Interahamwe in the context of "Impuzamugambi"

The Great Lakes refugee crisis is the common name for the situation beginning with the exodus in April 1994 of over two million Rwandans to neighboring countries of the Great Lakes region of Africa in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. Many of the refugees were Hutu fleeing the predominantly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which had gained control of the country at the end of the genocide. However, the humanitarian relief effort was vastly compromised by the presence among the refugees of many of the Interahamwe and government officials who carried out the genocide, who used the refugee camps as bases to launch attacks against the new government led by Paul Kagame. The camps in Zaire became particularly politicized and militarized. The knowledge that humanitarian aid was being diverted to further the aims of the genocidaires led many humanitarian organizations to withdraw their assistance. The conflict escalated until the start of the First Congo War in 1996, when RPF-supported rebels invaded Zaire and sought to repatriate the refugees. The conflict escalated again with the start of the Second Congo War, also called Africa's World War or the Great War of Africa, that began in 1998 when the Congolese president Laurent-Désiré Kabila turned against his former allies from Rwanda and Uganda. The conflict continues with the Kivu conflict that started in 2004 with the start of the M23 rebellion that started in 2012.

Hutu Power, or Hutu Supremacy, is an ethnic supremacist ideology that asserts the ethnic superiority of Hutu, often in the context of being superior to Tutsi and Twa, and therefore, they are entitled to dominate and murder these two groups and other minorities. Espoused by Hutu extremists, widespread support for the ideology led to the 1994 Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi, the moderate Hutu who opposed the killings, and the Twa, who were considered traitors. Hutu Power political parties and movements included the Akazu, the Parmehutu, the Coalition for the Defence of the Republic and its Impuzamugambi militia, and the governing National Republican Movement for Democracy and Development and its Interahamwe militia. Hutu supremacy is most common in Rwanda and Burundi, where Hutu comprise most of the population. Due to its sheer destructiveness, the ideology has been compared to Nazism in the Western world.

In 1990, Hassan Ngeze wrote the Hutu Ten Commandments, a document that served as the basis of the Hutu Power ideology. The Commandments called for the supremacy of Hutus in Rwanda, exclusive Hutu leadership over Rwanda's public institutions and public life, complete segregation of Hutus from Tutsis, and complete exclusion of Tutsis from public institutions and public life. Hutu Power ideology reviled Tutsis as outsiders bent on restoring a Tutsi-dominated monarchy, and idealized Hutu culture.

The Army for the Liberation of Rwanda (French: Armée pour la Libération du Rwanda, ALiR; Kinyarwanda: Ingabo zo Kubohoza u Rwanda, IzKR) was a rebel group largely composed of former members of the Interahamwe and Rwandan Armed Forces. Operating mostly in the eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo along the border with Rwanda, it carried out attacks throughout the Second Congo War against forces aligned with Rwanda and Uganda. In 2000, the ALiR agreed to merge with the Hutu resistance movement based in Kinshasa into the new Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR). ALiR was largely supplanted by the FDLR by 2001.