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Burundi: Ethnic Conflict and Genocide (2004) (Non-Fiction)
By Rene Lemarchand
Cambridge University Press
£22.99
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.
