Word: munyanzizas
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Julie and Pascal Munyanziza and their two children, who had fled to the south, made the journey back to their tidy three-room house in a mixed Tutsi and Hutu section of Kigali. They found all the windows broken and much of the furniture gone, but the windows have been patched and the house now bears a handwritten sign: IYINZU BANYIRAYO BARAHARI (The owner is here). "If you don't mark your house," says Munyanziza, "someone will take...
Though he is a Hutu, the former government's militia came to kill him in May because, Munyanziza says, he was not a member of the ruling party. The hit squad dumped him into a pit and threw rocks on him, but a friend rescued him. His next-door neighbor, Albert Rurangirwa, also a Hutu, is back in his house too, after fleeing in May. He learned that his father had been killed by militia, and "I don't even know where to look for my brothers and sisters." But since they all returned last month, says Munyanziza, "there have...
...have they encountered any hostility from the Tutsi families living in the area. "The Tutsi have the same problems we do," says Rurangirwa. "No work, no money." Munyanziza wonders, though, how they will get along with the Tutsi who are now returning to the capital from years of exile in Uganda and Burundi. "We don't know them," he says, "but they have food, money, and they have taken over empty houses...
With things so quiet in the capital, the returnees allow themselves to hope for a gradual return to normality. Still, Rwandans are well aware of their bloody past, and they have doubts. Munyanziza's wife Julie points to two paintings still hanging on her living-room wall: one shows a man climbing up a tree as a crocodile and a lion attack him; the other shows the same man running away in fear from the lion and the crocodile, while a snake winds down the tree where he had sought refuge. "They are a souvenir of all the problems...
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