This work places Burundi in the current global debate on ethnicity by describing and analyzing the wholesale massacre of the Hutu majority by the Tutsi minority. The author refutes the governments version of these events, which places blame on theMoreThis work places Burundi in the current global debate on ethnicity by describing and analyzing the wholesale massacre of the Hutu majority by the Tutsi minority.
The author refutes the governments version of these events, which places blame on the former colonial government and the church. He offers documentation that identifies the source of these massacres as occurring across a socially constructed fault-line that pitted the Hutu majoritys use of ethnicity, as an instrument for the achievement of majority rule in parliament, against the Tutsi minoritys use of ethnocide to gain hegemony.
By analyzing the roots of ethnicity conflict, the author derives institutional and other formulae through which conflict among the primary groups in Burundi - and elsewhere - may be mitigated.