Hutu

THREE GREAT DANGERS from the warfare in eastern Zaire compel the attention of the world. The first is humanitarian. More than 1 million Rwandan Hutu refugees are being driven from camps to face disease, starvation and execution. That would amount to revenge for the genocidal fury they vented on Tutsi neighbors in Rwanda, killing some half-million, in 1994.The second danger is disintegration of Zaire, the former Belgian Congo, a vast country of 40 million people and untold wealth. Its U.S.-backed dictator of three decades, President Mobutu Sese Seku, is a sick old man in Switzerland.

ALISON DES FORGES, 66 Scholar chronicled Rwanda's genocide Alison Des Forges, a human rights activist who drew the world's attention to the killings of hundreds of thousands of innocent people in Rwanda in the 1990s and chronicled the massacre, died Feb. 12 in the crash of a Continental Airlines passenger plane in Clarence Center, N.Y., near Buffalo. After April 6, 1994, when an airplane carrying Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down, members of the politically dominant Hutu group suddenly began to attack the Tutsi minority in an uncontrolled rampage of violence.

KAYANZA PROVINCE, Burundi -- The killers came at midnight across the steep green tea fields to Isaie Minani's village.A grenade tossed in his front window killed his 4-year-old son. Mr. Minani and his wife escaped into the darkness. For the next two hours they hid while the attackers raided more homes, shooting and knifing 25 more relatives to death.Mr. Minani, a 35-year-old farmer dressed in rags, said they died because of his politics. A member of the Hutu tribe, he campaigns for the party that ended decades of rule by the minority Tutsis last year.

NAIROBI, Kenya - The ringleader of the 1994 Rwanda genocide was sentenced yesterday to life in prison for his role in the early days of an ethnic slaughter that eventually killed an estimated 800,000 people. Theoneste Bagosora, 67, was the highest-ranking military officer convicted at the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. The former colonel's prosecution was viewed as a significant step in efforts to punish war crimes. "This victory sends a message to people like the warlords in Darfur or those committing horrendous rapes and killing in Congo," said Barbara Mulvaney, a Southern California attorney who served as chief prosecutor.

KIGALI, Rwanda -- When the Hutu militias began killing Tutsis in April, Ladislas Benimana, a Hutu, harbored Tutsis in his house, his wife and neighbors recalled.After several weeks, when the militia started raping women, his wife, Catherine Mujawamariya, a secondary school teacher, fled Kigali with their own daughters and several Tutsi women and children they were protecting.Mr. Benimana remained until Kigali fell to the Tutsi rebel army of the Rwandan Patriotic Front in early July, when he fled to the French-protected zone in the southwest, along with thousands of other Hutus uncertain about their fate under the new Tutsi-led government.

THE TUTSI ARMY of Burundi, bedeviled by Hutu guerrilla attacks, takes its frustrations out on the Hutu majority. There have been thousands of deaths reported, and tragic treks of people from their homes to camps inside the country and, if they can make it, out.Burundi escaped the genocide of its neighbor, Rwanda, in 1994, when Hutu regime propaganda and militia brought about the slaughter of all Tutsi who could be caught, only to fall to the purposeful campaign...

BUKAVU, Zaire -- Victorious rebel troops installed an ethnically mixed government in Rwanda yesterday, but fear and Hutu propaganda continued to drive hundreds of thousands from the country."

GOMA, Zaire -- The flow of Hutu refugees back to their homes in Rwanda increased yesterday to numbers so large as nearly to defy the imagination.The line of humanity packed a two-lane road shoulder-to-shoulder, stretched through Goma and for more than 10 miles into Zaire. Those in that slowly moving line walked like an inexorable force into the Rwandan border town of Gisenyi and then beyond, toward their home villages."There is no question that we are overwhelmed," said Ray Wilkinson, spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)

GISENYI, Rwanda -- The Hutus began swarming home to Rwanda yesterday, taking an anxious world by surprise.By the tens of thousands they left war- and disease-ridden eastern Zaire in a mass migration rivaled only by their flight in the opposite direction two years ago.They came in numbers that were too high to count, perhaps reaching into the hundreds of thousands, walking through the streets of the Zaire town of Goma to a small border crossing where the...

KARENGERA, Rwanda -- The bullet holes in the living room tell the story. Six of them, knuckle-deep, scar the concrete wall just above the cushioned chair where Anne Mukandoli was murdered in May. A stray shot pierced a window a week later, during an attack that freed dozens of genocide suspects from jail.Mukandoli had helped put many of them there. She was a Hutu, like the prisoners accused of participating in the 1994 slaughter of about 800,000 Tutsis. But she had watched the murderers pass her house without joining them; later, she hid in the bush with her family.

