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its civil war against the Hutu regime. The country was thrown into confusion. The violence was carried out by highly organized state armies, as well as the coordinated and trained Interahamwe militias, which were groups of armed youth indoctrinated in the Hutu-power ideology who killed and openly terrorized the population. Though a U.N. peacekeeping force had twenty-five thousand troops on the ground, they were quickly withdrawn, along with foreign nationals. Adding to the confusion of the period, the vast majority of Hutu took to the roads, fleeing the violence and the approach of the RPF.

      The details of the violence were horrifying, intimate, and unimaginable.¹³ People targeted by the genocidal regime, whether Tutsi or Hutu opposition, had little chance of survival. Soldiers and police officers encouraged or coerced civilian involvement and forced civilians to “kill or be killed.” Tutsi and those trying to protect them were massacred en masse in churches, schools, and public buildings where they gathered seeking safety, and were sought out in their homes and hunted while fleeing. Many of the people who killed their fellow Rwandans—often intimately, with machetes—had grown up together, went to the same churches and schools, and even intermarried and were related. Women of childbearing age were targeted, especially as objects of rape, sexual humiliation, and sexual mutilation (D. Newbury 1998). Identity cards—introduced by the Belgians but maintained by the First and Second Republics—were used by killers to determine victims’ ethnicity. While the genocide spread nationwide, violence did not play out uniformly across the country; some politicians fought to avoid escalation of violence, and many individuals sought to save neighbors (Des Forges 1999; Janzen 2000; Jefremovas 1995; Longman 1995; Nduwayo 2002; D. Newbury 1998:80–82). In areas where peasants were relatively cohesive and empowered, they were less susceptible to ethnic appeals, and therefore violence had to be imported from outside (Des Forges 1999; Longman 1995). Many people protected others with whom they felt bonds of kin, neighborhood, religion, or humanity.

      Researchers have shown clearly the egregiousness of the international community’s failure to act, detailing the ways the U.N. Security Council and key actors such as the United States hesitated and did not intervene in ways that could have saved lives (Dallaire 2003; Power 2002; Prunier 1995). Members of the French government are widely understood, within Rwanda and outside, to have supported the genocidal regime and to have led a controversial intervention (Operation Turquoise) that resulted in aiding the escape of thousands of perpetrators (Kroslak 2007).

      Debate remains on many points over the genocide: why people joined the killers, and how to understand the link between elite propaganda and individual actions; what the scale and meaning of Hutu casualties were; what the scale of participation was—how many Hutu participated versus how many tried to save neighbors, and how wide the web of collective guilt should be cast; and whether the RPF fighters were heroes or aggressors (Davenport and Stam 2009; Fujii 2009; Straus 2006; Vidal 1998). Those who call this period a civil war and negate the existence of genocide, equating all the killing during this period, are in disagreement with prevailing opinion and scholarship—and, since 2008, in contravention of Rwanda’s genocide ideology law.

      Further, the quantification of genocide victims remains highly contested. In the immediate wake of the genocide, scholars quoted a figure of approximately five hundred thousand victims, but consensus emerged at around eight hundred thousand victims within several years (e.g., Lemarchand 1995, 2009). In April 2004, on the eve of the ten-year anniversary commemorations, the government announced the tally was 937,000 victims, whom they claimed were predominantly Tutsi, and it said that with gacaca ongoing, more victims would likely be identified (Kazoora 2004). This official number rose to more than one million (Kagire 2009). Most scholars believe that both official figures are inflated, and that these numbers must include Hutu, including those killed by the RPF or the newly named Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) during and after the genocide. Davenport and Stam controversially claim that a majority of the victims were most likely Hutu, and that the events should be considered a politicide rather than a genocide (Davenport and Stam 2009).

