The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa. Rene Lemarchand

lies an abysmal ignorance of its past and recent history.² My aim here is not only to challenge many such received ideas but also, by the same token, to deepen the understanding of the region by offering comparative insights into the dynamics of violence in each of the three states around which these essays are constructed (Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo [DRC]).

      Viewing their agonies in isolation from each other reveals only a fraction of the regional forces at work behind the surge of ethnic strife. Just as the shock waves of the Rwanda bloodbath have sent violent tremors to neighboring states, its seemingly ineluctable advent is inseparable from the long-term processes of change that have taken place in the region. Only through a regional lens can one bring into focus the violent patterns of interaction that form the essential backdrop to the spread of bloodshed within and across boundaries.

      Part I of the book (“The Regional Context”) is an attempt to set the political trajectories of each state in a wider perspective. After looking at the geopolitical setting (Chapter 1)—so as to make more legible the region's complex social configurations, recasting of identities, and spatial fall-out—we turn to more specific dimensions of analysis (Chapter 2). Here the emphasis is on processes of exclusion, marginalization, and political mobilization as vectors of conflict. In the light of the empirical evidence, I suggest a critical reconsideration of the more fashionable explanatory models that have gained currency among contemporary social scientists, from Samuel Huntington to Paul Collier.

      This broad sketch is meant as a backdrop for a more sustained examination of the politics of mass violence in Rwanda, Burundi, and the DRC. Part II (“Rwanda and Burundi: The Genocidal Twins”) is an attempt to set the historical roots and circumstances of genocidal killings in Rwanda and Burundi in a comparative perspective. Ultimately the aim is to analyze the reciprocal impact of one upon the other. Sometimes referred to as the “false twins,” the phrase also applies to their experience of genocide. Although the 1972 carnage in Burundi never reached the magnitude of its 1994 counterpart in Rwanda, and the bulk of the victims were Hutu, this should not obscure the similarities in the dynamics of the killings in each state and how the Burundi carnage has reverberated upon Rwanda.

      Behind these horror stories lies a sociological puzzle, which for the sake of clarity, requires a brief historical digression. Although Rwanda and Burundi have more in common than any other two states in the continent in terms of size, ethnic maps, language, and culture, they crossed the threshold of independence under radically different circumstances, one (Rwanda) ending up as a republic under Hutu hegemony, the other (Burundi) as a constitutional monarchy under the rule of the Tutsi minority. Not until 1965 did the army abolish the monarchy. And although both experienced genocide, Rwanda today has emerged as a thinly disguised Tutsi dictatorship, with Burundi, on the other hand, painstakingly charting a new course toward a multi-party and multi-ethnic democracy. Seldom anywhere have Sigmund Freud's reflections on “the narcissism of minor differences”³ received a more dramatic confirmation: nowhere in Africa has fratricidal strife torn apart communities as nearly identical as between Hutu and Tutsi.

      The key to the puzzle lies in history. For all their similarities, traditional Burundi was far from being a carbon copy of Rwanda. In neither state is ethnic conflict reducible to age-old enmities, yet the Hutu-Tutsi split was far more pronounced, and therefore more potentially menacing, in Rwanda, where the “premise of inequality”—greatly reinforced by the legacy of colonial rule—emerged as the central axis around which Hutu-Tutsi relations revolved. Burundi society, by contrast, was significantly more complicated and therefore more flexible. Typically, at first the focus of conflict had little to do with Hutu and Tutsi, involving instead political rivalries between the representatives of dynastic factions, known as the Bezi and Batare. The years following independence saw a drastic transformation of the parameters of conflict, where the Rwanda model took on the quality of a self-fulfilling prophecy. As many Hutu elites increasingly came to look to Rwanda as the exemplary polity, growing fears spread in Burundi's Tutsi population of an impending Rwanda-like revolution. Unless Hutu claims to power were resisted, they would share the fate of their Rwandan kinsmen. This meant a more or less systematic exclusion of Hutu elements from positions of authority. Exclusion led to insurrection, and insurrection to repression, culminating in 1972 with what must be described as the first recorded genocide in independent Africa.

      The centrality of myth-making as a key element behind conflicting identities is the subject of Chapter 3, with particular emphasis on the case of Rwanda. Here the discussion finds a convenient point of entry in John Lonsdale's concept of “moral ethnicity” (evolving into a singularly immoral definition of the Tutsi “other”), as well as in Terence Ranger's seminal insights into the different “imaginations” involved in the historical process of redefining social entities. The parallel agonies of the two states are the subject of Chapter 4, which also tries to bring out the relevance of the killings in Burundi to an understanding of the Rwanda tragedy.

      Chapters 5 to 8 explore the multiple dimensions of the Rwanda genocide. Chapter 5 looks at the perverse “rationality” of mass murder and shows the fallacy behind the all-too-prevalent notion of a spontaneous, uncontrollable outburst of collective ethnic hatred; Chapter 6 is about the danger of reducing the horrors of mass crimes to a story of good and evil; Chapter 7 probes the politics of memory in contemporary Rwanda and leans heavily on Paul Ricoeur's analytic categories to describe the ways in which ethnic memory is manipulated by the Kagame government; Chapter 8 is an attempt to bring out the singularity of the Rwandan bloodbath and in so doing warns against the all-too-frequent tendency to draw an uncritical parallel between the Holocaust and Rwanda.

      Not only is the analogy with the Holocaust misleading on historical grounds ( Jews never invaded Germany with the assistance of a neighboring state for the purpose of bringing down the government); it suggests a way of apportioning responsibility that can lead only to the gravest of misunderstandings. Drawing the line between the good guys and the bad guys is easy enough in the case of Nazi Germany; in Rwanda the distinction is far more problematic, if only because it defies the simplistic equation between Hutu murderers and Tutsi victims. This inherently complex dimension is one that is systematically shoved under the rug in official Rwandan historiography. The watchword in Rwanda today, symbolized by the moving memorial to Tutsi victims, is “Never forget!”—but there is an unspoken subtext: “Never remember!” Never remember the 1972 genocide of Hutu in Burundi, the massacre of Hutu refugees in eastern Congo, or the systematic elimination of Hutu civilians during and after the 1990 invasion of Rwanda by Kagame's soldiers. Above all, never remember Kagame's onus of responsibility in the shooting down of the plane carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi to Kigali, the detonator that ignited the genocide. His involvement in the crash is convincingly demonstrated in Lieutenant Abdul Joshua Ruzibiza's autobiographical narrative while serving in Kagame's Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF),⁴ as well as in the judicial investigation of French magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguière. I have no hesitation to concede that the analysis in Chapters 5 to 8 would have been significantly enriched had I had access to these vitally important sources.

      The Burundi genocide—a largely forgotten drama, yet still poignantly relevant to an understanding of the contemporary political scene—is dealt with in Chapter 9. Whereas