Rewriting Rwanda.(Noires fureurs, blancs menteurs: Rwanda 1990-1994)(Book review)

Foreign Policy, May, 2006 by Doyle, Mark

Noires fureurs, blancs menteurs: Rwanda 1990-1994 (Furious Blacks, Lying Whites: Rwanda 1990-1994) By Pierre Pean 544 pages, Paris: Mille Et Une Nuits, 2005 (in French)

Between April and July 1994, I spent most of my time reporting on the genocide in Rwanda for the BBC. One day I would be counting cadavers piled high in a rural church; on another, I would interview perpetrators or victims. I remember looking out from a half-destroyed Kigali hotel at red-hot tracer bullets forming an arc in the night sky. I recall interviewing the International Red Cross representative--one of the few foreign aid workers not to have run away--who said into my microphone, "I stopped counting at 500,000 dead."

What happened in Rwanda in 1994 is now fairly common...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.

Premium Content Partnership | HighBeam Research provides an in-depth online archive library of reference works.