Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Turner,
The Congo Wars
, 37. Jason Stearns, in
Dancing in the Glory
of Monsters
, 193-94.
104
And yet the Congo Wars
This tension was in part a result, as Thomas Turner writes, of the Bel-
gian colonial idea “that parts of Congo were underpopulated, especially by 'useful' Africans [i.e.,
supposedly racially superior Tutsis]. This led to programmes to transfer families from Rwanda to
eastern Congo, with consequences that are still being felt.”
The Congo Wars
, 29.
104
Though ethnic division
As for the roots of Rwandan conflict, they lie in myth and conjecture,
since no one has established a definitive history of the Rwandan people. Though they speak the
same language, the division between Tutsis and Hutus traditionally functioned like a caste sys-
tem, the Tutsis being herders and the Hutus farmers. The Germans, whose colonization of Rwanda
lasted from 1885 to 1916, believed that the Tutsis were of Hamitic origin, from Ethiopia or the
Horn of Africa, though there was no archaeological or historical evidence to back this up. See-
ing the Tutsis' physical resemblance to Europeans, the Germans had them rule over the Hutus
in what was essentially a feudal system. The Hutus are a Bantu people who most likely first
spread along the coast, then migrated west, displacing the Twa, a Pygmy people. Some histori-
ans view the Tutsis and Hutus as two social groups that emerged from the same root, much as
French aristocrats and peasants did. However, others claim that the Tutsis migrated south, herd-
ing cattle, then lived and interbred with the Hutus long enough to share a language and cul-
ture, and that successful cattle-owning Hutus traditionally were able to join the Tutsis. The abil-
ity of adult Tutsis to digest lactose is remarkably high in comparison to other regional peoples
like the Hutu and required millennia to develop, supporting this theory to some degree. Genet-
ic tests also suggest that the Tutsis may have Nilotic origins though they are quite similar ge-
netically to the Hutu as a result of centuries of intermarriage. See J. R. Luis et al., “The Levant
Versus the Horn of Africa: Evidence for Bidirectional Corridors of Human Migrations,”
Amer-
ican Journal of Human Genetics
74 no. 3 (March 2004): 532-44,
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
pmc/articles/PMC1182266/
; Razib Khan, “Tutsi Probably Differ Genetically from the Hutu,”
Dis-
cover
, August 29, 2011,
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/08/tutsi-differ-genetically-
from-the-hutu/
; Razib Khan, “Tutsi Genetics ii,”
Discover
, August 31, 2011,
ht-
105
Over two million citizens
Kevin C. Dunn,
Imagining the Congo: The International Relations of
Identity
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 143.
105
Between thirty and forty thousand
Gérard Prunier,
Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan
Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe
(New York: Oxford University Press,
2009), 25.
105
Since the end of the Cold War
In fact, for years, Mobutu's military units had been promoting
ethnic violence in the Kivus against the Congolese Tutsis, the Banyarwanda, and “most observers”
saw the violence there as “less historical than the result of deliberate government manipulation de-
signed to divert popular resentment of the Mobutu regime.” Turner and Meditz, “Introduction,” in
Meditz and Merrill,
Zaire: A Country Study
, l-li.
106
Whereas the United States
In
The Congo Wars
, Thomas Turner writes:
The same community failed to act between 1994 and 1996 in response to the crisis generated
by the flight of Hutu Rwandan authorities, troops and civilians to eastern Congo, even though
the danger of international war was obvious. There were various reasons for this inaction, but
a major one was the rivalry between France on the one hand, which was backing Mobutu, and
the United States, which wanted to replace its former protégé. This relationship had shaped the
catastrophes in the Great Lakes region at least since 1990, when the West began pressurizing
the dictators Habyarimana [of Rwanda], Mobutu and their neighbours to democratize. As often
as not the USA and France were pulling in opposite directions, preventing effective interna-
tional intervention (150).
