Overview

Scene of one of the biggest genocides of the last century Rwanda has become a household word, yet bitter disagreements persist as to its causes and consequences. Through a blend of personal memories and historical analysis, and informed by a lifelong experience of research in Central Africa, the author challenges conventional wisdom and suggests a new perspective for making sense of the appalling brutality that has accompanied the region's post-independence trajectories. All four states adjacent to Rwanda are inhabited by Hutu and Tutsi and thus contained in germ the potential for ethnic conflict, but only in Burundi did this potential reach genocidal proportions when, in 1972, in response to a local insurrection, at least 200,000 Hutu civilians were killed by a predominantly Tutsi army. By widening his analytic lens the author shows the critical importance of the Burundi bloodshed to an understanding of the roots of the Rwanda genocide, and in later years the significance of the mass murder of Hutu civilians by Kagame's Tutsi army, not just in Rwanda but in the Congo. The regional dimension of ethnic conflict, traceable to Belgian-engineered Hutu revolution in Rwanda in 1959, three years before its independence, is the principal missing piece in the genocidal puzzle of the Great Lakes region of central Africa. But this is by no means the only one. Reassembling the missing pieces within and outside Rwanda is not the least of the merits of this highly readable reassessment of a widely misunderstood human tragedy.

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Rene Lemarchand is in the unusual position of having met, shared meals and argued with many of the players who have shaped the violence-spattered, atrocity-strewn history of the Great Lakes: experiences younger analysts can only envy. In this book he looks back on his long career and places the region's developments and actors in their rightful context, highlighting in particular the dangers of examining Rwanda and Burundi in isolation from one another. His eye is shrewd and acute, his delivery wry, sometimes humorous -- no mean feat, given the often grim material. The result is both refreshingly readable and deeply insightful. An opinionated take from a man who has more than won the right to his opinions. Michela Wrong, author of In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz and It's Our Turn to Eat .

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