Word: rwanda
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Western diplomat in Bujumbura. "There are 27 ministers, 11 of whom are from the opposition. There is an interim President afraid of his own shadow." The Tutsi-dominated military hovers in the background, alert for an opportunity to take power. And more than 230,000 Hutu refugees from Rwanda complicate any attempts to govern: an exodus from the French protected zone could add tens of thousands more...
...only thing now holding the country together is a delicate equilibrium of fear. On one hand there is each ethnic group's terror of the other. Counterbalancing that is the fear that if either side gives in to its worst impulses, Burundi will detonate as Rwanda did. "It's a tense, threatening atmosphere," says Irish aid worker Orla Quinlan. "Every time someone is attacked or killed, you say that's it. That's the trigger that will blow Burundi apart...
...measure of the evil that has swept through Rwanda that the symbolic guilt represented by Cyangugu's stadium was more potent than any reassurances the ministers could offer. Before the speeches had concluded, 2,000 more Hutu, convinced that they would be killed by the new government if they stayed in Rwanda, were already trudging across the border to the Zairean town of Bukavu...
...Bukavu fears a repeat of the huge exodus that brought 1.2 million Rwandans into Zaire last month. The latest tide could pour out of southwestern Rwanda this week, when the last of 2,500 French soldiers who established a safe zone in June for 1.5 million frightened Hutu are scheduled to depart. Under domestic pressure to bring its troops home, the French government last week ignored a plea by the U.S. to stay on until the situation stabilizes. The Hutu fear that the African troops of the United Nations force replacing the French will not be able to guarantee their...
...they continue to be denied safety in Zaire, many Hutu may head instead across Rwanda's southern border into Burundi, where tensions between resident Hutu and Tutsi -- and the 230,000 Rwandan refugees already camped there -- are near breaking point. For now, each new arrival pushes Bukavu another notch closer to the horrors at Goma, where epidemics of cholera and dysentery have killed at least 25,000. To prevent a similar refugee crisis, aid agencies are rushing food, water and medicine into the vicinity of Cyangugu in hopes of forestalling a mass departure. But if the humanitarian diplomacy fails...