Word: tutsis
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...together of relief-agency donated blue plastic sheeting, trash-can fires and hastily dug pit latrines and sought to scavenge the one thing that could sustain life in this place: hope. They were between countries. Host Tanzania didn't want them, and if they returned to Rwanda, they feared Tutsi would seek revenge for the genocide perpetrated by Hutu extremists just two years before. The landscape around the camp symbolized the prospects for the internees in it, scrubby hills that had been denuded of arboreal life, every twig and branch gathered for cooking-fire fuel. Yet Joseph still roamed...
...this darkness. And even when Tanzanian troops surrounded the camp, launched tear gas into the compound and ordered the refugees onto the roads back to Rwanda, Joseph and Nereciana, holding hands as two links in a 40-mile chain of humanity, could go with hope, believing--despite rumors that Tutsi were waiting at the other end of the Rusumo bridge over the Kageva River to castrate returning Hutu males--that God would watch over them and return them to safety. There were some positive signs: the Red Cross had set up biscuit and water stations to feed the procession...
...Rwanda today can be understood only through the harsh prism of the genocide that ravaged it in 1994. That bloodbath, fueled by an incendiary combination of misguided Belgian colonial policy, divisive domestic politics, ethnic stereotyping and tragic French foreign policy, took the lives of 800,000 of the minority Tutsi. The genocide, and the concurrent civil war during which the Tutsi minority took control of the country, devastated the infrastructure and exterminated the professional class. There were fewer than a dozen doctors within Rwanda's borders in 1997, and no more than 100 nurses. Hospitals were destroyed by retreating Hutu...
Returning refugees such as Joseph and Nereciana found the fields lying fallow, the last few harvests still rotting on the stem. This wave of humanity could have precipitated a disaster had not the new Tutsi government headed by Paul Kagame secured international aid and, even more miraculously, somehow managed to bridge the bloody tribal divide. There were Tutsi reprisals against Hutu, but for the most part the reintegration of Hutu refugees into Rwandan society went smoothly...