I | INTRODUCTION |
Rwanda, republic in east central Africa, bounded on
the north by Uganda, on the east by Tanzania, on the south by Burundi, and on
the west by Lake Kivu and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC, formerly
Zaire). Rwanda covers an area of 26,338 sq km (10,169 sq mi), and Kigali is its
capital and largest city.
II | LAND AND RESOURCES |
The central portion of Rwanda is dominated by
a hilly plateau averaging about 1,700 m (about 5,600 ft) in elevation. Eastward,
toward the Tanzanian border, the land slopes downward to a series of marshy
lakes along the upper Kagera River. On the western side of the plateau is a
mountain system averaging about 2,740 m (about 9,000 ft) in elevation, forming
the watershed between the Nile and Congo river systems. The Virunga Mountains, a
volcanic range that forms the northern reaches of this system, includes Volcan
Karisimbi (4,507 m/14,787 ft), Rwanda’s highest peak. West of the mountains the
elevation drops to about 1,460 m (about 4,800 ft) in the Lake Kivu region.
A | Climate |
Rwanda has three main seasons: a short dry
season in January, the major rainy season from February through May, and another
dry period from May to late September. The average yearly rainfall is 790 mm (31
in) and is heaviest in the western and northwestern mountain regions. Wide
temperature variations occur because of elevation differences. The average daily
temperature in the Lake Kivu area is 23°C (73°F). In the mountains in the
northwest, frost occurs at night.
B | Plants and Animals |
Forests, once extensive, now are
concentrated in the western mountains and Lake Kivu area. Predominant trees are
the eucalyptus, acacia, and oil palm. Wildlife—including elephant, hippopotamus,
crocodile, wild boar, leopard, antelope, and galago (bush baby)—is protected in
Akagera National Park. The Virunga Mountains in northern Rwanda are the home of
what is estimated to be half of the world’s remaining mountain gorillas. This
subspecies of gorilla was made famous by the work of American zoologist Dian
Fossey.
C | Mineral Resources |
The principal mineral resources are
cassiterite (tin ore), wolframite (tungsten ore), columbite, tantalite, beryl,
and gold. Large natural gas reserves have been found near the DRC border.
D | Environmental Issues |
Rwanda is one of the smallest and most
densely populated countries in Africa, and its land is intensively farmed. Soil
exhaustion and overgrazing are leading to desertification throughout the
country.
Forests cover about 18.2 percent (2005) of
Rwanda. The country’s forests are threatened by Rwandans’ reliance on
traditional fuels such as firewood for about 88 percent (1997) of their energy.
Rwanda has designated 7.6 percent (2007) of its land as protected area.
III | POPULATION |
The population of Rwanda is 78 percent
rural. Most of the people live in family groups dispersed throughout mountainous
regions. Three ethnic groups make up the population: the Hutu (about 85
percent); the Tutsi (14 percent), noted as cattle raisers; and the Twa (1
percent), a pygmoid people thought to be the original inhabitants of the region.
The official languages are Kinyarwanda (a Bantu language), French, and English.
About one-half of the population is Roman Catholic, and one-fifth is Protestant.
There are smaller groups of Muslims and people who follow traditional religions.
A | Population Characteristics |
The 2008 estimated population of Rwanda is
10,186,063. The population density is 408 persons per sq km (1,057 per sq mi),
making Rwanda one of the most densely populated countries in Africa. The civil
war that broke out in Rwanda in 1994 greatly disrupted the ethnic and geographic
distribution of the population and caused massive numbers of deaths. However,
the country’s density remains high.
B | Principal Cities |
Rwanda’s principal city is Kigali, the
capital, with a population (2003 estimate) of 656,000. Smaller urban centers
include Butare, in the south; Ruhengeri, in the north; and Kibungo, in the
southeast.
