Letter: Zaire: inaction is no solution

You describe Hutus and Tutsis as "two distinct peoples" ("The slide into darkness", 3 November). This is a myth. As Gerard Prunier writes in History Of A Genocide, it was German and Belgian colonial authorities' obsession with race that led to so much theorising and romanticising about the different origins of Rwandans, leading to the idea of superior Tutsis and inferior Hutus. They are in fact no more distinct than English and Welsh.

Anne-Marie Sutcliffe

London SW16