History of the
Genocide in Rwanda
As the smallest country
in Africa with the largest population, 7 million, Rwanda has
had to overcome famine, overpopulation, and, most recently,
a massive genocide which reduced their population by a huge
amount. The country of Rwanda has had an interesting history
due to their two supposed ethnic groups, the Hutus, the
majority, and the Tutsis, who consist of about 15-18% of the
population. The Tutsis were more prominent in the royalty
and hierarchy of the country but most of them were still
peasants. The Hutus were the farmers and the Tutsis ran the
cattle. During the time of European Colonization, the
Belgians came to Rwanda and decided to further the gap
between the peaceful Hutus and Tutsis. The Belgians saw the
Tutsis as more like themselves; therefore, they took them
under their wing and educated them and brought them up to be
the upper echelon of society. The Europeans created tribal
cards to differentiate between the two groups. Believing
that they were just furthering what the Tutsis had created,
the Belgians created a class system. Due to their presence,
the Belgians made the discrimination between the two groups
greater and yet the Hutus and Tutsis were still living
together peacefully. The Hutus, having no power, accepted
the role of the oppressed.
In 1962, Rwanda gained their independence from Belgium. The
Europeans, however, left the country in a state of discord
due to the majority of Hutus who were able to gain back
their power from the Tutsis, who were viewed as feudal
overlords. Soon the Party of the Hutu Emancipation Movement
(PARMEHUTU) came into power. The once oppressed Hutus
decided to take revenge and many Tutsis were killed. 200,000
Tutsi refugees fled to neighboring country to escape the
violence that was taking place in their country. . .
.—Trincol
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A Brief History
1400 - 1994
Once, Hutus and Tutsis
lived in harmony in Central Africa. About 600 years ago,
Tutsis, a tall, warrior people, moved south from Ethiopia
and invaded the homeland of the Hutus. Though much smaller
in number, they conquered the Hutus, who agreed to raise
crops for them in return for protection.
Even in the colonial
era—when Belgium ruled the area, after taking it from
Germany in 1916—the two groups lived as one, speaking the
same language, intermarrying, and obeying a nearly godlike
Tutsi king.
Independence changed
everything. The monarchy was dissolved and Belgian troops
withdrawn—a power vacuum both Tutsis and Hutus fought to
fill. Two new countries emerged in 1962—Rwanda, dominated by
the Hutus, and Burundi by the Tutsis—and the ethnic fighting
flared on and off in the following decades.
It exploded in 1994
with the civil war in Rwanda in which hundreds of thousands
of Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed. Tutsi rebels won
control, which sent a million Hutus, fearful of revenge,
into Zaire and Tanzania.
In Burundi, the Tutsis
yielded power after a Hutu won the country's first
democratic election in 1993. He was killed in an attempted
coup four months later, and his successor in a suspicious
plane crash in 1994, in which the Hutu leader of Rwanda was
also killed.—CNN
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Why is there
conflict between Tutsis and Hutus?
The bloody history of
Hutu and
Tutsi conflict stained the 20th century, from the
slaughter of 80,000 to 200,000 Hutus by the Tutsi army in
Burundi in 1972 to the 1994 Rwanda genocide in which Hutu
militias targeted Tutsis, resulting in a 100-day death toll
between 800,000 and 1 million.
But many observers
would be surprised to learn that the longstanding conflict
between the Hutu and Tutsi has nothing to do with language
or religion—they speak the same Bantu tongues as well as
French, and generally practice Christianity—and many
geneticists have been hard-pressed to find marked ethnic
differences between the two, though the Tutsi have generally
been noted to be taller. Many believe that German and
Belgian colonizers tried to find differences between the
Hutu and Tutsi in order to better categorize native peoples
in their censuses.
Generally, the
Hutu-Tutsi strife stems from class warfare, with the Tutsis
perceived to have greater wealth and social status (as well
as favoring cattle ranching over what is seen as the
lower-class farming of the Hutus). The Tutsis are thought to
have originally come from Ethiopia, and arrived after the
Hutu came from Chad. The Tutsis had a monarchy dating back
to the 15th century; this was overthrown at the urging of
Belgian colonizers in the early 1960s and the Hutu took
power by force in Rwanda. In Burundi, however, a Hutu
uprising failed and the Tutsis controlled the country.—WorldNews
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Hutu vs Tutsi
With the arrival of
catholic missions in the African great lake Region, there
was a resistance from Tutsi community against conversion.