Yves Twagirayezu stood next to his 17-year-old brother and watched the Hutu soldiers behead him and throw him into a 30-foot-deep mass grave. The 11-year-old Tutsi boy knew he was next. He squirmed from the clutches of a Hutu soldier to jump in after his brother, followed by two other Tutsi boys standing at the rim of the pit. The Hutu soldiers, ordered not to waste bullets on the young prisoners, shoveled on dirt and rocks, figuring they would bury the boys alive. "I got scared and broke loose," Twagirayezu said.

How do you tell the story of 800,000 deaths in 100 days without making a movie too horrific to bear? That is the challenge director Raoul Peck faced in making the HBO film Sometimes in April, which chronicles the genocide that took place in Rwanda in 1994 as hard-line members of the Hutu majority slaughtered Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The blood bath lasted more than three months while the world looked on but offered little help. Peck, who scored a triumph with HBO's Lumumba in 2002, masterfully combines a visual style of harsh realism to communicate the horror, with an elegiac tone and poetic sensibility that seeks to redeem it. The result is an epic that stirs the soul with its story of the dignity and suffering of those who survived, even as it staggers the imagination with the catalog of brutality that they witnessed.

It's not who you know or what you know or even how you use it, but whether you're willing to test it in a matter of life or death. That's the ultimate challenge for most people, yet the daily challenge for the hero of Hotel Rwanda, Terry George's enraging and enthralling fact-based movie about the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle), who manages a four-star Kigali hotel, understands everyone and everything about his country except its capacity for evil. When he can't escape that evil he combats it with rationality.

Writer-director Terry George, in Washington this past November to promote Hotel Rwanda, confessed that when he read co-writer Keir Pearson's initial script, he felt that the politics threatened to overwhelm the personal story. And how could they not? On April 6, 1994, the downing of Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana's plane on its approach to Kigali Airport triggered a genocide of unprecedented swiftness. Habyarimana was a Hutu, and the ruling, majority Hutu tribe blamed the Tutsis - even though the president had just agreed to share power with them.

Don Cheadle has been such a consummate chameleon that audiences may not recall how many times they've seen him. When they do see him, they may register his presence with a puzzled, then delighted double take. On TV in the mid-1990s, the now-40-year-old actor made his biggest splash as a comically earnest district attorney on David E. Kelley's quirky dramedy Picket Fences. In movies, he first generated worldwide buzz as Denzel Washington's homicidally jumpy friend, Mouse, in 1995's Devil in a Blue Dress -- a man so hard-wired with violence he could declare, with a straight face, "If you didn't want me to kill him, why did you leave me alone in a room with him?"

"The international community failed Rwanda, and that must leave us always with a sense of bitter regret and abiding sorrow." U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan Ten years ago last week the most rapid genocide in recorded modern history began in Rwanda, an obscure Central Africa state about the size of Maryland. In about 100 days, an estimated 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and their Hutu supporters were slaughtered, most often hacked to death by machete. While this massacre took place, the United States, the United Nations and most Europe did nothing to prevent or to stop the slaughter.

Rwanda and Burundi are both plagued by endemic strife between the upper-class Tutsi minority and under-class Hutu majority. But whoever assassinated the Hutu presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, the chaos afterward was driven by Hutu hardliner attacks against Hutu moderates. Other targets were Tutsi, aid workers, priests and 2,115 lightly armed U.N. troops from 23 countries.Two of Africa's smallest and most densely populated countries, Rwanda and Burundi were Belgian mandates after World War I until independence in 1962.

Happy is the lot of a family in a position to pay $14,615 on a 1980 tax obligation.Rwanda is where the Tutsi are trying to overthrow the Hutu; in Burundi, it's the other way round.At least Don won't have to worry about the legislature ever again.The official attitude toward responsibility for fixing up Memorial Stadium is to leave it to the Canadians.

KIGALI, Rwanda - President Paul Kagame raised his fist at a rally the other day, and the thousands of people gathered around him, ethnic Hutu and Tutsi alike, did the same. "Oye!" the president yelled. "Oye!" the people responded. With days to go before the first presidential election since the mass killings in Rwanda in 1994, Kagame clearly has the crowds on his side. They wear his T-shirts and caps and wave tiny flags that his campaign puts into their hands. When he cheers, they cheer along with him. But many question whether the campaign leading up to the election tomorrow has been truly democratic.

NAIROBI, Kenya - A United Nations war crimes tribunal convicted a Rwandan pastor yesterday who fled to Texas and his son of genocide for orchestrating the 1994 slaughter of hundreds of ethnic Tutsis who had sought refuge in the minister's church compound. The Rev. Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, 78, former pastor of a Seventh-day Adventist complex, is the first church leader that the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda has convicted. The judicial body was created in 1994 to try those suspected of ordering extremist ethnic Hutu militias to massacre 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and Hutus who refused to go along with the extremists.