The whole of central Africa is now under the threat of war. What are the reasons for the genocidal enmity between Hutu and Tutsi? The emeritus professor of theology at Leeds University, who worked in Uganda for a number of years, expounds the deep-seated origins of the conflict. As the world looks on, bemused, at an ever vaster tragedy unfolding in and around Rwanda, apparently determined on one thing only ? to do nothing ? I ask myself again how it is that so huge a disaster could be allowed to develop, in a quite predictable way, and why it is that nobody, from the Secretary-General of the United Nations down, shows the slightest interest in bringing it to an end. Part of the answer undoubtedly lies in the colossal ignorance of most people as to the causes and course of the tragedy.

It is agreed that in both Rwanda and Burundi the balance of population between the two ethnic groups was, before the main recent conflicts began, approximately 85 per cent Hutu and 14 per cent Tutsi. In pre-colonial times the kings and upper class of both countries were Tutsi, the ordinary population Hutu.

The Tutsi were cattle people who entered this part of Africa and settled some 500 years ago. In African terms there was nothing unusual in that. Many tribal societies are a mix created by waves of incomers who in a few generations fuse with the inhabitants into an amalgam, sharing a single language and with few, if any, surviving marks of differentiation between the groups. In much the same way in England, a fairly small group of Normans conquered the country in 1066, but were then quickly merged within a single English nation.

What was unusual in Rwanda and Burundi was that the fusion was never fully achieved, even across several centuries. While the Tutsi adopted the Hutu language and intermarried extensively so that many people could hardly have said to which group they belonged, nevertheless a conscious distinction did, unfortunately, remain. Pure Tutsi were far taller than the Hutu, they remained cattle people and, to some extent, differed in their diet. By contrast, while other Tutsi-type kingdoms were established in the area of Africa?s great lakes, in almost all of them any sense of group diversity within a specific society disappeared.

The one important exception for our purpose here ? as will become clear later ? was Ankole in western Uganda, where the ruling class of pastoral Bahima has continued to be distinguished from the mass of agriculturalist Bairu.

In the early colonial period, Rwanda and Burundi were incorporated into German East Africa; then, after the First World War, they were handed over as mandated territories to be governed by Belgium, alongside its vast colony of the Congo (now Zaire). The colonial regime recognised, and worked through, the monarchies in the two countries and there can be little doubt that the imposition of a European administrative system, offering perks to a privileged elite, hardened the sense of difference between Tutsi and Hutu, particularly in Rwanda. It gave the impression that the Belgians favoured the Tutsi against the Hutu.

At the same time, a sustained missionary campaign, mostly by White Fathers, produced in the 1930s a movement of mass conversion, described by excited missionaries as a tornado. Rwanda and Burundi were regularly cited as the pearl of the missions. In this part of Africa there were almost no Muslims. While there are significant Anglican and Protestant Churches, the majority of the population came to be classified as Catholic; more than 60 per cent in each country. These are, nominally, Africa?s most Catholic countries as well as its most genocidal.

When in the 1950s independence and democratisation were in the air, many Catholic missionaries, especially Archbishop Perraudin in Rwanda, became alarmed at the extent to which the Tutsi minority had been favoured. They became convinced that the balance needed to be altered for the benefit of the poor majority, but the attempt to help the Hutu forward was inevitably seen as an attack on the rights of the Tutsi.

In 1959 this encouragement of Hutu advancement resulted in a revolution in Rwanda, the overthrow of the Tutsi king and the establishment of a Hutu-dominated government led by Gregoire Kayibanda, a former Catholic Action leader. In Burundi, however, there was less inter-ethnic tension, and no revolution. The Tutsi retained elective control there, but it looked as if there might over the years be a gradual disappearance of any ethnic divide. Hence, in 1962, Burundi came to independence under a Tutsi-led government (though more than one of its early prime ministers was a Hutu); Rwanda under a Hutu one.

Many thousands of Tutsi had fled Rwanda into exile, particularly to western Uganda, where they found a generally friendly base in which they could maintain their collective identity and organise a counter-attack. There were two reasons for the support they received in Uganda. First, part of Uganda along the Rwanda border in the area of Mutolere was ethnically Tutsi. Secondly, the similarity of society, especially that of Ankole, made it a sympathetic place for Tutsi refugees. The Bahima of Ankole were natural supporters of the Tutsi of Rwanda.

Between 1962 and the late 1980s, there were periods when the Rwandan government made real efforts to be fair to the Tutsi minority; there were other periods, both under Gregoire Kayibanda and Major-General Habyarimana, who overthrew him in a coup in 1973, in which the Tutsi were largely excluded from any position of importance.

The ever-growing population of Rwanda (more than 7 million in 10,000 square miles: compare Uganda?s 19 million in ten times that space), a failing economy and poverty exceptional even by African standards, made it almost inevitable that Hutu rulers would discriminate against a minority which could easily be portrayed as an enemy, even though many Tutsi and Hutu continued to live amicably together, worshipping in the same churches.

Hostility to the Tutsi was next to inevitable for two further reasons. The first was what was happening in neighbouring Burundi. There, the early post-independence good relations between Tutsi and Hutu ended when it became clear that a democratic system would result in the elimination of Tutsi dominance. The general election of 1965 in which 80 per cent of the seats were won by Hutu was followed by their bloody repression and the execution of most of their more prominent leaders. That in turn led to a sudden uprising of Hutu peasantry in 1972, assisted by a refugee invasion across the Tanzanian border of Hutu who had fled the country in 1965.

