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Fujii, Lee Ann. 2009. KILLING NEIGHBORS: WEBS OF VIOLENCE IN RWANDA. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 212 pp.
By the end of May 1994, the world woke up from breathtaking apathy and slumber when it came to grips with the reality that, in only a hundred days, the worst human carnage in decades had taken place: in Rwanda, at least half a million Tutsis had been hacked to death by their own countrymen, neighbors, and even friends.
The reported genocide began after President Juvénal Habyarimana's airplane was shot down, in Kigali, on 6 April 1994, ending his twenty-year rule. He had been returning from peace talks related to the Arusha Accords. Researchers and scholars have asked why Tutsis and Hutus-long living as neighbors and friends, sharing a common language, culture, and religion, constituting a single social unit through intermarriage-could end up in a zero-sum conflict, which spiraled into genocide. This anthropological dilemma is what Lee Ann Fujii explores in Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda.
Violence had sporadically been occurring in parts of the country, but not at a genocidal level. The Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF), based in Uganda and led by Tutsis, had invaded northern Rwanda in late 1990 and had continued to fight the national government, led by Hutus. The thesis of the...