Word: hutu
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Between 1,500 and 2,000 Rwandan troops invaded the Democratic Republic of Congo on Tuesday on a mission sanctioned by the Congolese government to wipe out ethnic Hutu militias. Lambert Mende, Congo's Information Minister, told Reuters that his government had invited the Rwandans onto Congolese soil as "observers" for an offensive against Rwandan Hutu rebels, which was expected to last about two weeks. "The operations are beginning. We have invited Rwandan officers with their security contingents for their safety. They are observers ... The operations to disarm the FDLR [Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda] are planned...
...Rwandans failed to defeat the Hutus, despite several attempts and more invasions, and out of that crucible of conflict came a full-scale war involving a plethora of rebel groups, some Hutu, some Tutsi, some Congolese, some criminal mercenaries - as well as Congo's national army and the world's largest U.N. peacekeeping mission. In 1997 the rebels of Congo's Laurent Kabila managed to overthrow then President Mobutu Sese Seko and install Kabila as President. Later, Kabila's son Joseph took the reins when his father was assassinated. But none of them managed...
...Last October, the Tutsi rebel group of General Laurent Nkunda - initially formed in 2003 to fight the remnant Hutu genocidaires - advanced to within sight of the main eastern city of Goma and threatened to take the country. With the U.N.'s 17,000 soldiers outnumbered and overwhelmed by the sheer size and difficulty of the terrain it was meant to police - Congo is as big as Western Europe, without the roads - and the poorly paid and ill-disciplined national army disintegrating, little seemed to stand in Nkunda's way. That sounded alarm bells around the world. As well as displacing...
...International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda established the precedent that rape warfare is in fact a crime of genocide, in its judgment on the extermination of an estimated 800,000 ethnic Tutsis at the hands of Rwandan Hutu militias. It was a landmark addition to the term?s legal definition, and a judgment that could be important in future International Criminal Court proceedings related to the current situation in Darfur. Many observers have recounted stories of rape being used systematically as a weapon in Sudan for the purpose of ethnic cleansing, and the International Criminal Court is expected to decide...
...dithered while the Rwandan genocide was being perpetrated. At State Department press briefings, officials refused to acknowledge that genocide was occurring, despite internal documents clearly stating that it was. This spineless denial delayed the placement of U.N. troops that could have averted the bloody 100 days during which Hutu militias slaughtered at least 800,000 Tutsi citizens. Intervention was simply politically inconvenient...