text: Rwanda's Struggle to Recover from Genocide\nDespite efforts by Rwanda’s new government, the United Nations (UN), and the Organization of African Unity (OAU), Rwanda’s recovery from genocide has been slow and far from steady. At a December 1997 press conference, United States Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stressed that the United States and Rwanda “must account for the past in order to forge a more just future.” In the following article, written for Encarta Yearbook, author Gérard Prunier explains why this may be difficult to accomplish.\n\n\nRwanda's Struggle to Recover from Genocide\n\nBy Gérard Prunier\n\n\nOne of the 20th century's worst atrocities—the brutal slaughter of approximately 800,000 people in the East African nation of Rwanda in 1994—still demands an accounting.\n\n\nThree years after the genocide ended, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), created by the United Nations (UN), has yet to bring a war criminal to justice. In contrast, the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), established in 1993 to try war crimes committed during the civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, has proceeded relatively smoothly. The ICTY reached its first conviction in May 1997. The ICTR's lack of progress has led many Rwandans to believe that the outside world is more concerned about “ethnic cleansing” in Europe than about mass atrocities in east central Africa.\n\n\nOn April 6, 1994, Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana was shot down by unknown assailants as his plane approached the Rwandan capital of Kigali. Habyarimana's death triggered a chain of events in which neighbor turned on neighbor and friend upon friend. Murders occurred within families as ethnic Hutu killed their ethnic Tutsi relatives. Many Hutu priests refused asylum to Tutsi fugitives, and some Hutu schoolteachers actually murdered their Tutsi students. Although the violence appeared spontaneous, it was in fact planned. Many reports in Western news media inaccurately described what was happening as a tribal conflict. The true causes lay elsewhere.\n\nRoots of the Conflict\n\n\nThe conflict between the Hutu and Tutsi in east central Africa was not new. Nor was it the product of ancient tribal hatreds as was so often reported. The Hutu and Tutsi are not tribes. A tribe is a distinct community with its own language, customs, territory, and religion. Hutu and Tutsi in the nations of Rwanda and Burundi share the same territory, speak the same languages (Kinyarwanda in Rwanda, Kirundi in Burundi), share the same customs, practice the same religion, and frequently intermarry. The real difference between the majority Hutu (who make up between 80 and 85 percent of the population in Rwanda and Burundi) and the minority Tutsi (between 12 and 15 percent in both countries) is sociopolitical.\n\n\nThe aboriginal inhabitants of the area now known as Rwanda were the Twa. Rwanda's Hutu migrated to the region later and were well established by the time the Tutsi arrived in the 1400s. This early precolonial society was hierarchical, with Tutsi serving as the ruling aristocracy. Their status was linked to the ownership of cattle, a symbol of social distinction in many East African societies.\n\n\nHutus were not allowed to own cattle unless the cattle were given to them by a Tutsi overlord. The granting of cattle, a ceremonial process called ubuhake in Kinyarwanda, was an essential link between Tutsi social patrons and their Hutu clients. For example, Hutu soldiers who served their Tutsi masters well in war were often rewarded with cattle.\n\n\nWars in the region were frequent, but they did not pit Tutsi against Hutu. Rather, they were civil conflicts between high lineage Tutsis who were supported by their Hutu retainers in a system similar to that of medieval Europe. Or they were wars between the kingdom of Rwanda and the neighboring kingdoms of Iweju, Mpororo, Nkore, or Buha, which toda