Suchergebnisse

Examines the use of gacaca, a form of local justice, in Rwanda to try hundreds of thousands defendants suspected of involvement in the 1994 genocide. It is contended that gacaca is an institution that blends remembering & forgetting in a composite that allows, if imperfectly, survivors & perpetrators to move forward. The demographic aspect driving the selective memory & the more salient strategic forgetting is touched on before detailing the gacaca model & outlining criticisms of the institution, highlighting its tendency toward maximizing culpability & the black-&-white moral landscape constructed by the Kagame regime in which it is situated. It is contended, however, that gacaca will likely allow more guilty people to walk than it will convict the innocent. The existence of resentment toward survivors in Rwanda is then discussed in terms of comparisons to post-Holocaust Jews & Israelis, an anticolonialist backlash against the Tutsis, & victim use of gacaca for monetary gain. D. Edelman

Genocides, once over, have a way of turning into crimes without criminals. In the aftermath, the corpses pile up, denunciations, recriminations, and chants of "never again" fill the air, and the historians, political scientists, and genocide specialists set to work. Meanwhile, few, except the survivors, notice that the murderers themselves are disappearing: into thin air (the Turks), into the maquis (the Khmer Rouge), into the refugee camps (the Rwandans), or into their postwar lives as solid citizens (the Nazis). If you go by the numbers of known killers, you would think that millions of people died at the hands of a few miscreants. Exactly one Nazi, the commander of Auschwitz, admitted to murdering Jews.

Veteran war reporter Jean Hatzfeld's Machete Season is an astonishing investigation of a band of gACOnocidaires in the Rwandan countryside, nine men who spent a month hunting and killing their Tutsi neighbors, soccer mates, fellow church members, and relatives. Duch is interesting because he started out from such modest origins, a classic petit-bourgeois nationalist who came to the Communist Party by virtue of brains, study groups, and upward mobility.

"Something terrible happened here. And I don't know what it is," Bill Herod remembers thinking in his first days in Phnom Penh in 1980. He was with Church World Service, one of a group of aid workers allowed into the country after the Vietnamese overthrew the Khmer Rouge in January 1979 and put an end to the three-and-a-half-year-long nightmare of the Cambodian people. In 1980, Herod had just come from Vietnam. He had seen plenty of devastation, but this was something different, a higher order of magnitude.

The political use of Woman as a universal category, transcending social divisions, has fallen into disrepute. Yet it is necessary, in looking at gender history, to understand not just its obfuscations but its sources and political effects. The essay proposes an intellectual and political history of the uses of the term Woman and a social history of the heterogeneous mixtures of women from different social groups who seized the term and gave it force. Discussing recent scholarship on white and Afro‐American women, Stansell argues for the importance of moments of extravagant universalising to the history of women in politics.