Word: militia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Front, stood around a Hutu man in his 50s. He was barefoot and dressed in a torn shirt and baggy pants. A dirty strip of blue- and-white fabric roped his elbows tight behind his back. His three young accusers shouted that the Hutu was a member of a militia group that had slaughtered Tutsi and political moderates earlier this year. They had seen him beat an old woman to death with a hoe, they yelled; they had just come back to their town to find the Hutu still in his house, a free man. The suspect stared fixedly...
Along with the rest of their armed countrymen, these men bear responsibility for the tragedy that has engulfed Rwanda. It was the presidential guard, the army and its militia that took the lives of nearly half a million Tutsi civilians during three months of warfare. Last month, when they were defeated by the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front, the Hutu soldiers spread rumors that the new government was killing Hutu civilians, igniting the panic that drove more than a million refugees across the border to Goma. Now, as an army in exile, these same men prolong the nightmare by discouraging...
...trouble in Rwanda started last October when a violent civil war left between a violent civil war left between 100,000 and 500,000 civilians dead. Members of the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) overthrew the mainly Hutu civil government and militia in three months of bitter fighting. During the last few weeks of fighting the Tutsi rebels drove the Hutu army west (towards Zaire), pushing an estimated 1.75 million Rwandan refugees ahead of them. The exiled Hutu Government fled into the French controlled safe zone in southwestern Rwanda. From this haven, the deposed Hutu leaders broadcast messages...
...Hutu militiamen were renegades, their drinking and raping and viciousness tolerated by army officers. As relief workers struggled to get food to the spreading camps, the Hutu, equipped with cars and radios, kept track of where the next food distribution would occur and raced to get there first. The militia, many of them drunk or stoned on marijuana, stopped convoys to demand bribes and a portion of the supplies, wildly firing their weapons...
Elma Ahmic, 17, is haunted by memories of the brutal destruction of her village near Vitez, 37 miles north of Sarajevo, on April 16, 1993. A unit of the Bosnian Croat militia called the Jokers first shelled the mostly Muslim town, then moved in to finish off the men. Relations with local Croats had been good, she said, but after the arrival of the militiamen, "about 20 people surrounded our house, shouting, 'Get out of here! This is Croatia, not Turkey!' My father came out and asked them what they wanted. They took my father and killed him. They shot...