C | Education |
Schooling is free and, in principle,
compulsory for children aged 7 through 12, but only 72.7 percent of the adult
population is literate. In 2002–2003 virtually all primary school-aged children
were enrolled in school, but only 16 percent of the relevantly aged children
attended secondary or technical schools. The National University of Rwanda
(founded in 1963), in Butare, is the main institute of higher education.
D | Way of Life |
Most Rwandans live in round grass huts in
farms scattered over the country’s many hills. Family life is central to
society. Traditionally, the principal goal in life was parenthood. Women
generally dress in brightly colored wraps, men in white. However, many have
adopted Western clothes. The Rwandan diet consists mainly of sweet potatoes and
beans, with bananas, corn, peas, millet, and fruits added in season. Beer and
milk are important beverages. Protein deficiency is a serious problem. Cattle
are herded as signs of wealth and status rather than for their value as food.
Most Rwandans consume meat only about once or twice a month. Fish is eaten by
those living near lakes. Pastimes include poetry recitation, storytelling, and
mancala, a board game common throughout Africa. Soccer is also
popular.
E | Culture |
The richness of Rwandan culture is
apparent in the wide range of fine crafts. These include pottery, basketry,
painting, jewelry, wood carving, metalwork, and the making of gourd containers.
All ethnic groups cherish oral traditions of proverbs, songs, and chants. The
Tutsi, in particular, are known for their epic songs and dynastic poetry
chronicling the origins of the Tutsi ruling class. The verse, strongly flavored
with traditional mythology, has preserved Rwandan history orally through
generations of preliterate peoples. For many years, the tall, splendidly adorned
all-male Tutsi intore dancers, characterized by coordinated drilling
dances reflecting the warrior tradition of the Tutsi, and the
tambourinaires (drummers), were attractions for travelers. Rwanda has
produced a number of writers, including Alexis Kagame and J. Saverio Naigiziki,
both of whom have written primarily in French. French is the main literary
language in Rwanda because the educated elite of the country are educated
largely in French. Kagame’s and Naigiziki’s main themes include religion and the
conflict between tradition and modernity.
F | Social Problems |
Ethnic division and rivalry have been the
dominant features of Rwandan society since independence in 1962. These severe
problems are compounded further by poverty, overcrowding, environmental stress,
and one of the highest incidences of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS)
in the world.
IV | ECONOMY |
Rwanda has essentially a subsistence
economy. The gross domestic product (GDP) in 2006 was only $2.5 billion, or
$263.50 per person. The country suffers from soil erosion and occasional
droughts and subsequent famines, making Rwanda heavily dependent on foreign
assistance, mainly from Belgium.
A | Agriculture |
Most of the people of Rwanda depend on
subsistence agriculture, generally using a hoe as the main tool. The main cash
crops are tea and coffee. Food crops include bananas, sweet potatoes, cassava,
sorghum, beans, and rice. Cattle and goats are the main livestock raised.
Overgrazing and soil erosion are serious difficulties that affect the entire
country. Furthermore, Rwanda’s instability has caused disruptions in trade and a
decline in exports, leading even more people to revert to subsistence
agriculture.
B | Mining |
Minerals are Rwanda’s second most
important source of foreign exchange after agricultural products. However, due
to drops in world commodity prices, the mining of cassiterite was halted in
1986. The following year the country’s wolframite mines were also closed for the
same reason. By 1991 some cassiterite and other mineral ores were being exported
again, but mining in general was disrupted by the instability of the mid-1990s.
In the early 21st century, the main exploited minerals were columbite,
cassiterite, gold, and beryl.
C | Manufacturing |
Industries in Rwanda mainly revolve around
the processing of agricultural products, such as coffee, tea, and sugar. Other
important products include beer, soft drinks, cigarettes, and cement. The 1994
civil war brought Rwanda’s manufacturing sector to a standstill, but industry
began to pick up again in 1995.
