Word: rwandan
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During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, in which the government slaughtered over half a million people in 100 days, only one force stood between the country's ethnic Tutsi minority and complete annihilation. It was neither the United States nor the United Nations, both of which turned their backs. It was the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a guerrilla army of mostly Tutsi exiles based in neighboring Uganda, led by Paul Kagame. Though outgunned and outmanned, the RPF smashed the genocidal regime, sent its remnants scurrying in disarray and seized power...
...thought undoing these prejudices would be easy or without risks, but even during my brief time in the country, it was apparent that the bold attempt to remake Rwandan society, once so promising, has raised serious doubts...
Some have charged that Kagame's emphasis on merit over ethnicity simply hides the influence of Rwanda's Tutsi minority. But in dividing Rwandan politics into undifferentiated Hutu and Tutsi camps, these critics miss the point: the most important positions in Rwanda (as well as a disproportionate share of places in government, the army and schools) are held by Tutsi raised in exile, not the Tutsi who endured years of discrimination in Rwanda and lived through the genocide...
What is even more disturbing is that in reinventing Rwandan society, the RPF sometimes relies on the same authoritarian structures that made the genocide possible in the first place. Forget the stereotypes of "tribal chaos" and "failed states" that are used to describe the massacres. Mobilizing hundreds of thousands of ordinary people to slaughter their neighbors every day for three months required a dense, centralized network of administration...
...created civilian militia to help patrol rural areas, continued the practice of obligatory communal labor, and forcibly relocated hundreds of thousands of peasants into prefabricated settlements instead of the dispersed homes customary in Rwanda. Justified or not, these policies do nothing to loosen the hold of the state on Rwandan society. Reforming this structure could do more to prevent organized mass violence than anything else...