Ruanda st ein dicht bevölkerter Binnenstaat in Ostafrika. Er grenzt an Burundi, die Demokratische Republik Kongo, Uganda und Tansania. Wegen seiner in weiten Teilen hügeligen Landschaft wird es auch „Land der tausend Hügel“ genannt. Auf seinem Staatsgebiet verläuft die afrikanische Hauptwasserscheide zwischen den Einzugsgebieten des Nil und des Kongo. Von 1884 bis 1916 war Ruanda eine deutsche Kolonie, 1962 erhielt es seine Unabhängigkeit von der UNO-Mandatsmacht Belgien.
Nicht zuletzt wegen der Konflikte zwischen den Volksgruppen der Hutu und Tutsi – die im Völkermord an den Tutsi 1994 gipfelten – zählt das Land zu den ärmsten in Afrika, obgleich in den letzten Jahren Fortschritte zu verzeichnen waren.
CIA Background-Info
In 1959, three years before independence from Belgium, the majority ethnic group, the Hutus, overthrew the ruling Tutsi king. Over the next several years, thousands of Tutsis were killed, and some 150,000 driven into exile in neighboring countries. The children of these exiles later formed a rebel group, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), and began a civil war in 1990. The war, along with several political and economic upheavals, exacerbated ethnic tensions, culminating in April 1994 in the genocide of roughly 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The Tutsi rebels defeated the Hutu regime and ended the killing in July 1994, but approximately 2 million Hutu refugees - many fearing Tutsi retribution - fled to neighboring Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zaire. Since then, most of the refugees have returned to Rwanda, but several thousand remained in the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC; the former Zaire) and formed an extremist insurgency bent on retaking Rwanda, much as the RPF tried in 1990. Rwanda held its first local elections in 1999 and its first post-genocide presidential and legislative elections in 2003. Rwanda in 2009 staged a joint military operation with the Congolese Army in DRC to rout out the Hutu extremist insurgency there and Kigali and Kinshasa restored diplomatic relations. Rwanda also joined the Commonwealth in late 2009.
