Background
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Date
Fall 2022
Summary
On August 13th 2004, 166 people were killed and 106 were wounded at the UN’s Gatumba refugee camp in Burundi. Nearly all the victims were members of the Banyamulenge community, a Congolese Tutsi ethnic group who were deliberately targeted in the attack. The massacre was carried out by the Forces Nationales pour la Liberation (FNL), a Hutu supremacist rebel group fighting in Burundi’s civil war. Understanding the Gatumba Massacre requires understanding what forced those Banyamulenge refugees to flee their homes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and why the FNL targeted them. This background essay addresses the context historical and events that led to the Gatumba Massacre.
This essay is co-authored by Christopher P. Davey, Jean Paul Iranzi, Ezra Schrader, and Fidele Sebahizi.
Keywords
oral history, Gatumba, Burundi, refugees, massacres, Africa
Recommended Citation
Davey, Christopher; Schrader, Ezra; Sebahizi, Fidele; and Iranzi, Jean Paul, "Gatumba Massacre, Background Essay" (2022). Background. 1.
https://commons.clarku.edu/gatumba_background/1
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
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