Hutus

The deliberately paced, quietly immersive "Kinyarwanda" tells a tangle of stories set in and around 1994's Rwandan genocide, a roughly 100-day nightmare that pit that country's Hutu majority against its Tutsi minority, resulting in as many as a million violent deaths. This ambitious first feature film about the period made entirely by Rwandans (shot in a remarkable 16 days), while hardly an all-inclusive look at this complex conflict, paints a heartfelt, fairly restrained picture of a nation under siege.

The title of the ensemble drama "Answers to Nothing" is certainly truth in advertising. Though this "Crash"-lite intersection of L.A. stories, directed by Matthew Leutwyler from a script he co-wrote with Gillian Vigman, effectively portrays human loneliness and alienation, there's a lack of real conclusiveness to many of the film's characters and situations. The crisscross of Angelenos includes Ryan (Dane Cook), a moody shrink cheating on his fertility-challenged, lawyer wife (Elizabeth Mitchell)

Attempting to avoid being executed, about 2,000 prisoners have confessed to taking part in the Hutu-orchestrated slaughter of more than 800,000 people, the Justice Ministry said. On April 24, firing squads executed 22 Rwandans, among the first convicted of genocide in the massacre of minority Tutsis and a smaller number of moderate Hutus. Under the law, defendants who confess are eligible for reduced sentences.

The deliberately paced, quietly immersive "Kinyarwanda" tells a tangle of stories set in and around 1994's Rwandan genocide, a roughly 100-day nightmare that pit that country's Hutu majority against its Tutsi minority, resulting in as many as a million violent deaths. This ambitious first feature film about the period made entirely by Rwandans (shot in a remarkable 16 days), while hardly an all-inclusive look at this complex conflict, paints a heartfelt, fairly restrained picture of a nation under siege.

The mysterious flight of more than 85,000 Rwandan refugees into the Zairian rain forest began when machete-wielding villagers stormed their camps Monday, followed the next morning by uniformed troops opening fire without warning, according to accounts given to journalists Saturday. For a second straight day, international aid workers failed to find the main body of ethnic Hutu refugees despite a series of aerial searches.

Her first son was born 10 years ago on a Bujumbura street while fighting raged. She named him Nzikobanyanka, or "I know they hate us." Two successive sons were also christened with names reflecting weariness with Burundi's long war: Tugiramahoro ("Let's have peace") and Nduwimana ("I'm in God's hands"). But when the fighting stopped and Daphrose Miburu's youngest son was born a year ago, the 35-year-old mother chose something uplifting: Furaha -- "Happiness." The history of this battered nation can be told through names like these, given to reflect the world as parents see it at the time.

Hutu President Pasteur Bizimungu, in power since the end of Rwanda's 1994 genocide, resigned Thursday after falling out with leading members of his Tutsi-dominated ruling party. Political observers said Bizimungu had clashed with colleagues in the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front, or RPF, over the makeup of a new Cabinet that was announced Sunday.

A Rwandan court jailed former Justice Minister Agnes Ntamabyariro for life after finding her guilty of incitement during the country's 1994 genocide. Ntamabyariro is the first senior former government official to be tried by authorities in Kigali, the capital, over the killing of 800,000 minority ethnic Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus. "She has been individually implicated in those crimes," Augustine Nkusi, Rwanda's national prosecutor, told reporters. Most high-profile suspects in the slaughter have been prosecuted by the United Nations' International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, based in the northern Tanzanian town of Arusha.

Rwanda announced the arrest of a journalist who allegedly led a radio hate campaign that helped fuel the 1994 genocide in which an estimated 800,000 people were slaughtered. "Valerie Bemeriki was arrested in northwest Rwanda late last week. She will be prosecuted for genocide and crimes against humanity," Justice Minister Jean de Dieu Mucyo said.

Two women stand atop a hill looking out over the lush banana groves blanketing the slopes in green, but their thoughts are on their homeland's hard past, not its beauty. One, a Tutsi, insists she is not afraid to be living among the families of Hutu men who hacked her husband and children to death. But Speciosa Mukasine's quaking hands and darting eyes belie her words. Her Hutu neighbor is afraid too.

