Hutu

"I don't forget, but I forgive." Almost a million people were murdered in just 100 days between April and July 1994, the Hutus slaughtering Tutsis, even when they were family.

The 37-year-old Dubai resident, who is a survivor of the Rwandan genocide, lost her parents and most of her extended family and friends in the 1994 massacre carried out by the Hutus against the Tutsis over a period of 100 days.

The conflict originated as soon as the then Rwandan Prsident Juvenal Habyarimana and his counterpart Cyprien Ntaryamira of Brundi both Hutus was shot down.

He has been praised for bringing economic stability to the country following the 1994 genocide, in which some 800,00 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed by Hutu extremists.

He was just ten years old when the whole country was full of roadblocks and fanaticized Hutus were looking for Tutsis to kill.

The linguistics professor, who had lived for 12 years in the US, is considered by Rwandan prosecutors as one of the key ideologists of the genocide in which Hutu extremists killed 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994.

In both Rwanda's genocide and Burundi's civil war the majority Hutus (85 per cent of the population) were on one side and formerly dominant Tutsi minority on the other.

Hutus blamed Tutsi rebels, many of whom had come into Rwanda from neighboring Uganda.

In Rwanda in 1994 more than 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were victims of genocide.

Most of those murdered were Tutsis, and what makes this book unusual and controversial for some is that Umugwaneza is a Hutu. She shows that everyone suffered in the bloodletting: Tutsis, Hutus and the Twa--a marginalised ethnic group that has not received the same level of attention in international reports.

Two of the three main social groupings, Hutus and Tutsis, have swapped control of the country by rebellion and military coup.