The missionaries were successful with the Hutu. Properties
of Tutsis were taken away from them and given to Hutus. This
was the beginning of the conflict between the two ethnic
groups.
Culturally, Rwanda has
a monarchy system of Tutsi monarch, the Mwami. The other
area that is the northwestern part is ruled by Hutu society.
The rule of the king was demolished after it received
independence. Currently there seem to be no cultural
difference between the Tutsi and Hutu and they speak the
same Bantu language. There were marriages between a Tutsi
and a Hutu. The child was reared up as per the father’s
culture. The impression is that Tutsi is a class and not an
ethnic identity. But there are several dissimilarities
in the two groups of societies.
German rulers gave
special status to Tutsis as the rulers found them to be
superior to Hutus. Tutsis are well turned-out people in
relation to Hutus, who are shy and timid. This earned Tutsis
the chance to get educated and find a place in the
government. The Hutus were in majority and this special
status sparked off conflicts between the two groups. This
policy was followed by the Belgians who took over control of
the region after World War I. Finally in the year 1959,
Belgians changed their stand and allowed Hutus to form the
government through proper mandate.—DifferenceBetween
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Tutsi, Hutu and
Hima—Cultural Background in Rwanda
Burundi and Rwanda had
already become separate Tutsi kingdoms before European
occupation as the Tutsi-Hima empire broke up. The Tutsis
were a minority in both territories, and currently make up
about 15% of the Burundi population and about 9% in Rwanda.
But do not overlook the fact that the Tutsis and Hutus had
intermarried considerably, even with the tribal class
distinctions.
Some Tutsis have more
Bantu features than the "pure" Tutsis. But the Tutsis have
commonly been referred to as "the tall ones" and the Hutus
"the short ones." Many observers of the region comment that
there has been no real difference other than superficial
differences in features, and that the "tribal" division
referred to in recent history was a class distinction
exploited by the Germans and treated only by the
colonialists as a difference in ethnicity.
The Colonial Era
Animosity between the "indigenous" people and the Tutsis
increased due to the German, then the Belgian,
colonial pattern of indirect rule. The colonials chose
the Tutsi minority as their ruling class under the
suzerainty of the Belgian Empire.
Under German colonial
domination from 1890, Germany first occupied what is now
Burundi until the end of World War 1, when Burundi and
Rwanda were joined by the League of Nations under Belgian
administration as Rwanda-Urundi.
Initially Belgian
indirect rule supported Tutsi power, but tension built
between the two tribes. Clashes have broken out
periodically in both countries. The Tutsis have remained
dominant in military and politics in Burundi, though
recently Hutus have been brought into the government.—OrvilleJenkins
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Hutu and Tutsi
It has been theorized
that the distinctions between Hutu and Tutsi were not
emphasized until the area was colonized by European
settlers. When conducting census counts, the
Belgians separated Africans into Tutsi and Hutu groups
based solely on appearance or wealth. The colonists believed
that the Tutsi were superior because they were taller and
had longer noses and therefore more similar to Europeans. On
this basis, only Tutsi were allowed to participate in
government or seek education. Naturally, this caused
dissatisfaction among the Hutu majority. In
1959, the Belgian government reversed this practice and
implemented a Hutu government. Civil wars and genocides
instigated by both sides have occurred periodically ever
since.—Mahalo
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Hutus vs. Tutsis
The ethno-racial clashes between
African tribes have been particularly murderous in Rwanda
and Burundi because these two small areas are the densest in
Africa. Rwanda, for example, has about seven million people
in an area the size of Vermont – not a lot by Western
European standards, but very dense for Africa. In this
relatively small area there have lived for centuries, side
by side and at each other's throats, two very different
racial tribes: the Hutu and Tutsi. The Tutsi are familiar to
all those who saw the grand epic movie,
King Solomon's Mines (the 1950 version with Stewart
Granger and Deborah Kerr); they are a tall, slender,
graceful, noble-looking tribe, there called the Watusi. The
Tutsi are an Ethiopid, Nilotic people. The Hutu, on the
other hand, are short, squat Bantu, a closer approximation
to what used to be called "Negro" in America. "Negroes" are
now called "black," but the problem here is that the skin
color of both the Tutsi and the Hutu are much the same. The
real issue, as in most other cases, is not skin color but
various character traits of different population groups.
