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The third day after leaving Tingi-Tingi we began to pass the bodies of the dead and the dying.… My eye fell on a teenager hardly sixteen years old. Like the others she was lying at the side of the road, her large eyes open.… A cloud of flies swarmed around her. Ants and other forest insects crawled around her mouth, nose, eyes and ears. They began to devour her before she had taken her last breath. The death rattle that from time to time escaped her lips showed that she was not yet dead. All who passed by glanced at her and then took up their conversation where they had left off. I stood in a daze in front of this sixteen-year-old girl, lying in agony by the side of the road in die middle of the equatorial forest more than five hundred kilometers from home. As in 1993, when I heard about the extermination of my mother's family, as in 1994, when I saw the burned houses, the fear in the eyes of the fleeing Tutsi, and the arrogance and the hate in the faces of their executioners, as in 1995 when I saw pictures of women and children assassinated by the RPF in the camps at Birava, I was overcome by revulsion. What crime had all these victims committed to deserve such a death?Marie Béatrice Umutesi, Surviving the SlaughterIn the “witness literature” on the Great Lakes, Marie Béatrice Umutesi's wrenching narrative surpasses all others by its searing, intensely personal quality. She bears testimony to an almost forgotten tragedy: Between October 1996 and September 1997, hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees lost their lives in the course of a massive manhunt carried out by Rwandan-backed rebels and units of the Rwandan army.

Book reviewed: Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda, Peter Uvin

Is there more to Chad than the murderous idiosyncrasies of an improbable state which shares with its neighbors the vicissitudes of drought, famine, and environmental bankruptcy? The question is not merely rhetorical. In order to bring the present conflicts and confusions within the realm of comparative discourse, the uniqueness of the Chadian crisis must be assessed against its generic traits. To those of us who once debated whether Zaire was a unique or an extreme case, the issue has a familiar ring, and it carries intimations of inconclusiveness that may well apply to other states, including Chad.All states are, in one way or another, unique and Chad in more ways than one. Its uniqueness goes far beyond its sudden emergence as a strategic pawn in a desert war among proxies. With its national territory semi-partitioned, its northern half under Libyan occupation and its southern flank threatened by rebel activity; with a government in exile comprising no less than eleven factions at the latest count, some in open warfare with others, some appealing to Libya for continued military support, and others perpetually casting about to form an anti-Libyan coalition; with a central government overwhelmingly dependent on outside donors for military, economic, and financial aid but, nonetheless, highly sensitive to attempts at external manipulation; with a capital city in shambles, an infrastructure thoroughly inadequate for the tasks of rehabilitation and national reconstruction, and anywhere from 100,000 to 200,000 refugees living in neighboring states—what other state can make as many claims to being unique in coping with, or surrendering to, the blows of adversity?

Abstract:There can be no reconciliation between Hutu and Tutsi without justice, and no justice without truth. This proposition holds true for all three states of former Belgian Africa. In Rwanda and Burundi, in particular, getting at the truth will remain problematic as long as the perpetrators of genocide readily cast themselves in the role of victims, and the victims, in turn, are seen as perpetrators by their enemies. Basic disagreements between Hutu and Tutsi about who committed genocide and why are traceable in part to the uncritical use of the term genocide to describe just about any type of ethnic violence, in part to the selective sifting of the evidence with a view to exonerating one group and condemning the other. Although Hutu and Tutsi are both guilty of genocide, the tendency to substitute collective guilt for individual culpability in the planning and execution of the killings can only result in distortion of the facts. There will be no peace in the Great Lakes region unless one takes seriously the task of shedding light on the circumstances, the scale and the consequences of the genocide of Hutu by Tutsi in Burundi (1972), of Tutsi and Hutu by Hutu in Rwanda (1994), and of Hutu by Tutsi in Congo (1996–1997).