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  • Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda
  • E. Ofori Bekoe
Fujii, Lee Ann. 2009. Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 212 pp.

By the end of May 1994, the world woke up from breathtaking apathy and slumber when it came to grips with the reality that, in only a hundred days, the worst human carnage in decades had taken place: in Rwanda, at least half a million Tutsis had been hacked to death by their own countrymen, neighbors, and even friends.

The reported genocide began after President Juvénal Habyarimana’s airplane was shot down, in Kigali, on 6 April 1994, ending his twenty-year rule. He had been returning from peace talks related to the Arusha Accords. Researchers and scholars have asked why Tutsis and Hutus—long living as neighbors and friends, sharing a common language, culture, and religion, constituting a single social unit through intermarriage—could end up in a zero-sum conflict, which spiraled into genocide. This anthropological dilemma is what Lee Ann Fujii explores in Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda.

Violence had sporadically been occurring in parts of the country, but not at a genocidal level. The Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF), based in Uganda and led by Tutsis, had invaded northern Rwanda in late 1990 and had continued to fight the national government, led by Hutus. The thesis of the book is that the genocide did not result from ethnic hatred, as has generally been postulated; instead, ethnic hatred played only a minor part. Fujii suggests: “The principal conflicts is [sic] not between Hutu and Tutsi as corporate entities, but between elites of the same ethnicity who use violence to divert attention from the real threat to their power . . . and in Rwanda, ethnicity was a strategy of politics, not its foundation” (pp. 45–46, 75). Rwandan elites were exploiting perceived ethnic cleavages spawned by decades of political and socioeconomic asphyxiation by whichever ethnic group had been in power.

The lethal violence took place in different parts of the country at different times. Political allegiances played a major role in Kigali and its environs, where specially trained military and the Interahamwe paramilitary hunted down and killed Tutsis, moderate Hutus, and political enemies, but the genocide was a gradual process elsewhere, especially in Kimanzi, in the north, and Ngali, in the center-south, where the author conducted extensive interviews with 82 people of whom 28 were prisoners and had witnessed or taken part in the genocide.

In the north, people generally rejected the RPF invasion: they saw Tutsis as accomplices and in a minority, and both ethnicities had mobilized against the RPF because mass killings had gone on sporadically in there [End Page 107] for three and a half years; however, the crash of Habyarimana’s plane triggered a sudden escalation of the conflict. That was when the tables turned: henceforth, all Tutsis were seen as guilty by association with the RPF.

In Ngali, the inhabitants had heard of the war with the RPF, but they widely assumed that it would not reach them. Overall, the dominant politicians did not want to share power, and, as a result, they targeted Tutsis. This is shown in the career of Jude, the power broker in the center-south. With the power invested in him as the consellier of Ngali, he lured Tutsis to their deaths. The killings continued until May, when the RPF captured the region.

The group dynamics in this study show that not all Hutus attacked Tutsis. Some moderate Hutus helped Tutsis escape; others offered safe haven and informed Tutsis of imminent Hutu attacks. That is not to say that there was no enmity between them, as interpersonal antagonisms had long existed; but on the whole, Tutsi and Hutu neighbors coexisted peacefully: they drank beer together, helped build each other’s houses, and intermarried.

Fujii has written a useful historical account, which looks at the genocide from a refreshing scholarly perspective to show how group dynamics became a formidable instrument for mass murder: many who killed, raped women, and mutilated bodies acted only in groups, not individually. Taking a multidisciplinary approach to explain mass involvement in genocide is invaluable...

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