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
Rwandan genocide own, but by this stage the Hutu had full backing from the Belgian administration who wanted to overturn the Tutsi domination. In early 1960, the Belgians replaced most Tutsi chiefs with Hutu and organised mid-year commune elections which returned an overwhelming Hutu majority. The king was deposed, a Hutu dominated republic created, and the country became independent in 1962. As the revolution progressed, Tutsi began leaving the country to escape the Hutu purges, settling in the four neighbouring countries: Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania and Zaire. These exiles, unlike the Banyarwanda who migrated during the pre-colonial and colonial era, were regarded as