ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Rwanda's efforts to resolve the ethnic conflict that has marred the country since independence and reached its climax during the 1994 genocide. The decision to suppress ethnicity understood in light of pre-conflict political history and experience of genocide. The Hutu-Tutsi antagonism that increased as a result of this policy has been a source of violent conflict and genocide in Rwanda from the colonial era and until today. In 1987, RANU's veterans from the Ugandan conflict renamed their party the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and decided to start preparing a return to Rwanda to topple the Habyarimana regime. In the coalition government prior to the Arusha Agreement, the different parties included in the governments pursued opposite policies and the members of the president's party undermined its coalition partner's efforts for peace. In Rwanda, the post-conflict regime has attempted to resolve the ethnic conflict by an insistence on the formal equality of all individuals and the rejection of ethnicity.