D | Currency and Trade |
The currency is the Rwanda franc,
consisting of 100 centimes (552 Rwanda francs equal U.S.$1; 2006
average). The National Bank of Rwanda (1964) is the issuing bank. The chief
exports, coffee and tea, are shipped primarily to Germany and other European
countries. Motor vehicles, fuels, textiles, and machinery are imported, mainly
from Kenya, Belgium, the United States, Israel, and South Africa. Exports earned
$50 million in 2003, while imports cost $261 million. In 2007 Rwanda became a
member of the East African Community (EAC). Membership in the EAC customs union
was expected to help Rwanda increase trade and revenues with the other member
nations of the EAC, such as Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda.
E | Transportation and Communications |
Rwanda has a road network of 14,008 km
(8,704 mi), only about 19 percent of which is paved. The country has no
railroads but is linked by road to the Uganda-Kenya railroad system; most of
Rwanda’s international trade passes through the Kenyan port of Mombasa. The main
international airport is near Kigali. Two radio stations and one television
station operate from the capital.
V | GOVERNMENT |
The Rwandan government collapsed in the civil
war of 1994, and the country was taken over by the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan
Patriotic Front (RPF). The RPF banned political parties that were judged to have
participated in massacres during the civil war. As part of a planned five-year
transition to civilian rule, the RPF appointed a multiparty Transitional
National Assembly. In 1995 the assembly adopted a new constitution based on the
1991 constitution and peace agreements that were signed at the end of the civil
war.
The five-year transitional period stretched
to nine years before Rwanda adopted a new constitution in 2003. The 2003
constitution establishes the rights of its citizens, prohibits political parties
based on ethnic or racial groups, and resolves to fight the ideology of ethnic
hatred in Rwanda.
A | Executive |
The head of state of Rwanda is a president,
elected by universal suffrage to a seven-year term. The president may serve only
two terms. The president appoints a Cabinet to implement national policy and a
prime minister to oversee the Cabinet.
B | Legislature |
Legislative power is vested in a
parliament, consisting of two chambers: the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate.
Of the 80 members of the Chamber of Deputies, 53 are directly elected, 24 are
women elected by provincial councils, 2 are selected by the National Youth
Council, and 1 by the Federation of the Associations of the Disabled. All
deputies serve five-year terms. The Senate consists of 26 members elected or
appointed for an eight-year term: 12 elected by local councils, 8 appointed by
the president, and 6 selected by various other groups. At least 30 percent of
the senators must be women.
C | Judiciary |
Rwanda’s judicial system is based on
Belgian and German codes and traditional local law. The highest court is the
Supreme Court, whose 14 judges are appointed for life by the Senate. The High
Court of the Republic is subordinate to the Supreme Court, and a lesser court is
located in each of the country’s local government units. Judges are appointed
for life. The 2003 constitution also outlines the creation of a specialized
branch of local courts called Gacaca Courts, which are traditional judicial
bodies overseen by village elders. Gacaca Courts were created to try the tens of
thousands of Rwandans who were accused of participating in the massacres of the
early 1990s.
D | Local Government |
For administrative purposes, Rwanda is
divided into 5 provinces: North, South, East, West, and Kigali. Provinces are
subdivided into districts.
E | Health and Welfare |
A government-assisted program provides
community centers and health services. Trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness),
malaria, schistosomiasis, and sexually transmitted infections are all severe
medical problems in Rwanda. However, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS)
is by far the most serious health issue. In 2005, an estimated 160,000 Rwandans
had AIDS.
VI | HISTORY |
The first known inhabitants of Rwanda were
the Twa. The Hutu, probably from the Congo Basin, were well established by the
15th century, when the Tutsi came down from the north and conquered the area.
The Tutsi kings, or mwamis, became the absolute monarchs of the region.
Their rule was enforced by chiefs and subchiefs, who each ruled an
umusozi, a fiefdom that consisted of a single hill. Political and
economic relations were based on an unequal feudal relationship, known as the
ubuhake system, in which the Hutu became a caste of serfs forced into
subjugation and economic dependency by the Tutsi. This caste system was rigidly
upheld, and intermarriage was almost nonexistent. A similar feudal system was
dominant in Burundi.