This revolt quickly ended in disaster, and was followed by the wholesale massacre of Hutu, in which about 200,000 people were exterminated, including everyone with education, among them 40 to 50 per cent of all pupils in secondary schools. As I wrote in my 1979 History of African Christianity 1950-1975, it was probably the only atrocity in recent African history which can without exaggeration be described as genocidal. The outside world did precisely nothing, and the Hutu in Rwanda drew their conclusions. In Burundi, Tutsi domination has since remained essentially unchanged.

The second reason why Tutsi and Hutu could never settle down inside Rwanda was that the Tutsi refugees in western Uganda regularly invaded the country. While these invasions were for years somewhat ineffective, they destabilised ethnic relationships within Rwanda and led to further Tutsi waves of refugees fleeing the country as the Hutu reacted against people perceived as supporters of the invaders.

What altered this pattern, decisively and disastrously, was the triumph within Uganda of the anti-Amin resistance movement led by Yoweri Museveni, who came to power in January 1986. Museveni?s government has unquestionably brought about much improvement, but for Rwanda it has led to disaster. Museveni?s principal area of support was always in western Uganda, in Ankole above all, home to many Tutsi. They were able to use their positions in the army, and the weapons available to them, to mount a far more formidable invasion of northern Rwanda than had ever been possible before. They were helped in this by many powerful Ugandans with Tutsi connections, and especially by the Catholic Bishop of Kabale, himself a Tutsi, who has since been removed by Rome.

In October 1990, a major invasion of Rwanda began from the Tutsi base in western Uganda. Better armed and more experienced than the Rwandan army, the exiles, or the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) as they called themselves, steadily advanced, producing violent but ineffective reactions on the part of the Hutu government, including massacres of ordinary Tutsi already in early 1991.

The terrible climax came in 1994. When it seemed clear that the RPF could not be driven back, and when the government of Rwanda had practically fallen to pieces after the President was killed in an air crash, a desperate rump chose this moment to launch its own genocide of everyone who remained in areas under its control, with the aim of ending the Tutsi problem once and for all. The massacres which followed included many Hutu. While the total number of the slain can hardly have come to the million now regularly claimed, since that would mean the elimination of almost all the Tutsi in Rwanda, the figure was certainly very high. Those killed, often horribly, may well have been more numerous than the Hutu massacred in Burundi in 1972. The killings were certainly more indiscriminate.

Instead of providing a final solution, the genocide led to the collapse of Hutu rule and the seizure of power by the RPF, which could now claim a mantle of righteousness and included, at least at first, a number of Hutu disgusted with the preceding government. For the mass of Hutu, however, it meant the return of minority Tutsi rule for the first time in nearly 40 years, ensuring that both Rwanda and Burundi are now controlled by ethnic groups smaller in proportion to their population than the former white rulers of South Africa.

Again and again commentators in the media speak of the Rwandan tragedy as beginning with the genocide of 1994. This is simply not so. The final wave of the tragedy began no later than the well-armed RPF invasion of the country in 1990, but behind that lie a series of earlier invasions, the Tutsi genocide of Burundi Hutu in 1972 and, most basic of all, the obstinate determination of an ethnic group, comprising far less than 20 per cent of the population, to maintain its traditional rule over both countries. There would seem to be no way to lasting peace which does not break that determination by introducing a long period of external supervision, tied to economic aid, to ensure ethnically balanced government.

The disaster is now rapidly spreading still further. Zaire was the only place to which most Rwandan Hutu could flee, and the remains of their army have used the refugee camps to continue their war against the RPF. Zaire is a vast country and one of the worst governed in Africa. Its ruler, Mobutu, has remained in power for more than 30 years, sucking from its ruined economy an immense private fortune, largely because he has remained the choice of the American government. He is now old, ill and out of the country.

For many years local government has almost entirely broken down in the eastern part of Zaire. Here too, at least close to the borders of Rwanda and Burundi, dwells a Tutsi minority which now appears to have thrown in its hand with the Tutsi government of Rwanda in an attempt to force the Hutu refugees either to return to Rwanda, where they can be effectively controlled, or to move further into the interior of Zaire. The effect may well be either a revolution in Zaire or even a claim to independence on the part of its eastern provinces, though they are in no state to pursue such a claim.

Nor is the Zairean army in any condition to rebut a Rwandan invasion. In the short run, the RPF, backed by Museveni, may well provide the strongest force in the area. In the longer run, numbers stand against it. There is no likelihood that the Hutu will settle down contentedly under Tutsi rule and little that Zaire will accept being humiliated by Rwanda. Beyond hundreds of thousands of additional deaths, the latest development is likely simply to harden a Zairean-Hutu alliance, which is bound to seek a bloody comeback unless the international community can enforce a major shift in government in all three countries.

Such a shift is highly unlikely to work without a massive economic programme planned to make life tolerable in these heavily overpopulated lands ? some of the only ones in Africa which can genuinely be so described.

If that is not done, anarchy is likely to remain and, indeed, to spread more widely. It will then produce a vast area of tyranny, endemic war and sheer barbarism, worse than anything ever seen in Africa in the past, in either colonial or pre-colonial times.

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