The Hutu trademark death by machete
Called the Interahamwe those who stand together the Hutu extremists of Rwanda attempted their own Final Solution on their fellow countrymen, the minority Tutsis.
To hold on to control of a country that was set to switch to power sharing between Hutus (85pc of the population) and Tutsis they engineered a campaign of mass murder.
For months leading up to the massacres the Interahamwe distributed racist propaganda against the cockroaches (the chilling euphemism for Tutsis). Playing on the Hutus' deep-rooted sense of inferiority, they convinced them their survival depended on eliminating the other side.
And on the evening that the death of Hutu president Juvenal Habyarimana, in a mysterious plane crash, set off the first wave of killings, the Interahamwe were there organising the road blocks at which terrified Tutsis were stopped, asked to produce their identity cards in which ethnicity had been recorded since colonial times and then led away or hacked to death on the spot with farm implements and machetes.
The killing did not break out everywhere at once. While some Hutus were happy to take up the machete and the gun against their neighbours, and even relatives and spouses, others were understandably reluctant to kill. Even in the prevailing culture of obedience where what the headman said was slavishly followed some villages held out against the madness. But the Interahamwe roamed the country, stoking the fire, keeping mass murder going.
They were never slow to lift a machete and hack a child to death, or to rape a young girl after forcing her to witness the murder of her entire family.
When millions of Hutu refugees led, post-genocide, into exile in Congo (then Zaire) by their leaders returned to Rwanda in 1996, the Interahamwe had to stay behind. They sent their children home alone. They were easy to spot. Sad bewildered little souls carried along by the crowd.
But Rwanda's jails were already bursting with 130,000 men and women implicated in genocide. The architects of mass murder could never return home.
So they have remained in Congo, launching regular attacks across the border. They have grown more and more audacious, creeping across the Congolese border and infiltrating north-west Rwanda, the traditional Hutu homeland.
Last year Interahamwe attacks were spreading across Rwanda, even closing on the capital Kigali. There was panic. And late last year the government fought back.
With a combination of military attacks, and a campaign to win over the local Hutu population, the Rwandan army has successfully flushed out many of the extremists. Controversially, the government is currently moving 600,000 Hutus from their isolated hillside homes into villages. It says it is doing this to protect civilians.
Independent News Service
- MARY BRAID
