The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa (National and Ethnic Conflict in the 21st Century) - Softcover

Lemarchand, Ren&

 
9780812220902: The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa (National and Ethnic Conflict in the 21st Century)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0812220900 ISBN 13: 9780812220902
Verlag: UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA PR, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

Endowed with natural resources, majestic bodies of fresh water, and a relatively mild climate, the Great Lakes region of Central Africa has also been the site of some of the world's bloodiest atrocities. In Rwanda, Burundi, and the Congo-Kinshasa, decades of colonial subjugation—most infamously under Belgium's Leopold II—were followed by decades of civil warfare that spilled into neighboring countries. When these conflicts lead to horrors such as the 1994 Rwandan genocide, ethnic difference and postcolonial legacies are commonly blamed, but, with so much at stake, such simple explanations cannot take the place of detailed, dispassionate analysis.

The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa provides a thorough exploration of the contemporary crises in the region. By focusing on the historical and social forces behind the cycles of bloodshed in Rwanda, Burundi, and the Congo-Kinshasa, René Lemarchand challenges much of the conventional wisdom about the roots of civil strife in former Belgian Africa. He offers telling insights into the appalling cycle of genocidal violence, ethnic strife, and civil war that has made the Great Lakes region of Central Africa the most violent on the continent, and he sheds new light on the dynamics of conflict in the region.

Building on a full career of scholarship and fieldwork, Lemarchand's analysis breaks new ground in our understanding of the complex historical forces that continue to shape the destinies of one of Africa's most important regions.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rene Lemarchand is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Florida.

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Preface

"The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it."
Oscar Wilde

My immediate purpose in putting together this reader is to make readily accessible to interested scholars a selection of my recent (and not so recent) writings on former Belgian Africa; though most of these appeared in professional journals and edited volumes, none were sources of high visibility. Whatever their merits, their subliminal message is that the Great Lakes region matters. It matters because of its vast territorial expanse and the many borders it shares with neighboring states, and the ever-present danger of violence spilling across boundaries. It matters because the Congo's huge mineral wealth translates into a uniquely favorable potential for economic development. While claiming the largest deposits of copper, cobalt, diamonds and gold anywhere in the continent—it is not for nothing that the Belgians called it a "geological scandal"—more than 60 percent of its population lives below the poverty line. More importantly, it matters because of the appalling bloodshed it continues to experience. Public revulsion over the Rwanda genocide has all but overshadowed the far greater scale of the human losses suffered in eastern Congo. The death toll between 1998 and 2004 was estimated to be nearly four million. If one adds the killings in Rwanda and Burundi since 1994 one reaches the staggering figure of approximately 5.5 million. To this day as many as 38,000 die every month of war-related causes. In many parts of the country rape has become the weapon of choice of militias. The unspeakable has become commonplace. This in itself is a sufficient reason to devote serious attention to an area which is all too often dismissed as a latter-day version of the Heart of Darkness, entirely beyond redemption.

There is also an intellectual rationale behind this exercise. At the root of the misconceptions and prejudices that figure so prominently in the media coverage of Central Africa lies an abysmal ignorance of its past and recent history. Our aim here is not only to challenge many such received ideas, but, by the same token, to deepen our 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 DCR).

Viewing their agonies in isolation from each other only reveals a fraction of the regional forces at work behind the surge of ethnic strife. Just as the shock waves of the Rwanda blood bath has sent violent tremors in neighboring states, its seemingly ineluctable advent is inseparable from the long-term processes of change that have taken place in the region. Only through 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 One of the book (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 we 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 Two (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 while both experienced genocide, Rwanda today has emerged as a thinly disguised Tutsi dictatorship, with Burundi on the other hand painstakingly charting a new course towards a multiparty and multiethnic democracy. Seldom anywhere have Sigmund Freud's reflections on "the narcissism of minor differences" 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 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 among the 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 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 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...

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Verlag
UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA PR
Erscheinungsdatum
2009
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812220900
ISBN 13 
9780812220902
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
327
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Mare Nostrum Group B.V.
gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk

Doelen 72
Breda
4831 GR
Niederlande

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