The crucial point is that, in both
Rwanda and Burundi, Hutus and Tutsis have coexisted for
centuries; the Tutsi are about 15 percent of the total
population, the Hutu about 85 percent. And yet consistently,
over the centuries, the Tutsi have totally dominated, and
even enserfed, the Hutu.—LewRockwell
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Hutu and Tutsi
By
Aimable Twagilimana
As We Forgive: Stories of Reconciliation from Rwanda
By Catherine Claire
Larson
Rwanda Ten Years after
Rwanda
Genocide Conference Clinton Administration
The Struggle Odes
Ode #95
The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo (Film
Review by Kam Williams)
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Rape Crisis in Congo Tied to Mining Activity—Washington
Eve Ensler, author of
The Vagina Monologues, helped launch an
international awareness raising campaign called V-Day in
2007 to end sexual violence in eastern Congo. UNICEF
estimates that hundreds of thousands of girls have been
raped in the last decade in the two eastern provinces of
North Kivu and South Kivu. "Corporate greed, fueled by
capitalist consumption, and the rape of women have
merged into a single nightmare," Eve Ensler said at U.S.
Senate hearings on May 13. "Women's bodies are the
battleground of an economic war." Ensler said that
international mining companies with significant
investments in eastern Congo value economic interest
over the bodies of women by trading with rebels who use
rape as a tactic of war in areas rich in coltan, gold
and tin.
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"Military solutions are no longer an
option," she said. "All they do is bring
about the rape of more women." The United
States has invested more than $700 million
in humanitarian aid and peacekeeping to
Congo, according to the U.S. Department of
State.
Prendergast said this money will do nothing
to root out the economic causes of eastern
Congo's conflict and sexual violence.
He said
a comprehensive long-term strategy to combat
rape needs to change the economic calculus
of armed groups. Prendergast asked senators
to support the Congo Conflict Minerals Act,
which was introduced by Kansas Sen. Sam
Brownback, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin and
Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold in April of
this year.
The bill aims to
break the link between resource exploitation and armed
conflict in eastern Congo by requiring companies trading
minerals with Congo or neighboring states to disclose
mine locations and monitor the financing of armed groups
in eastern Congo's mineral-rich areas.
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"The sooner the
illicit conflict minerals trade is eliminated, the
sooner the people of Congo will benefit from their own
resources," said Prendergrast. U.S. consumers,
Prendergrast said, can also help by pressuring major
electronic companies - from Apple to Sony - to certify
that cell phones, computers and other products contain
"conflict-free minerals," a campaign tactic popularized
by the Sierra Leone-based film
Blood Diamonds. Such a process would use a
tracking system for components, similar to that
developed in 2007 under the Kimberly Process. This
international certification scheme ensures that trade in
rough diamonds doesn't fuel war, as it did in Angola,
Cote d'Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and
Sierra Leone during the 1990s.
Germany has already
developed a pilot fingerprinting system for tin that
could be expanded to other minerals and help establish
certified trading chains, linking legitimate mining
sites to the international market.
Truthout
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Congo has attracted
attention in the media [as a place that is suffering]
systematic rape in war. One statistic quoted is 200,000
rapes since the beginning of the war 14 years ago, and
it is certainly an underestimate.
When in Congo, I met government representatives and
particularly women who had been raped and violated. It
was interesting but also disappointing - nothing is
getting better and more and more civilians are
committing rapes.
But I should be fair and say that there has been
progress, the government has introduced laws against
rape, it has a national plan and there is political
will. There is a lot to do to implement the legislation,
but now there is an ambitious legal ground to stand on
to be implemented by the police, judiciary and health
care.
Margot Wallstrom - "There Is Almost Total
Impunity for Rape in Congo"
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How did Rwanda cut
poverty so much?—16 February 2012—The small African
nation of Rwanda recently announced that it had cut poverty
by 12% in six years, from 57% of its population to 45%. That
equals roughly a million Rwandans emerging from poverty --
one of the most stunning drops in the world.It's a
remarkable achievement for Rwanda, which has emerged from
civil war and a bloody ethnic genocide in the 1990s. How did
it happen? The Times quizzed Paul Collier, director of the
Center for the Study of African Economies at Oxford
University, about the numbers.