A | Foreign Rule |
In 1858 John Hanning Speke was the first
European to visit the area. German explorers arrived in the 1880s, and Roman
Catholic clergy established missions in the area. Later in the decade Rwanda
(then called Ruanda) and Burundi (then called Urundi) were incorporated into
German East Africa. The indigenous rulers maintained good relations with the
Germans, and later, with the Belgians, who occupied the country during World War
I (1914-1918). After the war the area was mandated to Belgium by the League of
Nations and became known as the Territory of Ruanda-Urundi. Following World War
II (1939-1945) it became a United Nations (UN) trust territory. The Belgians
continued previous policies of supporting education by missionaries and of
ruling through the Tutsi chiefs. However, they also forced the Tutsi to phase
out the ubuhake system by 1958.
As political consciousness increased among
Africans after World War II, the Hutu grew more vocal in protesting the
political and social inequalities in Rwanda. In 1959 the antagonism between
Tutsi and Hutu erupted into violence; the next year the Tutsi king fled the
country, and an exodus of some 200,000 Tutsi followed. A republic was
established in January 1961. In elections held the following September, the
Hutu-dominated Parmehutu Party won a large majority of the seats in the National
Assembly, and a 4-1 majority voted against the return of the king.
B | Independence |
At the insistence of the United Nations
trusteeship council, Belgium granted Rwanda independence on July 1, 1962, with
Grégoire Kayibanda, leader of the Parmehutu (now renamed the Democratic
Republican Movement; MDR), as president. The MDR won the elections in 1965 and
1969.
In 1963 some exiled Tutsi returned to
Rwanda as a rebel army. Although unsuccessful, the takeover attempt prompted a
large-scale massacre of Tutsi by the Hutu, followed by periodic ethnic violence.
At the same time thousands of Hutu victimized in Burundi took refuge in Rwanda.
In July 1973 the defense minister, General Juvénal Habyarimana, led a bloodless
coup that ousted Kayibanda. Habyarimana, a Hutu from the north, charged that
Kayibanda favored southern Hutu and was trying to monopolize power. Both
parliament and the MDR were suspended after the coup. Political activities
resumed in 1975 with the formation of a new ruling party called the National
Revolutionary Movement for Development (NRMD). In 1978 a new constitution was
approved, and President Habyarimana was confirmed in office for another five
years. After thwarting a coup attempt in 1980, he was reelected without
opposition in 1983 and again in 1988. In 1990, Belgium and several Central
African nations sent troops to Rwanda to oppose an uprising by the Tutsi-backed
Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a movement of Tutsi refugees and moderate Hutu,
invading from Uganda. A new constitution authorizing the establishment of a
multiparty democracy became law in 1991, and a prime minister was appointed to
organize a transitional government in preparation for multiparty elections in
1995.
C | Civil War |
In April 1994, shortly after concluding
peace negotiations with the RPF that called for UN peacekeeping forces to be
stationed in Rwanda, President Habyarimana and Burundian president Cyprien
Ntaryamira were killed when their plane was shot down near Kigali.
Responsibility for the attack has not been established. Habyarimana’s death
provoked a wave of ethnic violence, prompting UN Secretary General Boutros
Boutros-Ghali to accuse the Hutu-dominated Rwandan Army of genocide against the
Tutsi. At the height of the violence, the UN forces, lacking a mandate to
protect civilians, abandoned Kigali. Over the next few months, it is estimated
that between 500,000 and 1 million Rwandans, mostly Tutsi, were massacred. The
RPF army pushed toward Kigali, and a civil war ensued. In June the French
government sent 2,500 troops to Rwanda to establish a safe area in the
southwestern part of the country. But attempts to mediate a cease-fire failed as
the RPF mounted a successful final assault.
