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Yet so far, despair has not triumphed completely. Relief workers are astonished by the cohesion and sense of community they see around them. In some cases whole villages moved together and reassembled themselves in the camps; the elders ration food supplies; some priests are presiding over congregations 1,000 strong. For those who have been witness to mayhem throughout the past four years of civil war, there were even words of relief. Compared with the life he had left behind, one refugee told a reporter from ABC, "here we are tasting the good life." At least here, he explained, no one was being killed.
How did so much hate accumulate in so small a country? Historians could point to Rwanda as a case study in what happens to a former colony when suppressed tribal rivalries are released into a power vacuum. It is a familiar lesson: an estimated 1 million Hindus and Muslims died in communal fighting after the British pulled out of India; the departure of the Belgians from the Congo set off savage ethnic-regional warfare; the collapse of the Soviet Union ignited a murderous rivalry between Abkhazians and Georgians for control of Georgia. Rwanda's preindependence history held special ironies: while colonial rule was far less strict in Rwanda than in South Africa or Rhodesia, the legacy of Belgian rule all but guaranteed the violence that has erupted.
Europeans who stumbled into Rwanda a century ago found a country ruled by tall, willowy Tutsi cattle lords under a magical Tutsi king, while darker- skinned, stockier Hutu farmers tended the land, grew the food, kept the Tutsi clothed and fed. They lived in symbiotic harmony. "They were a reasonably contented rural society," says Basil Davidson, a leading British historian of Africa. "There was no hatred between the two groups. That came only with the colonial system."
First the Germans and then, after World War I, the Belgians ruled their African colony indirectly. Based on their notions of racial hierarchy, the Belgians upheld the dominance of the Tutsi, with their lighter skin and aquiline, almost European features, as their agents governing the majority Hutu population. Sometimes they gave the Tutsi privileged access to education; a minimum height was set for the sons of chiefs who wanted to go to school, which effectively disqualified many of the shorter Hutu. The Tutsi received the best jobs in the bureaucracy, even as the colonists drained the wealth from the country. "That really began to stratify society," says John Lamphear of the University of Texas, an East Africa expert, "creating differences that hadn't been there."
The years of colonialism essentially destroyed the social and political structures that had kept tribal peace for centuries. By 1959 the aggrieved Hutu majority rose up in rebellion; in some villages, machete-wielding gangs set upon the Tutsi and hacked off their feet, cutting them down to size. The Belgians, pushed by the wave of independence sweeping the continent, abruptly abandoned their Tutsi agents and sided with the Hutu majority. Having inflamed the Hutu's resentment of the Tutsi elite, the retreating colonizers left the minority to the mercies of the mob. Thousands of Tutsi fled into exile in Uganda, where they waited for the next 30 years for the chance to reclaim their power.