How did Rwanda cut
its poverty so much?—There were one or two helpful
events, notably the rise in world coffee prices, which
pumped money into the rural economy, but, of course, overall
the global economy since 2005 has not provided an easy
environment for success. Hence, most of the achievement is
likely due to domestic policies. Rwanda is the nearest that
Africa gets to an East Asian-style “developmental state,”
where the government gets serious about trying to grow the
economy and where the president runs a tight ship within
government built on performance rather than patronage. There
were strong supporting policies for the rural poor—the “one
cow” program [that distributed cows to poor households free
of charge], which spread assets, and the improvements in
health programs. Alongside this, the economy was well
managed, with inflation kept low, and the business
environment improved, both of which helped the main city,
Kigali, to grow. Growth in Kigali then spread benefits to
rural areas—the most successful rural districts were those
closest to Kigali.
When you say well
managed, what do you mean? What choices did the government
make that were signs of good management?—Basically,
[President Paul] Kagame built a culture of performance at
the top of the civil service. Ministers were well paid, but
set targets. If they missed the targets there were
consequences. Each year, the government holds a
whole-of-government retreat where these performances are
reviewed: good performance rewarded, and poor performers
required to explain themselves.An example is the strategy to
improve Rwanda's rating on the World Bank's “Doing Business”
annual rating, where over the course of six years the
country moved from around 140th to 60th in the world
rankings. Each component of the ratings was assigned each
year to an appropriate minister. So over time, a cadre of
government officials has been built up who believe in their
ability not just to strategize but to get things done.—
LaTimesBlogs
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|
Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power
By Zbigniew Brzezinski
By 1991, following the disintegration first of the Soviet bloc and then of the Soviet Union itself, the United States was left standing tall as the only global super-power. Not only the 20th but even the 21st century seemed destined to be the American centuries. But that super-optimism did not last long. During the last decade of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century, the stock market bubble and the costly foreign unilateralism of the younger Bush presidency, as well as the financial catastrophe of 2008 jolted America—and much of the West—into a sudden recognition of its systemic vulnerability to unregulated greed. Moreover, the East was demonstrating a surprising capacity for economic growth and technological innovation. That prompted new anxiety about the future, including even about America’s status as the leading world power. This book is a response to a challenge. It argues that without an America that is economically vital, socially appealing, responsibly powerful, and capable of sustaining an intelligent foreign engagement, the geopolitical prospects for the West could become increasingly grave. The ongoing changes in the distribution of global power and mounting global strife make it all the more essential that America does not retreat into an ignorant garrison-state mentality or wallow in cultural hedonism but rather becomes more strategically deliberate and historically enlightened in its global engagement with the new East. |
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Scorched Earth: Legacies of Chemical Warfare in Vietnam
By Fred A. Wilcox and Introduction by Noam Chomsky
Scorched Earth is the first book to chronicle the effects of chemical warfare on the Vietnamese people and their environment, where, even today, more than 3 million people—including 500,000 children—are sick and dying from birth defects, cancer, and other illnesses that can be directly traced to Agent Orange/dioxin exposure. Weaving first-person accounts with original research, Vietnam War scholar Fred A. Wilcox examines long-term consequences for future generations, laying bare the ongoing monumental tragedy in Vietnam, and calls for the United States government to finally admit its role in chemical warfare in Vietnam. Wilcox also warns readers that unless we stop poisoning our air, food, and water supplies, the cancer epidemic in the United States and other countries will only worsen, and he urgently demands the chemical manufacturers of Agent Orange to compensate the victims of their greed and to stop using the Earth’s rivers, lakes, and oceans as toxic waste dumps. Vietnam has chosen August 10—the day that the US began spraying Agent Orange on Vietnam—as Agent Orange Day, to commemorate all its citizens who were affected by the deadly chemical. Scorched Earth will be released upon the third anniversary of this day, in honor of all those whose families have suffered, and continue to suffer, from this tragedy. Noam Chomsky & Fred Wilcox Book-TV |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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