Also known as 'the land of a thousand hills', Rwanda is a landlocked country of lovely and various landscapes. The Virunga volcanic mountains have high altitude-forests, world-famous mountain gorillas, and Lake Kivu offers beautiful beaches, jutting peninsulas and an archipelago of islands.
Many visitors have been surprised by the fact that Rwandans are now harmoniously living together only 10 years after the genocide that threatened to shatter the social fabric of the country. Reconciliation has not been easy. Upon assuming office, the Government of National Unity inherited a deeply scarred
nation.
Sometimes, people cannot set Rwanda's recent history in a context. People need to go as far back as the late 13th century when pastoral Tutsi tribes arrived from the south and conquered the agricultural Hutu and hunter-gatherer Twa inhabitants of Rwanda, establishing a feudal kingdom. A unified state was established by King Kigeri Rwabuguri during the 19th century, but this lasted only until 1890 when Rwanda was annexed as a province of German East Africa. As part of the post-World War I settlement, Belgium was later granted the right to govern Rwanda-Urundi under a League of Nations mandate. The Belgians sponsored the continued dominance of the Tutsi minority at the expense of the Hutu but were forced, in the early 1960s, to concede internal autonomy and then independence under majority Hutu rule. Intercommunal violence between Hutus and Tutsis continued and a Tutsi government-in-exile was even established in the Ugandan capital, Kampala.
In 1973, Major-General Juvénal Habyarimana led a bloodless coup and established a Hutu-dominated military government. A few years later, the country’s sole political party was founded, dominated by Hutus. Sporadic fighting resumed in the early 1990s. Hutu extremists decided upon a ‘final solution'. It required a single trigger: this was a plane crash which killed Hutu President Habyarimana in 1994. Encouraged by official broadcasts, armed militias set about the systematic murder of their ethnic and political opponents, largely Tutsis. The international community, and especially the UN, proved reluctant to intervene. There was particular opposition from the Americans, still scarred by their experience in Somalia, and the French, covertly backing the Habyarimana government. The best estimate is that around 800,000 people were tragically and horrifically killed.
From their bases in Uganda, the Rwandan Patriotic Front launched a full-scale invasion, but the bulk of the Hutu militia had fled to the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo – a fact that has crafted a violent rift between the two countries.
Nevertheless, Rwandans are not only living together today but they are striving to be recognized as one people. Rwanda is a country of unimaginable beauty and such beauty defies its violent past: may it continue to defy it forever.
GeographyRwanda is a small mountainous country in central Africa, bordered to the north by Uganda, to the east by Tanzania, to the south by Burundi and to the west by the Democratic Republic of Congo. The country is divided by great peaks of up to 3000m (9842ft), which run across the country from north to south. The Virunga volcanoes, rising steeply from Lake Kivu in the west, slope down first to a hilly central plateau and further eastwards to an area of marshy lakes around the upper reaches of the A’Kagera River, where the A’Kagera National Park is situated.
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