Wednesday, October 19

Today is early release! Whoop, whoop!
What are the origins of the Tutsi-Hutu conflict?

The hostility between Hutus and Tutsis, however intense, reaches back only a few decades. Although a minority, making up approximately 15 percent of the population, the Tutsis have long held most of the land in Rwanda (and neighboring Burundi). For centuries, they were primarily cattle herders while the Hutus, making up 84 percent of the population, were farmers. (The Twa people comprise the remaining 1 percent of the population.) Under German and then Belgian colonial rule, the economic differences between the two groups deepened. The Belgians
openly favored the Tutsis. Educational privileges and government jobs were reserved solely for the Tutsis. Identity cards were issued to document ethnicity. (These types of cards were later used to identify the Tutsi during the 1994 genocide.) This colonial favoritism contributed to tensions between the Hutus and Tutsis.

Despite the growing tensions, widespread violence did not break out between the two groups until the country gained independence in 1962 as Rwanda-Urundi. (The country later
split into the nations of Rwanda and Burundi.) In the late 1950s, the Belgians hastily organized
elections in Rwanda and Burundi as their colonial empire in central Africa began to crumble. Hutu parties gained control of the Rwandan government in 1959, reversing the power structure and triggering armed opposition by the Tutsis. In three years of civil war, fifty thousand Rwandans were killed and another one hundred thousand (almost all Tutsi) fled the country. In neighboring Burundi, the Tutsis took advantage of their control of the army to override election results and seize political power. During the next three decades, Burundi’s Tutsi-led government crushed repeated Hutu uprisings. In 1972 as many as one hundred thousand Hutus were killed in Burundi.

Ethnic conflicts notwithstanding, the vast majority of Hutus and Tutsis struggled side by side for survival as small farmers. By 1994, Rwanda, with a population of 8.4 million people and a land area the size of Maryland, was among the world’s most densely populated and poorest nations. Poverty and the scarcity of land played into the hands of politicians seeking to further their power by igniting ethnic tensions.

In your blog, answer the following questions:

Blog Title: What are the origins of the Tutsi-Hutu conflict?
Assignment: Read the above selection, then answer the following questions.

1. What percentage of the population do the Tutsis make up? The Hutus? Who owns the majority of the land?
2. How did the Belgians show favor toward the Tutsis?
3. Why were identification cards later used for? How is this connected to the Holocaust?
4. When did Hutus gain political power?
5. Write two facts about the country of Rwanda.