      The genocide is understood to have ended on July 4, 1994, when the RPF captured Kigali. The RPF put in place a government generally based on one that was mandated by the Arusha Accords, and it tried to govern in a situation marked by massive death and destruction, devastated infrastructure, and displaced population. The late 1990s continued to be marked by instability and violence. Hundreds of thousands of Tutsi returnees quickly began to cross the borders from Burundi and Uganda, while hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees left the country for refugee camps in the DRC. Hutu insurgents living in these refugee camps launched periodic attacks into Rwanda, and RPA responded with attacks against them, under General Kagame. In 1996, the RPA was involved militarily in the DRC, both to clear the refugee camps in efforts to eliminate the rebel threat and to help overthrow President Mobutu, widely considered a dictator, and install Lauren-Désiré Kabila. In 1997, internal civil war resumed as rebel insurgents—former Interahamwe and members of Habyarimana’s army—continued their guerrilla warfare across Rwanda, and the RPA retaliated. Again in 1998, the RPA entered the DRC to quell ongoing threats from Hutu Interahamwe. Rwanda made repeated forays into the DRC between 1998 and 2002 before officially withdrawing in 2002 because of the Pretoria Accords (Lemarchand 2009:26–27), but Reyntjens claims the RPA continued to maintain a clandestine presence (Reyntjens 2005:36). The official period of political governance transition ended in 2003 with Paul Kagame’s election as president.

      The Postgenocide Government’s Master Narrative of History and Its Implications

      The official Hutu-power narrative, propagated by the architects of the genocide to mobilize people and justify the violence, contended that the history of Rwanda was one of conquest by “foreign” Tutsi cattle herders who, through economic and military means, gradually imposed centuries of oppression and exploitation on the Hutu (Eltringham 2004; Malkki 1995; Rutembesa 2002; Semujanga 2003; Twagilimana 2003). This narrative goes on to assert that in the 1959 social revolution, the Hutu reversed this feudal situation and acquired their rightful place. They continued to defend their right to majority rule against domineering, power-hungry Tutsi who wished to reestablish hegemony and oppression, evidenced by continued Tutsi-led violent incursions into Rwanda.

      The official postgenocide narrative was a renegotiation of the Hutu-power narrative, with altered evaluations and different implications for future action. It stated that the Abanyarwanda (inhabitants of Rwanda) were a single ethnic group, and that divisions were created by the colonial leaders. As the national genocide memorial, which opened in April 2004, explained in its text, “We had lived in peace for many centuries, but now [with colonial rule] the divide between us had begun.” The dominant narrative contended that the violence of 1959, when Hutu came to power, marked the beginning of the genocide. Having lived side by side with Hutu for centuries in a relationship of mutual respect and even friendship, Tutsi then were oppressed and persecuted under the First and Second Republics for decades building up to 1994. In 1994, according to this narrative, the Rwandan Patriotic Front reversed the trend of Tutsi persecution by defeating the genocidal regime and establishing a government that restored order, including implementing such policies as abolishing ethnicity and promoting national unity.

      The official postgenocide master narrative was buttressed by the genocide memorials across the countryside, which served as lieux de mémoire (Nora 1989), ritualized spaces in which people actively produced memory. The careful planning of genocide and the international community’s failure to prevent it were manifest in the enormity of the death toll at any given memorial, often marked in hand-lettered signs—twenty-five thousand victims (Kibeho), 11,400 victims (Kibuye Parish), ten thousand victims (Kibuye stadium), 250,000 victims (Kigali genocide memorial). The scattered limbs and disconnected pelvises, the bullet wounds or machete cuts on skulls, the rosaries clutched in shriveled corpses’ fingers, and the devastated physical structures of the churches or schools in which these were found materially represented victims’ desperation and dehumanization. Victims’ innocence was manifest in the corpses of toddlers, the skulls of children, the baby shoes, and leg braces found within the remains of the buildings. The ubiquity of sites across the landscape and the lost lives they immortalized underscore the narrative’s emphasis on the heroism of the RPF in bringing an end to the terror.

      At the same time that the postgenocide authorities were beginning to consolidate a new narrative of history in the wake

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