Genocide and Minority Persecution 1970+

Why did Rwanda's rural Hutus participate so massively, and so personally, in the country's 1994 genocide of its Tutsi population? Given all that has been written already about this horrific episode, is there still more that can be learned? Answering these questions, Jean-Paul Kimonyo's social and economic history explores at the deepest level the role both of power relations among Rwanda's grassroots citizens, political parties, and the state and of socioeconomic factors vs. politically/socially constructed ethnicity.

After the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, victims, perpetrators, and the country as a whole struggled to deal with the legacy of the mass violence. The government responded by creating a new version of a traditional grassroots justice system called gacaca. Bert Ingelaere, based on his observation of two thousand gacaca trials, offers a comprehensive assessment of what these courts set out to do, how they worked, what they achieved, what they did not achieve, and how they affected Rwandan society.

"This ... book chronicles what has happened in Rwanda and neighboring states since 1994, when the Rwandan government called on everyone in the Hutu majority to murder everyone in the Tutsi minority. Though the killing was low-tech--largely by machete--it was carried out at shocking speed: some 800,000 people were exterminated in a hundred days. A Tutsi pastor, in a letter to his church president, a Hutu, used the chilling phrase that gives Philip Gourevitch his title."
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.

Using a vast variety of source documentation the researchers and author of this report for Human Rights Watch and the IFHR have compiled a comprehensive account, of over 700 pages, of the origins, evolution, and aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda.

Joshua James Kassner contends that the international community had a moral obligation to intervene and therefore unrolls a convincing argument for a significant reform of the normative framework governing international relations.

The news media played a crucial role in the 1994 Rwanda genocide: local media fuelled the killings, while the international media either ignored or seriously misconstrued what was happening. The book examines how local radio and print media were used as a tool of hate by encouraging neighbours to turn against each other. It also presents a critique of international media coverage of the cataclysmic events in Rwanda.

During a one-hundred-day period in 1994, Hutus murdered between half a million and a million Tutsi in Rwanda. The numbers are staggering; the methods of killing were unspeakable. Utilizing personal interviews with trauma survivors living in Rwandan cities, towns, and dusty villages, We Cannot Forget relates what happened during this period and what their lives were like both prior to and following the genocide.

Rejecting easy explanations of the genocide as a mysterious evil force that was bizarrely unleashed, one of Africa's best-known intellectuals situates the tragedy in its proper context. He coaxes to the surface the historical, geographical, and political forces that made it possible for so many Hutu to turn so brutally on their neighbors. He finds answers in the nature of political identities generated during colonialism, in the failures of the nationalist revolution to transcend these identities, and in regional demographic and political currents that reach well beyond Rwanda.

The Elgar Companion to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda is a one-stop reference resource on this complex tribunal, established in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, which closed its doors on 31 December 2015. This Companion provides an insightful account of the workings and legacy of the ICTR in the field of international criminal justice