Overview

The story of the Rwandan Genocide has been told many times by scholars and journalists. Over the course of a hundred days in the spring and summer of 1994, about eight hundred thousand Tutsi and moderate Hutu were murdered by their extremist Hutu compatriots. Those hundred days defined the final phase of a four-year civil war, also known as the Struggle for Liberation, which formed the immediate context of the genocide. Though scholars have researched the preparations for the genocide and the international community’s role in it, none has placed the Struggle for Liberation at the heart of the narrative. However, the preparation of the genocide, the rise and fall of the moderate opposition, the degradation of the Forces armées rwandaises (FAR) from a respected fighting force to a genocidal militia, the role of the international community, the Arusha negotiations, and the execution of the genocide all took place in the context of that war. John Burton Kegel contends that the Struggle for Liberation forms the bedrock of any genuine understanding of Rwanda between 1990 and 1994, and indeed beyond. The Struggle for Liberation, which eventually led to the genocide, was fought between the FAR and the civilians and soldiers of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and its armed wing, the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA). The civil war started on October 1, 1990, when the RPF entered Rwanda from Uganda, where Rwandan refugees had lived throughout the Great Lakes region since roughly 1959. This book traces the history of those refugees—and Rwanda’s deeper Hutu-Tutsi divide—from the precolonial period up to 1990. It also provides a wholly new take on how the disciplined RPF, which rules Rwanda to this day, was born and organized.

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Reviews

Many people write about the Rwandan Genocide as if it were essentially a moral issue. And it certainly was. But it was rooted in a war reality few people know about. If you want to understand what that reality was, read this book. * Gérard Prunier, author of The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide * The 1990–94 Rwandan Civil War was no ordinary civil conflict, but rather the critically important precursor to genocide and to a campaign to bring about a ""second independence"" for Central Africa and beyond. With his detailed and finely researched book, John Burton Kegel makes a very important contribution to our understanding of the war and its protagonists. * Harry Verhoeven, coauthor of Why Comrades Go to War: Liberation Politics and the Outbreak of Africa's Deadliest Conflict *

Many people write about the Rwandan genocide as if it were essentially a moral issue. And it certainly was. But it was rooted in a war reality few people know about. If you want to understand what that reality was, read this book. * Gérard Prunier, author of The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide * The 1990–94 Rwandan Civil War was no ordinary civil conflict, but rather the critically important precursor to genocide and to a campaign to bring about a ""second independence"" for Central Africa and beyond. With his detailed and finely researched book, John Burton Kegel makes a very important contribution to our understanding of the war and its protagonists. * Harry Verhoeven, coauthor of Why Comrades go to War: Liberation Politics and the Outbreak of Africa's Deadliest Conflict *

Author Information

John Burton Kegel specializes in African military and economic history from roughly 1850 to the present. He is a lecturer at the Faculty of Military Sciences of the Netherlands Defence Academy and a research fellow at the African Studies Centre Leiden, where his work is sponsored by the Ford Foundation.

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