Word: tutsis
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Finally, the remaining monks managed to escape in a Land Rover. "They were just waiting for us to leave," recalls Bordeau. In the end, between 100 and 150 Tutsi men, women and children were slaughtered at the Mokoto monastery. "The genocidal mentality of Rwanda is spreading here," Bordeau lamented after reaching the nearby town of Goma. "It is a contagion...
...eastern Zaire. Eclipsed until recently by the scale of the killing in neighboring Rwanda and Burundi, the region is boiling over in a conflict that has left up to 50,000 dead and more than 350,000 homeless, 100,000 in the past two months. Thousands of civilians, mostly Tutsi, continue to stream across the border into Rwanda and Uganda...
...Hutu and Tutsi have lived in eastern Zaire for generations, many of them immigrating to the region to till the sparsely populated hillsides in the 1930s, and still more being driven across the border by violence at the time of Rwandan independence in 1959. Since then Hutu of Rwandan ancestry have outnumbered both Tutsi immigrants and indigenous tribes. This imbalance, along with a government decree stripping Rwandan immigrants and their descendants of Zairian citizenship, spawned tension that flared into fighting in 1993. That conflict pitted Hutu against indigenous Hunde tribesmen and was marked by gruesome rituals, with Hunde sometimes eating...
Then came the exodus of more than 1 million Rwandans in 1994. Militiamen and members of the defeated Hutu army, furious at losing their war with Tutsi rebels, soon joined with their Zairian Hutu brethren and began killing Zairian Tutsi. Their objective, observers believe, is a "Hutuland" on Zairian soil that would provide a safe haven for refugees and a base for ongoing armed incursions into Rwanda...
...Unarmed Tutsi civilians, most of them landholders, are bearing the brunt of the ethnic cleansing. Despite decades of peaceful coexistence with local Hutu, at least 50,000 Tutsi have been forced to flee since 1995, most to squalid refugee camps just across the Rwandan border. In the Masisi highlands, two small groups of Tutsi remain. Desire Gaspira, 40, a veterinary nurse born in the area, is among them. "Before, Tutsi and Hutu worked together," he said last month. "We drank together. We were brothers. Now we are enemies." In nearby Goma a Tutsi aid worker explained the dilemma facing...