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  • Suffering and Survival in Central Africa
  • Catharine Newbury (bio)

In this remarkable book, Marie Béatrice Umutesi recounts what she saw and experienced in Rwanda before and during the 1994 genocide, and as a refugee in Zaire after the genocide. With its intense local level perspective, her study provides fresh insights into the Rwanda genocide and its antecedents, the massacre of Rwandan refugees during the war in Zaire of the mid-1990s, and the utter failure of the international media to understand what was happening there on the ground. Eschewing extremism of all sides, Umutesi records the experiences of ordinary people buffeted by violent events and broader political dynamics they could not control. She is a perspicacious observer—astute, courageous, engaged, and compassionate. One of the remarkable features of this narrative, however, is how little Umutesi appears in this text; it is about her experiences, to be sure, but not about "her." It is as a testimonial to the times and the human experiences of those times that this tale has such force.

Antecedents to Genocide

The initial chapters of Surviving the Slaughter recount Umutesi's experiences as a student in the 1970s and mid-1980s and (having completed her university education) as a young adult managing rural development programs. Ethnic distinctions between Hutu and Tutsi held little importance for Umutesi and her friends while she was growing up. Instead, as a Hutu [End Page 121] from the north, she found that regional tensions among Hutu were important during the 1980s, under the Second Republic of Juvénal Habyarimana, when she witnessed regionalism in high school and college in Rwanda. Only later, when studying in Belgium, did ethnic distinctions and discrimination between Hutu and Tutsi come into play. The examples she describes show both the contingent nature of ethnic categorization and identities in Rwanda, and the importance of politics in shaping their salience.

Umutesi also depicts the changing social and economic conditions that created an explosive situation in Rwanda in the years preceding 1994: famine, rural impoverishment, and economic policies that exacerbated hardships for ordinary people; the plight of youth with no jobs and lack of access to land; corruption among high government officials; and the war that began in 1990 when the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), composed largely of Tutsi exiles, attacked northern Rwanda from their bases in Uganda. Like the late André Sibomana in Hope for Rwanda (1999), Umutesi indicates the political impact of these conditions by describing her own experiences and those of people she knew.

Ethnic polarization intensified during the war, placing constraints even on those who rejected such divisions. When the Habyarimana government imprisoned thousands of people (mostly Tutsi) on specious claims that they were linked to the RPF rebels, Umutesi visited her friends and colleagues who had been imprisoned to offer them solace and support. But such behavior placed her under suspicion. After her office was searched and she narrowly escaped imprisonment herself, a relative warned her to be more discreet about her contacts with Tutsi.

In February 1993, hundreds of thousands of Rwandans were driven out of northern Rwanda by a major RPF offensive; they were relegated to living in miserable camps near the capital, Kigali. Umutesi was dismayed that the government and residents of Kigali and southern areas of the country showed so little concern for these dispossessed people—some of whom were neighbors and relatives from Byumba, her home region.

All lived under conditions of misery that are impossible to describe; only the humanitarian NGOs were worried about their fate.... The political, ethnic, and regional divisions were such that many Rwandans did not see them as human beings worthy of compassion and in need of help.... Every morning several thousand starving, half naked women and children descended on Kigali. They came to beg something that would allow them to live one more day. When a woman or a child held out an emaciated hand, more often than not instead of five or ten francs, they got insults or spit in the face. Most of the inhabitants of Kigali said that the refugees were responsible for their own misery. Others told them to go home because the supposed killings committed by the...

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