Accounting for Horror: Post-Genocide Debates in Rwanda, and: Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire (review)

Few parts of the world have endured more postcolonial conflict and disorder than the Great Lakes region of Central Africa. In 1994, Rwanda experienced one of the century's worst genocides, following decades of strife since the country achieved independence from Belgium. The eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC, formerly Zaire) that are nearest to and bordering Rwanda, in particular North and South Kivu, have been the scene of almost continual chaos and civil war since 1997, resulting in close to four million deaths. In the past ten years, millions of Africans have suffered predation at the hands of soldiers and rebel militias.

One of them was a Rwandan refugee named Marie Béatrice Umutesi, who fled across the DRC on foot from 1994 to 1997, ultimately arriving in Kinshasa, from where she secured passage to Belgium. Her memoir of the journey, Surviving the Slaughter, originally published in France in 2000 as Fuir ou Mourir au ZaVre, translated by Julia Emerson, reveals the depth of human suffering resulting from the Rwanda–Congo crisis and the political complexities surrounding it. Umutesi's story reminds readers of the anguish experienced by all sides in the Rwandan conflict and its aftermath.

Nigel Eltringham, who performed doctoral research in Rwanda and among Rwandan exiles in Europe, offers a different perspective on the genocide in Accounting for Horror: Post-Genocide Debates in Rwanda. As a worker for three years in postgenocide Rwanda with a conflict-resolution NGO, he is well suited to offer a scholarly work that examines the historical thought processes in Rwanda that led to the genocide. He also seeks to understand the way the genocide is viewed in post-1994 Rwanda. Taken together, Eltringham and Umutesi offer a more complete picture of the level of human suffering experienced in the Rwanda–Congo crisis and a fuller understanding of why it happened.

In 1959, Belgium yielded self-government to Rwanda and Burundi. In the years that followed, both countries endured almost perpetual conflict between their two main ethnic groups, the majority Hutu and the minority Tutsi. In Rwanda, conflict simmered intermittently until 1994, when the assassination of Rwanda's Hutu president, Juvénal Habyarimana, sparked a conflict that ultimately cost the lives of more than 800,000 Rwandans. The massacre, carried out by the interahamwe militias and regular army units (the Forces Armées Rwandaise [FAR]), was directed mostly against ethnic Tutsi.

Many in the West viewed the conflict dichotomously, as between Hutu and Tutsi, and explained it as a reversion to tribalism, but Umutesi and Eltringham illustrate that the conflict was far more complicated. Umutesi recalled her youth in postindependence Rwanda by observing, "I had to realize that I was Hutu. All Rwandans share the same language and culture, and there is no specific region that is identified with an ethnic group, no 'Hutuland' or 'Tutsiland'" (Umutesi, p. 6). Eltringham supports this assertion by demonstrating that ethnicity in Rwanda was a historical construct, aided and abetted by the colonial authorities. He suggests that the while the terms Hutu and Tutsi are significant, in precolonial times they were understood as social distinctions, and only later evolved into ethnic stratifications: "Both over time and at any given moment in time the terms 'Hutu' and 'Tutsi' were polyvalent—there was no single meaning valid for the whole territory at any one time" (p. 13).

The 1994 genocide ended when the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), led by current Rwandan President Paul Kagame, intervened with force, stopped the bloodshed, and established a government of national unity. The RPA was the military arm of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a political faction made up of Tutsi exiles living in Uganda and backed...