ABSTRACT
Since the Jewish Holocaust (Chapter 6), no genocide has attracted as much analysis and reflection, and produced such institutional innovation and transformation, as the catastrophe that consumed the tiny Central African country of Rwanda from April to July 1994. This is reflected in the decision of nearly everyone writing or editing a volume on genocide to include detailed attention to the Hutu-extremist genocide of Rwandan Tutsis. The first two editions of this book were no exception. For this new edition, however, I have reworked and reorganized the chapter on the “Apocalypse in Rwanda” much as the chapter on the Armenian genocide in the first edition morphed into “The Ottoman Destruction of Christian Minorities” in subsequent ones. As the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has received ever greater study and investigation, notably with the 2010 release of the long-delayed, UN-sponsored “Mapping Report” of atrocities; as Burundi, Rwanda’s ethnic twin to the south, took center stage in global humanitarian concerns in 2015–2016; and as I, personally, have attained a deeper understanding of political and historical processes in the African Great Lakes region, it has become clearer that a more synoptic and relational treatment is necessary. Only with this framing can we understand how the conflicts, ethnic divisions, migrant and refugee flows, and postcolonial policies of each state have reverberated with the others. I have argued elsewhere that the 1994 genocide of Rwandan Tutsis merits an “anchoring” position in the narrative. 1 But it has also served to sideline, discursively and legally, the genocidal atrocities inflicted by the post-genocide RPF regime in Rwanda against Hutu refugees in the DRC (see “The genocide of the camps,” below). In Burundi, outbreaks of anti-Hutu genocide by the Tutsi-dominated military in 1972, and of reciprocal genocidal atrocities in 1993 and since, have failed to arouse much notice, in either academic 471or humanitarian circles. Despite the dedicated efforts of René Lemarchand (see Further Study), there is only the tiniest smattering of monographs, book chapters, and scholarly articles on Burundi and its ongoing conflicts. This left governments and journalists struggling to situate the outbreak of renewed mass violence in 2015–2016, when probably no country outside the Middle East was setting off as many alarms in the humanitarian and genocide-prevention communities.
