Word: rwanda
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...taking place; one report estimates the toll at a thousand daily. Almost all the victims are members of the Tutsi (or Watusi) tribe, usually remembered for their great height--many Tutsi are seven feet tall. The people slaughtering the Tutsi are the Hutu, who make up 85% of Rwanda's population...
Genocide, then, is not an inappropriate description of what is happening in Rwanda. Violence between Tutsi and Hutu has long been imminent. For centuries, the Tutsi held the Hutu in a type of feudal boundage. The Belgians allowed Tutsi domination to continue when they took over Ruanda-Urundi (now divided into Rwanda and the Kingdom of Burundi) after World War I. Only in 1959 did the Hutu overthrow the Tutsi's jealously guarded hegemony...
...weak is the Congolese control of its borders that last week 3,000 spear-wielding Watutsi tribesmen exiled in the Congo's eastern reaches mounted an attack on their neighboring homeland, Rwanda, out of revenge for the recent genocidal slaughter there of thousands of Watutsi by the ruling Bahutu tribe. They were driven back by the Belgian-officered Rwanda army at a cost of 300 Watutsi dead...
...Watutsi ruled the more primitive native Bahutu as their slaves. The tables were turned in 1960 when the Belgians staged an election in which the 1,500,000 Bahutu wrenched control from their longtime feudal masters, who numbered only about 250,000. The Bahutu wreaked a savage reprisal; after Rwanda won its independence in July 1962, some 86,000 Watutsi streamed into neighboring Tanganyika, Uganda, Burundi and the Congo's Kivu Province...
...Watutsi tribesmen vowed revenge. Bands of night-time raiders called inyenzi ("cockroaches") began attacking Bahutu villages. The week before Christmas, thousands of Watutsi refugees suddenly invaded Rwanda from three countries. Although they advanced to within a few miles of the Rwanda capital, Kigala, the Watutsi were finally repulsed in a bloody battle...