The Rwanda crisis

by Gérard Prunier

In the spring of 1994 the tiny African nation of Rwanda exploded onto the international media stage, as internal strife reached genocidal proportions. But the horror that unfolded before our eyes had been building steadily for years before it captured the attention of the world. In The Rwanda Crisis, journalist and Africa scholar Gerard Prunier provides a current yet historical perspective that Western readers need to understand how and why the brutal massacres of 800,000 Rwandese came to pass. Prunier shows how the events in Rwanda were part of a deadly logic, a plan that served central political and economic interests, rather than a result of ancient tribal hatreds - a notion often invoked by the media to dramatize the fighting. The Rwanda Crisis makes great strides in dispelling the racist cultural myths surrounding the people of Rwanda, views propagated by European colonialists in the nineteenth century and carved into "history" by Western influence. Prunier demonstrates how the st