Reaching Souls International Involvement:
We are planning our first project in Rwanda for
2005. Over 8% of Rwanda's population is infected
by the HIV virus. Rwanda is 56% Roman Catholic.
Short Term Projects:
- Kigali, 2005
- Kigali, 2008
Population:
7,954,013
Life Expectancy: 39
Years
HIV Deaths: 49,000
per year
Rwanda is a small landlocked country in the Great Lakes
region of central Africa. Also known fondly as "Land of
a Thousand Hills". It is bordered by Uganda, Burundi,
the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Tanzania. Prior
to European colonization, it was the site of one of the
region's most complex monarchical systems. Its fertile
and hilly terrain supports one of the densest
populations in Africa. It is best known to the outside
world for the 1994 Rwandan Genocide that resulted in the
deaths of up to one million people.
The earliest known inhabitants of the region now known
as Rwanda were the pygmy Twa. At later stages groups
known as Hutus and Tutsis also settled in the same
region.
In 1895 Rwanda, like Burundi, became a German
protectorate. However at early stages the Germans were
completely dependent on the indigenous government. The
German authority kept the indigenous administration
system by applying the same type of indirect rule
established by the British Empire in the next Ugandan
kingdoms. After Germany's loss in World War I, the
protectorate was taken over by Belgium with a League of
Nations mandate. Belgian rule in the region was far more
direct and far harsher than that of the Germans. Belgian
colonizers, backed by Christian churches, mainly
Catholics, used Tutsi high class over lower classes of
Tutsis and Hutus, creating a wider social gap between
social entities than had existed before. Belgian forced
labour policies, stringent taxes, were mainly enforced
by Tutsi high class, used as buffers against people
anger, further polarising the Hutu-Tutsi situation. This
situation, also, led a lot of young peasants to escape
tax harassment and hunger by migrating toward
neighboring countries. They mainly expatriated to Congo
with the Belgian colonial monitoring in mining and
agriculture sectors but also freely to Uganda in
plantations, looking for work and incomes to pay taxes
and to enjoy some well-off.
After World War II Rwanda became a UN trust territory
with Belgium as the administrative authority. Through a
series of processes, including several reforms, the
assassination of King Mutara III Charles in 1959 and the
fleeing of the last Nyiginya clan monarch, King Kigeri
V, to Uganda, the Hutu gained more and more power and
upon Rwanda's independence in 1962, the Hutu held
virtually all power.
In 1990, the Tutsi-dominated Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF)
launched military attacks against the Hutu government
ruling Rwanda from their base in Uganda. The military
government of Juvénal Habyarimana responded with
genocidal pogroms against Tutsis, whom it claimed were
trying to re-enslave the Hutus. Fighting continued until
1992, when the government and the RPF signed a
cease-fire agreement known as the Arusha accords in
Arusha, Tanzania.
In 1994, President Habyarimana was assassinated when his
plane was shot down while landing in Kigali, and over
the next three months, the military and militia groups
killed approximately one million Tutsis and Hutu
moderates in the Rwandan Genocide. The RPF launched
final attacks, and occupied the northern, the east and
the southern parts of the country by June in wide swift
turning movement. The 4th July, the war ended as the RPF
entered the capital Kigali and while French peacekeeper
troops were occupying the south-west part of the country
under Opération Turquoise.
Over 2 million Hutus fled the country after the war,
fearing Tutsi retribution. Most have since returned,
although some militias remain in the Democratic Republic
of the Congo, and have become involved in that country's
civil war.
