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  • On Behalf of Ordinary People:Bridging the Gap between High Politics and Simple Tragedies
  • Danielle de Lame (bio)

Without minimizing the horrors of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, the book by Marie Béatrice Umutesi, Fuir ou mourir au Zaïre ("Running Away or Dying in Zaïre,"L'Harmattan, 2000), published under the English title Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire," throws a much needed light on the plight of Rwandan refugees in Kivu from the time they fled Rwanda, many of them as ordinary, peaceful citizens. If we want to understand the events that continue to unfold in the region, and if we want to improve the aid humanitarian agencies provide, we need to consider Umutesi's story—a story in which distant international organizations, with their own views and objectives, took actions that had deleterious consequences for ordinary people.

While some refugees pursued dubious policies in the camps, people of good will went on helping others while they all were in exile. Their collective support systems helped them retain their dignity under the worst of circumstances and, when their fragile safe haven came under attack, helped them endure a hell that seemed at times unendurable. Telling the complete history, as Jan Vansina helped to do in his recent book (2004), and putting ordinary people back into the picture, are the surest ways to avoid lethal stereotypes and quick categorizations that hinder our understanding of complex situations and produce simplifications that contribute to more injustice. [End Page 133]

The English translation of the title of the book, with its reference to slaughter, keeps the reader, intentionally or unintentionally, thinking about the genocide of the Rwandan Tutsi. This points to the complexities of the situation and to the many consequences of the massive movements of populations in the Great Lakes area during the genocide. Individual motives and feelings were caught in this human landslide, as the strategies of politicians and militaries, combined with the blindness of international agencies, produced a series of lethal outcomes. The fears of ordinary citizens who did not always chose freely to quit Rwanda and flee to Zaire, or who went with the flow because they chose a course of action that seemed less uncertain than the situation they were leaving behind, were the driving forces of a massive displacement that can either be perceived as shapeless or identified with the will of its determined leaders.

Generalizations simply give fuel to further stereotyping and hinder comprehension of the dynamics at play. Simplifications are easy and cheap, and they meld with ideologies that mask the motives of those resorting to them. Is it not, then, the task of historians and social scientists to broaden their field of study and delve more deeply into the diversity of motives of social actors? Individual stories should not be seen as one case contradicting another, but rather as multiple versions of history that all contribute to making sense of the past from different perspectives. Each of these lives is encompassed by fluctuating constraints that determine and modify the set of choices that knowledge, learned responses, and values can make available and meaningful. Seen in this perspective, as Vansina (2000) points out, Umutesi's story is "an epic of our times, a tale to ponder for the lessons it conveys, testimony so powerful and moving that it reaches an unintended literary greatness." This book does not, indeed, belong to immediate history, but it restores a human dimension that has been lacking in the history of the genocide and massacres in Rwanda. Huge parts of Congo fell into greater disarray after the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Umutesi presents a unique testimony, offering a side of the story that has been overlooked as an excess of repetitive writing has been unable to make sense of the tragedies in the Great Lakes. These writings have drawn upon images that prevent analysis or have desperately attempted to promote a unidimensional version of history that would legitimate the victors (see Pottier 2002). The scanty accounts drawn from the survivors, and more recently from prisoners, have been in tune with this simplified version of history. Umutesi's testimony brings us...

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