Hutu power

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Hutu Power is the unofficial name of a right-wing extremist Hutu movement that has made the expulsion and later the extermination of all Tutsi an ideology .

The roots of Hutu power lie in the long-term rule of the Tutsi over the Hutu in Rwanda , Burundi and adjacent areas of the Democratic Republic of the Congo .

In the 1950s , the Hutu started a political movement against the Tutsi who were still dominant at the time . For a long time, the Tutsi were supported by Belgium in their feudal structures of rule, since Belgium was the mandate power (colonial power) in Rwanda and Burundi at the time. With the increasing Christianization of the country, which was first successful with the Hutu , individual Catholic clergy began to fight with the Hutu for their emancipation . At the end of the 1950s, the movement radicalized and in 1959 the first deaths in violent clashes occurred. This was followed by massacres and expulsions of the Tutsi minority from Rwanda, which lost its power in Rwanda with independence in 1962, but was largely able to maintain its position in Burundi.

Over the next 35 years, the movement in Rwanda became more and more radical, with expulsions and massacres of Tutsi occurring again and again. From around 1990, voices advocating the complete extermination of the Tutsi became louder and louder. This movement was then instrumentalized by a small Hutu elite that increasingly feared for their benefices .

The militias of the Interahamwe and the Impuzamugambi as well as the radio station Radio-Télévision Libre des Mille Collines were developed into instruments of Hutu power.

The assassinations of Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira on April 6, 1994 at Kigali Airport prompted the genocide of the Tutsi and the moderate Hutu in Rwanda, which killed around 800,000 people. The sometimes violent involvement of large parts of the Hutu population in the genocide triggered a further dynamization of the Hutu power, since now many Hutu who were previously not ready for genocide, all surviving Tutsi, who were able to draw attention to the guilt of the Hutu , wanted to see dead too, so that no witness would be left for future generations.

The 1994 conquest of Rwanda by the Rwandan Patriotic Front , a Tutsi rebel army from Uganda , put an end to the genocide of 1994, but did not solve the network of problems created by the violent history of the two groups. The current, Tutsi-dominated government of Rwanda is trying to initiate a process of national reconciliation by punishing the main perpetrators of the genocide, the so-called Génocidaires , but a solution will only be very slow and difficult.