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By the time the Belgians ceded independence to Rwanda in 1962, the foundations for slaughter had been laid. "When there is a rupture of authority, that creates a situation that is apocalyptic by nature and leads to fear and anguish," says Professor Francois Constantin, head of the East Africa Research Center at the University of Pau in France. "In Rwandan society, the fault of an individual becomes the fault of a group. A whole family is held responsible for a prejudicial act committed by an individual and can be eliminated. In a traumatic situation, fear and uncertainty can lead to collective murder. Vengeance breeds countervengeance."
As its hold on power was challenged by better-educated Tutsi rivals, the Hutu government increased ethnic tensions by creating a sense of tribal solidarity -- a useful distraction from the internal power struggles among northern and southern Hutu. All Rwandans were required to carry racial- identity cards; there was talk of herding Tutsi into certain regions, an apartheid imposed by blacks on fellow blacks. Any effort by Tutsi to reassert themselves met with a vicious and murderous response. "There was bludgeoning of public opinion," argues Philip Reyntjens, professor of law and politics at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. "Ethnicity does not necessarily have to give rise to violence, but one can easily manipulate ethnicity to throw people against one another."
When it suited his purposes, President Habyarimana could behave like a model multiculturalist. By the late 1980s his economy was gasping, famine was spreading, and his hold on power looked increasingly fragile. In a gesture of reform he loosened controls on the press and began negotiating to allow competing parties into the government. But many thought he was still dragging his feet. In 1990 the exiled Tutsi of the Rwandan Patriotic Front invaded from Uganda and launched a civil war that came to a halt only last August with the Arusha accords, which mandated that power be shared. Tutsi would finally be allowed into a national-unity government, and a new army of both Hutu and Tutsi soldiers would enforce the peace.
The prospect of reconciliation was too much for Hutu hard-liners, and the plotting began. Well-connected residents of Kigali knew something awful was coming and began sending their children out of the country. What looked at first like a spontaneous eruption of ancient ethnic hate appears now to have been carefully planned. Though no one has been allowed in to investigate, U.N. officials suspect the hard-line presidential guard as being behind the assassination.
If the Rwanda catastrophe was more than a simple tribal meltdown, it also showed signs of being the kind of conflict that scholars warn will haunt the world for decades to come. These wars are not started by statesmen or fought by armies or ended by treaties. The tribal skirmishes recall the wars of the Middle Ages, when religion and politics and economics and social conflicts all messily intertwined.