Burundi
Ethnic Conflict and Genocide

This book situates Burundi in the current global debate on ethnicity by describing and analysing the wholesale massacre of the Hutu majority by the Tutsi minority.

Rene Lemarchand (Author)

9780521566230, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 26 January 1996

248 pages
22.9 x 15.4 x 1.5 cm, 0.393 kg

' Accessible to the general reader and at the same time a valuable contribution to academic debate on this subject … essential reading for all Burundi-watchers .' Development in Practice

This book situates Burundi in the current global debate on ethnicity by describing and analysing the wholesale massacre of the Hutu majority by the Tutsi minority. The author refutes the government's version of these events that places blame on the former colonial government and the church. He offers documentation that identifies the source of these massacres as occurring across a socially constructed fault-line that pitted the Hutu majority's use of ethnicity as an instrument for the achievement of majority rule in parliament against the Tutsi minority's use of ethnocide to gain hegemony. By analysing the roots of ethnicity conflict, the author derives institutional and other formulae through which conflict among the primary groups in Burundi - and elsewhere - may be mitigated. Published in cooperation with the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD).

Preface
Acknowledgements
1. The Burundi paradox
2. The meta-conflict: violence as discourse
3. History as prologue
4. The crystallization of ethnic tensions
5. The 1972 watershed
6. The restructuring of state-society relations
7. The 1988 killings: the anatomy of fear
8. Toward a grand settlement
9. Hegemony, consociationalism, democracy, or none of the above?
10. Epilogue
References
Index.

Subject Areas: Genocide & ethnic cleansing [HBTZ]