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

"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with which she began—"What led us to this extremity?"—but her compelling account of that extremity is a valuable historical document.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.)