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The two small neighbouring countries of Burundi and Rwanda in Central Africa are inhabited primarily by two ethnic groups, Hutu and Tutsi, in the same proportions: 85 percent Hutu and 15 percent Tutsi. In 1972, the Tutsi-led government and army of Burundi slaughtered up to 250,000 Hutu. The Jeunesse Revolutionaire, a paramilitary organization of young men attached to the Tutsi ruling political party, did much of the killing. A subsequent report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace excoriated the United States administration of President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for "indifference, inertia, and irresponsibility" in its response to the massacres.(1)
In October 1993, fighting broke out again in Burundi, following an attempted Tutsi coup against the first democratically elected president of the country, a Hutu. Amnesty International estimates that around 100,000 people were killed in the three months between October and December 1993; other estimates of the number of dead vary between 50,000 to 200,000.(2)
In October 1990, a group of Rwandan exiles, primarily Tutsi who had served for years in the Ugandan armed forces, invaded Rwanda. For the next three years, a war between the Hutu government and the invading force, known as the Rwandan Patriotic Front, partitioned the country. Under strong pressure from the international community of aid donors, a peace agreement had been brokered by emissaries from the United Nations and the Organization of Africa Unity (OAU) in August 1993, and a cease-fire was in effect from that time until mid-April 1994. However, the Hutu president continually delayed implementation of the peace agreement, and the governing Hutu party had been recruiting young toughs into a militia and training them all through the early months of 1994. By April 1994, 10,000 Hutu had been recruited into this militia.
On April 6, 1994, the Presidents of Burundi and Rwanda were both returning to the Rwandan capital of Kigali from a UN-mediated parley of the contending parties of both countries with other regional leaders. The Rwandan president was under strong international pressure once again, this time to implement the 1993 peace agreement. The airplane in which the leaders were travelling was shot down as it approached the Kigali airport. In less than an hour, roadside barriers began to go up in...