After capturing the capital of Kigali, RPF
troops began to drive the Rwandan Army and Hutu civilians northwest, toward the
border with Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Retaliatory
violence by Tutsi claimed several thousand lives, including that of the Roman
Catholic archbishop of Kigali. By mid-July, an estimated 1.2 million Rwandans
had fled the advancing RPF army across the border and into Zaire, forming
enormous refugee camps around the city of Goma. By early August, an estimated
one-quarter of the prewar population of Rwanda had either died or fled the
country. International relief efforts were mobilized to care for the refugees,
but available supplies were inadequate and outbreaks of disease were widespread.
In the midst of the squalor of the camps, more than 20,000 refugees died in a
cholera epidemic.
A cease-fire was declared in July, and an
RPF-backed government was established with Pasteur Bizimungu, a moderate Hutu,
as president. The RPF made a point of including other groups in the government.
Many Tutsi refugees began to return to Rwanda, including refugees who had fled
in the 1960s, but the repatriation of Hutu refugees was slower, as many feared
reprisals.
Former United States president Jimmy
Carter sponsored a summit in Cairo, Egypt, in November 1995, on the issue of
Rwandan refugees. The summit was attended by the presidents of Burundi, Rwanda,
Uganda, and Zaire, and a representative from Tanzania. An agreement was reached
to work to return refugees to Rwanda. In the next months refugees began
returning in large numbers from Burundi and Tanzania, but few returned from
Zaire. The UN mission in Rwanda ended in March 1996.
D | Cross-Border Unrest |
Throughout 1996 more than 1 million
Rwandan refugees, most of them Hutu, remained in camps in Zaire. The civil war
that erupted in eastern Zaire in late 1996 revealed that these camps contained
small percentages of armed Hutu militias. These Hutu, likely the same who led or
participated in the 1994 massacres of Tutsi, used the huge refugee camps as
places of refuge while they organized raids into Rwanda with the goal of
overthrowing the RPF government. The Hutu refugees remained in the camps either
out of fear of Tutsi retribution in Rwanda or because they were held against
their will by the militias. The militias clashed with the largely Tutsi eastern
Zairian rebels around Lake Kivu, often very close to the border between Rwanda
and Zaire. The Hutu militias were aided by the Zairian government, the Tutsi
rebels in Zaire, by the Rwandan government. Cross-border artillery shelling was
reported near Gisenyi, north of Lake Kivu.
In October and November 1996 the Tutsi
rebels successfully routed Hutu militias in several huge refugee camps near the
border. Some 800,000 Rwandans poured home, but several hundred thousand remained
in Zaire. As the civil war spread and the rebels gained territory, the Rwandan
refugees were forced west, deeper into the jungles of Zaire. Despite
international outcry over their plight, the constantly moving refugees remained
largely beyond the reach of aid workers. By the end of Zaire’s civil war in May,
tens of thousands of Rwandan refugees had been killed in the fighting, or had
died of disease or starvation.
E | Search for Justice |
The UN voted in late 1994 to establish the
International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda to try the organizers of the
massacres (see War Crimes Trials). The tribunal opened in Arusha,
Tanzania, in 1996. Trials began in early 1997, but the UN tribunal was
criticized for mismanagement, poor organization, and the slow pace of the
trials. The RPF government began its own trials of midlevel massacre organizers
in 1996. In 2002 the tens of thousands of Rwandans accused of participating in
the actual killings began to be tried in traditional local courts called Gacaca
Courts.
In March 2000 Bizimungu resigned the
presidency after clashing with the RPF over the composition of a new Cabinet. He
accused parliament of targeting Hutu politicians in anticorruption
investigations. Vice president and defense minister Paul Kagame succeeded
Bizimungu. Kagame, the former head of the RPF rebels, had long been considered
Rwanda’s real political leader. Kagame became the first Tutsi president since
the nation’s independence. Following the adoption of a new constitution, Kagame
won an August 2003 multiparty presidential election.
No comments:
Post a Comment