Word: rwanda
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Participants in the conference discussed health, the role of women, famine, religion and technology on the continent. The conference also stopped for a moment of silence to remember those slain in Rwanda, where thousands died in fighting this weekend...
...SEVERAL HUNDRED REBEL INSURGENTS SUDDENLY decide to do battle in a wildlife preserve filled with apes, is this guerrilla warfare or gorilla warfare? That's a tough question now that Rwanda's Volcanoes National Park, home to half the world's surviving population of African mountain gorillas (large, hairy herbivores) has been overrun by guerrillas (somewhat smaller omnivores in camouflage with machine guns...
...rebels who seized control of the park are Tutsis, an ethnic group trying to reclaim land they lost more than three decades ago during a civil war with Rwanda's majority Hutu tribe. The marauding insurgents have threatened the lives of the gorillas (only 300 remain in the sanctuary) by driving out game wardens and destroying habitat. Moreover, they have ransacked a research center that was run for nearly two decades by the American naturalist Dian Fossey. Her pioneering work with the great apes was made famous in the film Guerrillas . . . make that Gorillas in the Mist...
...official minimum monthly wage is 5,000 shillings ($17) in Tanzania, where a loaf of bread costs 190 shillings and a pair of trousers 4,000 shillings. "Nobody in Tanzania expects to survive on his salary," says Thomas Mrima, a truck driver who plies between Tanzania, Rwanda and Zaire. "Everybody makes money with everything he can lay his hands on. They steal government stores and sell them over the border. They use government machinery for private building contracts." Ripping off the government has become a popular sport: it is thought of as stealing from thieves...
...much worse in the next few years. Yet when British biologists predicted that the number of Africans could actually begin to shrink within two decades, the reaction was unalloyed horror. The reason for the decline, said the biologists: a dramatic increase in deaths due to AIDS. Places like Uganda, Rwanda, Malawi and Tanzania, in Central and East Africa, hard hit by the epidemic, would be the most severely affected. The scientists note that Uganda will have 20 million people within 15 years, in contrast to 24 million if the epidemic hadn't happened...