Word: rwanda
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...much hate accumulate in so small a country? Historians could point to Rwanda as a case study in what happens to a former colony when suppressed tribal rivalries are released into a power vacuum. It is a familiar lesson: an estimated 1 million Hindus and Muslims died in communal fighting after the British pulled out of India; the departure of the Belgians from the Congo set off savage ethnic-regional warfare; the collapse of the Soviet Union ignited a murderous rivalry between Abkhazians and Georgians for control of Georgia. Rwanda's preindependence history held special ironies: while colonial rule...
Europeans who stumbled into Rwanda a century ago found a country ruled by tall, willowy Tutsi cattle lords under a magical Tutsi king, while darker- skinned, stockier Hutu farmers tended the land, grew the food, kept the Tutsi clothed and fed. They lived in symbiotic harmony. "They were a reasonably contented rural society," says Basil Davidson, a leading British historian of Africa. "There was no hatred between the two groups. That came only with the colonial system...
...time the Belgians ceded independence to Rwanda in 1962, the foundations for slaughter had been laid. "When there is a rupture of authority, that creates a situation that is apocalyptic by nature and leads to fear and anguish," says Professor Francois Constantin, head of the East Africa Research Center at the University of Pau in France. "In Rwandan society, the fault of an individual becomes the fault of a group. A whole family is held responsible for a prejudicial act committed by an individual and can be eliminated. In a traumatic situation, fear and uncertainty can lead to collective murder...
...Rwanda catastrophe was more than a simple tribal meltdown, it also showed signs of being the kind of conflict that scholars warn will haunt the world for decades to come. These wars are not started by statesmen or fought by armies or ended by treaties. The tribal skirmishes recall the wars of the Middle Ages, when religion and politics and economics and social conflicts all messily intertwined...
Missing too is the hygienic, high-tech, buttons-and-bombs warfare that developed countries have spent the past 40 years refining. The chosen weapons are often far more crude. In Rwanda, says the U.N.'s Bellamy, "it is man to man, flesh against flesh. It is a human hunt; one man butchering another with his own hands." Distinctions between soldiers and civilians become harder to make and less respected. There are no rules of engagement and no one reliable with whom to negotiate. The Hutu army chief of staff guaranteed safe passage to U.N. soldiers evacuating wounded Tutsi civilians...