Hutu

BUJUMBURA, Burundi -- When Carl and Eleanor Johnson came here, the primary goal of the former Marylanders, as missionaries for the Protestant Brethren Assemblies, was to preach the gospel.Fifty years later, their assignment has moved beyond spreading the Word to serving as inadvertent hosts of a camp filled with 5,000 refugees who have fled the terror that threatens to tear this tiny central African nation apart.The camp sprang up six years ago, as frightened civilians fled to what used to be a missionary station in this picturesque capital.

THIS IS THE SEASON for intoning ''Never again!'' But what if ''again'' happens again and again to others, and the world does little to stop it? That is why the conviction of Dusan Tadic by the U.N. tribunal investigating war crimes in the former Yugoslavia matters.He was nobody important, who managed to get himself identified and arrested in Germany in 1994 for having killed and tortured Muslim and Croat prisoners in camps near Prijedor in Bosnia two years earlier. But he was convicted of 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

THE ASPECT of the Zairian civil war crying out for international intervention is the plight of Hutu refugees, herded by former soldiers toward death by starvation and disease. Laurent Kabila, who seems certain to take over Zaire in the near future, will then want international aid, respect and cooperation. He should be judged on how well he facilitates aid agencies in finding and rescuing these refugees.Of some 100,000 surviving Hutu refugees who fled the Tingi-Tingi camp in March, some two-thirds have been spotted moving toward the Central African Republic to the north.

PARIS -- Africa nags for attention, largely ignored at the edge of our political consciousness -- and consciences. Yet the immense horrors committed by Hutu in Rwanda, and then the suffering of the displaced Hutu themselves, women and children and genocidal bands alike, fleeing through the great forest of the central Congo, pursued by enemies who showed them no mercy, bear comparison to the slaughters and forced population upheavals of World War II.Liberia and...

LAURENT KABILA, the Congo dissident who fronted for the Rwandan-led forces that toppled the crumbling Mobutu dictatorship last year, has yet to show he can hold his country together and improve the lives of 45 million suffering compatriots. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's visit emphasized U.S. support for his role as transitional president, but also acknowledged the absence of choice. He's the only game in Kinshasa.What the U.S. wants from Mr. Kabila is freedom for political opposition.

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast -- The Zairian government has stepped up a campaign to arm Hutu guerrillas living among the largest population of Rwandan refugees still in Zaire, effectively making human shields of tens of thousands of refugees, according to diplomats and international relief workers.Diplomats and aid workers say that, in recent days, so many weapons have been flown into the Tingi-Tingi camp that they have interrupted relief shipments. The camp, 125 miles southwest of Zaire's third-largest city, Kisangani, is a tiny jungle village that has swelled to 150,000 people as Rwandan Hutus fleeing fighting in the east flocked into the camp.

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.

AT FIRST THE international response to the July 25 coup in which Tutsi Major Pierre Buyoya ousted the Hutu president of Burundi, Sylvestre Ntibantunganya, was tough talk.Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali's spokeswoman ,declared that "the international community will on no account accept a change of government in Burundi by force or other illegitimate means." And Kofi Annan, the U.N. Undersecretary General for Peacekeeping Operations, reportedly called for intervention that could "beat up on people if necessary" to try to stop the killing.

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...

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

NAIROBI, Kenya - Beset by eight years of ethnic violence, Burundians attempt to write a new chapter in their bloody history today by ushering in a government that will eventually transfer power to the Hutu majority. During the past week, 700 South African soldiers have massed in Bujumbura, the capital of this central African nation, to protect about 150 political exiles returning to participate in a three-year transition to democracy. Former South African President Nelson Mandela brokered an agreement on the transitional government, and he will be joined by several other African leaders today in launching it. Current President Pierre Buyoya, an ethnic Tutsi, will serve as Burundi's leader for the next 18 months.