Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire / Edition 1

by Marie Beatrice Umutesi, Catharine Newbury

Overview

Though the world was stunned by the horrific massacres of Tutsi by the Hutu majority in Rwanda beginning in April 1994, there has been little coverage of the reprisals that occurred after the Tutsi gained political power. During this time hundreds of thousands of Hutu were systematically hunted and killed.

Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire is the eyewitness account of Marie Béatrice Umutesi. She tells of life in the refugee camps in Zaire and her flight across 2000 kilometers on foot. During this forced march, far from the world's cameras, many Hutu refugees were trampled and murdered. Others died from hunger, exhaustion, and sickness, or simply vanished, ignored by the international community and betrayed by humanitarian organizations. Amidst this brutality, day-to-day suffering, and desperate survival, Umutesi managed to organize the camps to improve the quality of life for women and children.

In this first-hand account of inexplicable brutality, day-to-day suffering, and survival, Marie Béatrice Umutesi sheds light on a backlash of violence that targeted the Hutu refugees of Rwanda after the victory of the Rwandan Patriotic Front in 1994. Umutesi's documentation of the flight and terror of these years provides the world a veritable account of a history that is still widely unknown. After translations from its original French into three other languages, this important book is available in English for the first time. It is more than a testimony to the lives and humanity lost; it is a call for those politicians, military personnel, and humanitarian organizations responsible for the atrocious crimes--and the devastating silence--to be held accountable.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299204945
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	10/05/2004
Series:	Women in Africa and the Diaspora
Edition description:	1
Pages:	284
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Marie Béatrice Umutesi was born in Byumba, Rwanda. Umutesi worked with women's associations in Byumba until she fled to Zaire in 1994. She is currently working on rural development projects in Cameroon.

Table of Contents

	Foreword	xi
	Author's Acknowledgments	xvii
	Translator's Acknowledgments	xix
	Maps	xx
	Prologue	3
1	I Discover My Ethnic Identity	6
2	Increasing Violence	17
3	Descent into Hell	45
4	Survival in the Camps at Kivu	71
5	A Difficult Choice	89
6	Pursued Westward	103
7	Hunted by the Rebels and the RPF	122
8	The Death Camp at Tingi-Tingi	138
9	Hunger on the Road	164
10	My Life for Ten Dollars	196
11	The End of the Ordeal	233
	Acronyms	249
	Personal Chronology	251
	Chronology of Political Events in Rwanda	255

Editorial Reviews

"A towering work. . . . An epic for our times, a tale to ponder for the lessons it conveys, testimony so powerful and moving that it reaches an unintended literary greatness."--Jan Vansina, African Studies Review

"A vivid account of the grueling nightmare experienced by tens of thousands of Rwandan civilians whom the world had deliberately forsaken. . . . An outstanding call for justice."--Aloys Habimama, African Studies Review

"Of all the current books and films ten years after the Rwandan genocide, none is more effective than Surviving the Slaughter . . . . This book carries one along, often as if running with the refugees."--Anne Serafin, Multicultural Review

"Passages of Umutesi's book rank with some of the most effective antiwar literature of the twentieth century."--Nicolas van de Walle, Foreign Affairs

"Restores a human dimension that has been lacking in the history of the genocide and massacres in Rwanda."--Danielle de Lame, African Studies Review

"Umutesi helps us better understand the fear that has fueled a history of violence between both Tutsi and Hutu Rwanda . . . and the utter failure of the international organizations, governments, and media to tell the truth."--Aili Mari Tripp, series editor

"Umutesi's tale, told with honesty and eloquence, is a tribute to the human spirit, a searing indictment of the agents who perpetrated these horrors, and a reproach to those who turned away."--Catharine Newbury, African Studies Review

From the Publisher

"I have been through Hell, have known horror, and now that I have escaped... I give testimony to what I have seen." So begins Umutesi's personal account of the bloody ethnic confrontations between Tutsi and Hutu in Rwanda and neighboring Zaire, culminating in the 1994 slaughter of Tutsi and moderate Hutus. A Hutu often "taken for a Tutsi," sociologist Umutesi fled to Zaire in 1994 and spent two years in the refugee camps, witnessing the destruction of the camps and the subsequent ethnic massacres of Hutu refugees by Rwandan soldiers and Zairian rebels. Her tone encompasses both a sociologist's objectivity and a sufferer's anguish, describing malnutrition and famine, cholera and dysentery, panic and brutality. There were two genocides, this book argues, with barbaric acts committed by and against Hutus and permitted by an international community that "seemed more interested in gross acts of war than in the plight of the people being killed every day, of those who were hiding in the ceilings, woods, ditches, and swamps." Acts of kindness and heroism occur, but this is painful, bitter reading. Umutesi is unable to answer the question with which she began-"What led us to this extremity?"-but her compelling account of that extremity is a valuable historical document. (Oct.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly