Word: hutus
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Just tuning in? The Interahamwe are the Hutu militants behind the 1994 massacre of more than half a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda. They make their camps in the wilds of eastern Congo - formerly known as Zaire - wreaking havoc there or across the border in Rwanda, and current Congolese president Laurent Kabila has shown little inclination to control them. (Rwanda, the region?s military heavyweight, once backed Kabila?s rebellion against Mobutu Sese Seko because Mobutu would not control the militias; now it is backing the new Congo rebels against Kabila for the same reason.) So what happened...
...against three of his ex-allies--Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi--in a desperate war to preserve his rule. The fighting has bled across Congo's border with Angola, and with last week's killings, there is fear it will spread further. Already Africans are starting to place blame. The Hutus who struck in Bwindi aimed their anger at the Americans and British, who they say are plotting to encourage the dominance of their rivals, the Tutsis, in central Africa. It was a shocking message for Westerners, who a year ago hoped that Africa would soon invite them into...
...tourists had come to clamber through the miles of unforgiving forest inclines, hoping at the end of it to see a handful of the world's 600 remaining mountain gorillas at play. But something else lay waiting in the Ugandan mist. Shortly after dawn last Monday, 100 Rwandan Hutus, screaming and brandishing machetes and guns, raided three camps outside the Bwindi national park, where several dozen tourists were just waking. The Hutus eventually seized 14 tourists they believed to be American and British and forced them to march barefoot into the hills. Only six returned to camp alive; the rest...
...raiders never found her. Another American, Linda Adams, 53, walked a mile toward a certain death with the other captives, then feigned an asthma attack and was let go. Deanja Walther, 26, a Swiss flight attendant who speaks French, stayed with the English-speaking hostages even though the Hutus let the French-speaking tourists remain at the camp. Walther, who last September was supposed to work aboard the ill-fated Swissair Flight 111, was ultimately spared. Some of the terrified survivors left the park on a plane flown by Ross, who had to start its engine with a pocketknife...
There was speculation that the Hutus deliberately targeted the expeditioners in an effort to cut Uganda's burgeoning income from tourism. But the real explanation may be more mundane. "They took a lot of very good gear, rain jackets, boots, backpacks," says a Nairobi diplomat. "These guys were wearing old jeans and T shirts. They were very happy, very excited with what they got." Gorilla-watching expeditions to remote preserves were once limited to the likes of Dian Fossey, the American researcher who lived for 18 years in the Rwandan forests before her murder in 1985. But adventure-holiday companies...