Hutus and Tutsi's

A little over ten years ago something occurred in Rwanda that would change the country forever. On April 6, 1994 the Rwandan President Habyarimana (who belonged to the Hutu ethnic group) was killed when a missile was fired at his plane and caused it to crash near the Kigali Airport. This may have possibly been the event that sparked the grisly genocide of over 1.5 million Tutsi's by Hutu extremists. These two ethnic groups which include the Hutus and Tutsi's had been at odds with each other for decades.

In this course, there have been a number of theories and concepts that have been examined and studied. Many of these theories apply to the situation that the Hutu and Tutsi people have found themselves in ever since the beginning of their power struggle in 1926 when the Belgians decided to classify the group as either Hutu or Tutsi, giving considerable favor to the Tutsi's.

One of these concepts is self-justification, which involves convincing oneself that a group is in some way inferior so that one may feel justified in discriminating or even killing members of that group. Apparently this is the concept that the Hutus used as a justification for killing the Tutsi's. I remember it being mentioned in class that a lot of the Hutus said "cut down the tall trees" and proceeded to cut the long limbs off of the Tutsis bodies. I believe this was their way of reducing the Tutsi's as mere objects in their minds. To them, the Tutsi's were not as good as they were and treated them accordingly. Perhaps this was what made it easier for the Hutu's to kill the Tutsi's especially in the manner that some chose to do it in.

The Rwandan genocide was extremely unfortunate especially considering the fact that the Hutus and Tutsi's were at one time able to get along with each other. In fact, a Hutu was able to become a Tutsi if he/she accumulated significant wealth, which usually meant a large herd of cattle at the time and Tutsi's who lost their wealth would fall to the status of a Hutu. This is a type of social mobility and the opportunity to rise or fall within the levels disappeared once Belgium and Germany took over and established ethnic stratification. Ethnic stratification is the structured inequality of different ethnic groups as a result of their different places in the social hierarchy. This was carried out by issuing the people identification cards distinguishing them as a Tutsi or Hutu. This was the beginning of a long, bitter conflict between the Tutsi's and Hutu's that would last until present times.

After their independence from Europe, the Hutu's became the ones who were in charge and openly discriminated against the Tutsi's. It is likely that they were resentful because of the power that the Tutsi's had held before their independence due to the favoritism of the Belgians. Under President Habyarimana's rule, Tutsi's were expelled from schools, government positions, and businesses. Toward the beginning of the genocide,