In November 1959 an attack on a Hutu sub-chief triggered a wave of arson and killing directed at Tutsi households across Rwanda; the Belgian administration, under Colonel Guy Logiest, replaced most Tutsi chiefs with Hutu appointees rather than restoring the previous order. Communal elections in 1960 and the 1961 referendum ended the monarchy, and successive waves of violence pushed Tutsi families into Uganda, Burundi, Tanganyika and the Congo. In December 1963 raids by exile fighters (the inyenzi) from Burundi were met by reprisals inside Rwanda, most severely in Gikongoro prefecture, where an estimated 10,000 or more Tutsi were killed; Bertrand Russell and some contemporary observers called it genocide, and the events were reported to the UN. Those who remained were subject to ethnic quotas, and the refugee population that accumulated abroad, denied return for three decades, produced the Rwandan Patriotic Front that invaded in 1990. The 1959-64 displacement is thus the beginning of the sequence that the atlas already records at 1990 and 1994.
Hutu political movements, backed by the Belgian trusteeship administration, drove Tutsi chiefs and families out of Rwanda and killed thousands after 1963 raids
Belgian administrative counts of the trusteeship territory recorded Tutsi at about 16-17 per cent of a population of roughly 2.6 million, or some 400,000-450,000 people. The ethnic categories were fixed by the Belgian identity-card system of 1933, which itself hardened what had been fluid social categories, and the counts should be read in that light.
The lower figure reflects the commonly cited toll for the 1963-64 Gikongoro reprisals (around 10,000-14,000) plus several hundred to a few thousand killed in 1959-62. The upper end reflects higher contemporary estimates, including those of exile organisations. No systematic count was made.
Belgian trusteeship reports, UN Trusteeship Council records and contemporary press documented house-burning, killings and the refusal of return to those who fled.
Rwanda, Burundi