How is the past of the two Hutu-Tutsi countries likely to influence their future?
Most of us might be accustomed to the 1994 Rwandan genocide popularized by the Hollywood movie Hotel Rwanda in which the shooting down of President Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane was used as a signal to execute a planned killing of Tutsis by Hutus. However, the Rwandan case is not the first case of genocide in the Great Lakes region. The region’s first occurred in neighboring Burundi in July 1972, in which about 200,000 to 300,000 Hutus were killed by Tutsis using an abortive Hutu insurrection as a trigger. In-between these two, several other planned mass killings between the two groups, in turn, have taken place. Neither Rwanda nor Burundi can be mentioned independently of the other when examining the Hutu and Tutsi groups. Moreover, any discussion of the two groups whether on the basis of ethnicity or social caste that seeks to examine the long-held hatred between them cannot ignore the anti-Tutsi,