Viking_Yearbook_95

Courtesy ofAssociated Press Civil War In Rwanda T he civil war in Rwanda began with a plane crash that killed the president. Before the year was over another 500,000 Rwandans had been killed and another 2 million had fled the African nation for the relative safety of squalid refugee camps in Zaire and other neighboring countries. President Juvenal Habyarimana died in a mysterious plane crash on April 6, igniting long-simmering tensions among the Hutu tribe, which accounts for 10 percent of the'population. A rebel group comprised mainly of Tutsis had been trying to unseat the president, who was Hutu. His tribe blamed the Tutsis for his death, and Hutu extremists began a series of mass killings that a United Nations panel later characterized as genocide— "concerted, planned, systematic and methodical." The violence was awful, but it was nothing new. The Hutus slaughtered thousands of Tutsis in uprisings in 1959 and the early 1960's. Courtesy ofAssociated Press 27