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400 Years of Trouble: The Tutsi and Hutu in 2000

© Jessica Powers

The story of ethnic tension is older than Egyptian slavery.

In modern-day Rwanda, the roots of ethnic tension extend hundreds, even thousands, of years back to the arrival of the Hutu, whose presence meant the virtual destruction of the Twa, Rwanda's oldest inhabitants. Today, the Twa make up only 1 percent of Rwanda's population.

The Tutsi arrived in Rwanda sometime during the 15th century. Even though they never became the majority ethnic population, they established a feudal system that reduced the Hutu to serfdom. For several hundred years, the Hutu labored under their Tutsi feudal masters until 1959 when they rose up to break the stranglehold of serfdom. Thus began Rwanda's twentieth century genocide and the first exodus of Tutsis to other regions.

Rwanda became a UN trusteeship briefly in 1961 until Belgium granted independence in 1962. Under the leadership of President Gregoire Kayibanda, Rwanda made moderate progress as a democratic nation until a coup in 1972 placed power in the hands of the military. General Juvenal Habyarimana, who led the coup, served as president until his death in 1993 as a result of a suspicious airplane accident.

A group of exiles, mostly Tutsis who had fled in 1959, invaded Rwanda from Uganda in 1990. War dragged on for two years, ending with a peace accord that provided power sharing between the Hutu and Tutsi. (And what about the Twa? What are they doing these days? Few news reports mention them, the extremely silent minority.)

The peace accord might have brought lasting peace, but when an airplane carrying President Habyarimana and the President of Burundi was shot down in 1994, killing both men, it launched the 1994 civil war. The military kicked into a killing spree, murdering almost one million Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu over the course of one year. Almost two million Tutsi and moderate Hutu citizens fled Rwanda for neighboring countries.

Since the war's end in 1994, Rwanda's leadership has come full circle and ended right back in the hands of the Tutsi.

Some African journalists criticize the international community for assuming that a Tutsi-led government, which for years subjected and oppressed the Hutu majority, can build a just and democratic society. Henry F. Mirima, Editor-in-Chief for the African paper The Exposure, writes, "If the international community wants to bring lasting peace to Rwanda, the only solution is to remove Tutsis from the government they are occupying through manipulation of super powers, and hold fair and free general elections whereby the majority will go to power. It is well known that if a majority is in power it can tolerate the minority. But when a minority is in power, through the gun, it becomes brutal and oppressive."