Hutu

Having turned their backs on the Tutsi and Hutu moderates when they were being slaughtered, they now overflowed with sympathy and help for their killers.

(Rwanda's prime minister at the time, a moderate Hutu who opposed the mass killing of Tutsis, was a woman; she was murdered and sexually mutilated in the first hours of the slaughter.) Now 18 percent of all top government jobs are held by women.

Fighting in the East involves, among others, Rwandan-backed Congolese rebels, Congolese-backed Rwandan rebels, local Congolese militia, the Rwandan Army, and Congolese supported Burundian Hutu rebels.

Children of Hutu and Tutsi who had intermarried were categorized as Tutsi and killed.

In 1959, however, a revolution by the Hutu peasants of southern Rwanda brought the Hutu to power and resulted in a redistribution of land to previously landless people.

He lives with his Tutsi mother, Marie, and has only seen his Hutu father, released from prison four years ago, once, on the street.

As Hutu groups began taking over towns, slaying every Tutsi in sight regardless of age and gender, fear and chaos began spreading into every neighbourhood.

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

Reverien Ndikuriyo, the president of the Burundian senate, has been referring to the regime's opponents as "cockroaches" (the same word used for Tutsis by the Hutu extremists in Rwanda).

A spokesman for the U.N.'s MONUSCO force in DRCongo said troops taking part in joint operations against FNL fighters in the east of the country had taken several Hutu rebel strongholds.

AFRICAN expatriates marked the 20th year of the Rwandan Genocide, a slaughter of Tutsi and moderate Hutu in Rwanda by members of the Hutu majority, in 1994.

"But we also reaffirm our commitment to help ensure that other countries do not face the pain and suffering Rwandans endured two decades ago." Members of the Hutu tribe - mostly security forces and militias - backed by a Hutu-majority government used machetes to slaughter men, women and children of the Tutsi ethnic group, sometimes torching entire buildings with Tutsis hiding inside.

Carney states that the Catholic Church in the 1950s represents the resurgence and ultimate triumph of the "church from below," formed by the first Rwandese converts who came from the ranks of Hutu peasants and marginalized petit Tutsis.

Angelique Umugwaneza, a Hutu, was 13 at the time it happened in 1994.