I. The Conflict in Africa
a. Congo and the nine nations around it sit on the richest patch on the planet
i. Now one of the biggest battlefields in African history. (Kabila assassination)
ii. Africa's First World War.
iii. Conflicts are a series of related wars fuelled by ethnic conflict. At the heart of this war is Ethnic conflict: a cause of wars around the world.
iv. Beginning place is the Rwandan genocide of 1994, where a violent clash between Hutu and Tutsi has been simmering since even before Belgium granted independence to Rwanda in 1962 .
v. In 1994, Hutu extremists massacred 500,000 Tutsi in Rwanda, leading hundreds of thousands of Hutu to flee into neighboring Congo (then Zaire)
vi. What we're going to do today is examine this conflict in order to generate a model for understanding ethnic conflict.
II. Two explanations for ethnic conflict
a. The Ancient Hostilities model
i. Why this an insufficient explanation
b. The pressure cooker model
i. Why this is an insufficient explanation
c. We need two more elements in our understanding:
i. We need to know what ethnicity is
ii. We need to know more about how ethnic groups were created in Rwanda's history, and why ethnicity has become so significant.
III. What is ethnicity?
a. definition
b. What happened in Rwanda
i. There were people called Tutsi and Hutu before colonialism, but these were CLASS DIVISIONS in one society.
ii. Colonialism and Tribalism
IV. History of Conflict
a. Decolonization
b. Genocide
V. Legacies of Conflict
a. West did not prevent another genocide.
b. Conflict has spread, now involving Hutu and Tutsi fighting in Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, and sucking in weapons and training and militias from Zimbabwe, Namibia, etc.