2021: Special Issue. Beyond the "Rapport Duclert". Decentering the history of the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda
Special issue edited within the journal by Camille Evrard, Muriel Gomez-Perez, Martin Mourre, Florent Piton, Nathaniel Powell and Romain Tiquet.
The joint editorial with Sources. Matériaux & Terrains en études africaines can be found here.
This special issue is structured around a series of reactions to the Rapport Duclert, most of which deal with aspects beyond France, the Commission's methodology and conclusions. Marie-Eve Desrosiers, for example, highlights what she considers to be a “presentist bias” in the way the commission analysed the first months of the civil war at the end of 1990.
Ornella Rovetta wonders if it is possible to be “writing history in a commission,” that is to say, on the basis of an archival corpus and a chronology rather defined by political power than a research question.
Caroline Williamson Sinalo's analysis, which she describes as “gender-specific,” highlights the report's failure to take gender perspectives into account, not only when it examines the violence and cruelty committed before and during the genocide against the Tutsis, but also when it examines the rape accusations made against French soldiers during the Noroît and Turquoise operations between 1990 and 1994.
Using the contents of the Duclert report as a starting point, Étienne Smith examines the way in which the report analyses the tensions and contradictions that ran through the military establishment in relation to Rwanda between 1990 and 1994, and how this same establishment reacted to the publication of the commission's conclusions.
This special issue concludes with a singular text. It does not emanate strictly from an academic figure, instead from the Senegalese writer Boubacar Boris Diop. In this text—which we are delighted to publish both in Wolof and French—he puts the Duclert report into context, emphasising that it is just one step—and undoubtedly not the last—on the road to the ‘truth’.
A number of other texts complete this collection of articles. These include a miscellaneous article by Florent Piton on the historiography of the Rwandan Tutsi genocide, an interview with François Graner–a Survie activist deeply involved in the Rwandan issue, and several critical book reviews.
Articles published by Sources as part of our collaboration:
