Tatiana Rusesabagina all of her family's identification cards to say that they were Hutu; however, the militia had other ways of tracking who was who. Two of her siblings survived the genocide. Tatiana's family was targeted specifically because they were Tutsi, which the Hutu people were killing in mass in an attempt to make the Tutsi extinct. The conflict between these two ethnic groups goes back centuries in Rwanda. Paul's family was of mixed Hutu and Tutsi which meant he was not as much of a target as a full blood Tutsi. Paul was initially at the hotel himself, and later had
History of Burundi that provided for a president, non-ethnic government, and a parliament. Burundi's first Hutu president, Melchior Ndadaye, of the Hutu-dominated Front for Democracy in Burundi (FRODEBU) Party, was elected in 1993. Ndadaye was assassinated three months later, in October 1993, by Tutsi army extremists. The country’s situation rapidly declined as Hutu peasants began to rise up and massacre Tutsi. In acts of brutal retribution, the Tutsi army proceeded to round up thousands of Hutu and kill them. The Rwandan Genocide in 1994, sparked by the killing of Ndadaye’s successor Cyprien Ntaryamira, further aggravated the conflict in Burundi by sparking additional massacres