders so that Hutu and Tutsi can live apart in their own countries...