Issa Munyangaju is willing to tell his story, but he requires a beer. He sips a Primus in a dim concrete bar and talks about the houseboy he shot during the genocide. They were friends, he says, until they came to a roadblock manned by Hutu militiamen. They gave Munyangaju, also Hutu, a gun. They told him he would be killed if he didn't execute his friend, whose ethnic group, the Tutsis, had been targeted for extermination. "I followed their orders," Munyangaju, 44, says. He put a bullet in the young man's stomach, and was within earshot when another shot finished him off. While he was in prison, government officials visited to tout the benefits of confessing at a type of trial known as gacaca (pronounced ga-CHA-cha)

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Wednesday pressed Rwanda to keep its forces serving on peacekeeping missions despite its anger over a draft report accusing the African nation's troops of atrocities and possible genocide in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The government of Rwandan President Paul Kagame has threatened to pull 3,500 troops from U.N. operations in the Darfur region of Sudan because of its outrage over the world body's draft report, which was leaked recently to the French newspaper Le Monde.

A Rwandan court jailed former Justice Minister Agnes Ntamabyariro for life after finding her guilty of incitement during the country's 1994 genocide. Ntamabyariro is the first senior former government official to be tried by authorities in Kigali, the capital, over the killing of 800,000 minority ethnic Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus. "She has been individually implicated in those crimes," Augustine Nkusi, Rwanda's national prosecutor, told reporters. Most high-profile suspects in the slaughter have been prosecuted by the United Nations' International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, based in the northern Tanzanian town of Arusha.

Her first son was born 10 years ago on a Bujumbura street while fighting raged. She named him Nzikobanyanka, or "I know they hate us." Two successive sons were also christened with names reflecting weariness with Burundi's long war: Tugiramahoro ("Let's have peace") and Nduwimana ("I'm in God's hands"). But when the fighting stopped and Daphrose Miburu's youngest son was born a year ago, the 35-year-old mother chose something uplifting: Furaha -- "Happiness." The history of this battered nation can be told through names like these, given to reflect the world as parents see it at the time.

Burundians voted overwhelmingly to adopt a power-sharing constitution guaranteeing majority rule and minority rights in the Central African country, officials said. Paul Ngarambe, electoral commission chief, said 90% of voters turned out Monday and more than 91% of them approved the new constitution, which reserves 60% of government and parliament seats for Hutus and 40% for Tutsis.

Nations around the world solemnly noted the 10th anniversary this spring of the Rwandan genocide in which some 800,000 people were slaughtered. In the midst of the commemorations, the Sudanese government was sponsoring and taking part in the killing of tens of thousands of its own citizens in its Darfur region. Sudan is not the only country in the area plagued by civil war.

The Rwandan army has launched major operations against Hutu militants it says are responsible for recent massacres and assassinations of local officials, foreign aid workers and survivors of previous genocide, officials said Sunday.

She grew up in a house hidden by broad-leaf banana trees. She was a Hutu, but it didn't mean much to her. Who was what in Rwanda's ethnic mix was mainly grist for teasing at her Roman Catholic boarding school. "We didn't think much about it," she says. "It was something we joked about--taunting each other, 'Hutu nose,' 'Tutsi nose,' stuff like that."

Evariste Ahimana can't even utter the word "one" to tell how many people he killed in Rwanda's genocide. He just holds up a finger to represent what he did -- clubbing a neighbor named Augustin Murinda, whom he liked and often drank with -- at the behest of strangers from the next village. Since returning to this village after his release from prison last year, Ahimana has walked past the house of his victim's brother every week as he climbed the hill to the church.

Beset by eight years of ethnic violence, Burundians today attempt to write a new chapter in their bloody history by ushering in a government that will eventually transfer power to the Hutu majority. During the last week, 700 South African soldiers have massed in Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi, to protect about 150 exiled political leaders returning to participate in a three-year transition to democracy.