AfricaBib 
bibliographic database
| Previous page | New search |
The free AfricaBib App for Android is available here
 Periodical article |
 Leiden University catalogue |
 WorldCat |
| Title: | All the Bourgmestre's Men: Making Sense of Genocide in Rwanda |
| Author: | Wagner, Michele D. |
| Year: | 1998 |
| Periodical: | Africa Today |
| Volume: | 45 |
| Issue: | 1 |
| Pages: | 25-36 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | Rwanda |
| Subjects: | genocide Politics and Government Ethnic and Race Relations Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups) Law, Human Rights and Violence |
| External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/4187201 |
| Abstract: | The author, who arrived in Rwanda in early October 1994 as a human rights monitor with the United Nations, and shifted to a position as human rights investigator for Human Rights Watch/Fédération Internationale des Droits de l'Homme (HRW/FIDH), examined the ways the genocide has taken place in three different communes in order to understand the patterns of current abuses. The continuing hostilities with the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and the increasingly virulent multipartyism forced ordinary citizens to make choices about their own participation and to develop patterns of coping. In the article the author describes the situation in Nyakizu commune, one of the three communes where she worked on the genocide study for HRW/FIDH, where the population had lived in relative ethnic harmony until April 1994. The most important distinction in the conflict was whether one was in or out of the 'bourgmestre's' group. The 'bourgmestre' and his men, who ruled with unhindered local autonomy, had already established the means to respond locally to the national trend of ethnic extremism, and genocide was but a small step from the mundane routinized violence that had already taken over daily life. Notes, ref. |
