Africa
Highlights - Essential Info - Itineraries - History
The earliest known inhabitants of what is now Rwanda were the Twa Pygmies who held sway over much of the mountainous terrain until around the 11th century, when Hutu farmers migrated into the region and displaced them. A few hundred years later the Hutus were subjugated by the Tutsis, who came down from either Ethiopia or southern Sudan in the 16th century and forcefully impressed their harsh system of feudalism on the area.
German colonialism in the late 19th century introduced urban development and Christian prosyletisation. At the end of World War I, Rwanda was taken from Germany and passed to Belgian administration as reparation for its suffering during the war.
The Belgians found it convenient to increase Tutsi administrative and military power over the large Hutu population. In the late 1950s, Hutus started demanding an improvement in their living conditions and an easing of their ethnic suppression. The response from a powerful Tutsi clan in 1959 was a mass murder of Hutu leadership, leading to a Hutu uprising in which an estimated 100,000 Tutsis were massacred.
Rwanda's independence in 1962 was followed by the country's first officially recognised Hutu government. However, tensions between the two dominant groups remained high and the inter-tribal killings continued until in 1972, tens of thousands of Hutu were massacred in neighbouring Burundi. In the aftershock of the incident, Rwandan Prime Minister Gregoire Kayibanda was overthrown by his army commander, Major General Juvenal Habyarimana. Habyarimana somehow managed to keep a lid on Hutu-Tutsi hatred for the next 18 years, even keeping the country's depressed economy afloat by sidestepping the burden of huge, internationally financed debt. Then in 1990 the country imploded.
On 1 October, Rwanda was invaded by some 5000 well-armed Tutsi exiles - collectively called the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) - from their base in Uganda, led by current president Paul Kagame. Within days, the Hutu army (bloated with extra troops from France, Belgium and Congo/Zaïre) went on a rampage against the Tutsi and any Hutu suspected of collaborating with the RPF. Thousands of people were slaughtered. But regardless of the human toll, the RPF tried again in 1991 and, after a failed ceasefire, yet again in 1992. A year later saw the signing of a peace accord between the government and the RPF, but the peace unfortunately turned out to be a very short one.
In 1994, after years of fiery anti-Tutsi government rhetoric circling Rwanda, and prompted by the death of Habyarimana and his Burundian counterpart after their plane was shot down on the outskirts of Kigali, Rwanda became the scene of the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II. In just three months, some one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were butchered in what was believed to have been a campaign orchestrated and encouraged by Hutu extremists in the government and the army - the vast majority of the murders have in fact been blamed on machete and rifle-wielding civilian militias that were allegedly trained by the Rwandan military. Over three million Rwandans fled the country to refugee camps in neighbouring countries. The killing spree abated only when the United Nations Security Council finally decided to deploy international troops.
By July 1994, the still-active RPF had taken Kigali and established the 'Government of National Unity', which began to try and deal with the aftermath of the attempted genocide. This included the poverty and ethnic violence that still faced a million Tutsi refugees in border camps and insurgencies from Hutu extremists now based in the camps and in Congo (Zaïre). The outbreak of civil war in Congo (Zaïre) in 1996 didn't help matters - the fighting quickly saw Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia and Hutu militias lined up in new President Laurent Kabila's corner, and Uganda and Rwanda in the Tutsi-led rebel's corner, with refugees from the genocide caught in the middle. In recent years, the situation in Rwanda has greatly improved. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, based in Tanzania, has begun bringing those directly responsible for the events of 1994 to trial; large numbers of genocide refugees are being slowly repatriated and resettled; the economy is being rebuilt; and tourism has returned.
