Two terrible massacres happened between the same people in the same part of Central Africa within the last 50 years. In Burundi and Rwanda, two small, neighbouring countries, the Tutsi are about 14% of the population and the Hutu 85%. The Tutsi feel superior to the Hutu, as whites did to blacks in South Africa in the past.
In 1972, in Burundi, the Hutu staged a rebellion against Tutsi minority rule. It was crushed and the Tutsi rulers decided upon a final solution to the Hutu problem: they systematically slaughtered Hutu with more than primary school education. About 300 000 Hutu died in this genocide.
The world’s reaction to this genocide was silence. Not horrified silence, but bored silence. The anti-apartheid activists around the world said nothing. The genocide is never remembered.
From independence in 1962, Rwanda had a Hutu government. The Tutsi hated this and formed a Tutsi army in exile: the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). In 1990 it invaded Rwanda, causing panic among the Hutus, who feared, correctly, it wanted to seize power for the minority. In 1994 hysteria set in among the Hutu and they fell upon the Tutsi in bloodthirsty hatred and killed about 800 000 of them, being the genocide we all do remember.
