Commentaire
In this book devoted to mass violence, Nicolas Mariot offers a deeply questionable interpretation of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. By prioritising mechanisms of social conformity, collective pressures and interpersonal relationships, he tends to downplay the decisive role of racist anti-Tutsi ideology, exterminationist propaganda and the political organisation of the genocide. His critical reading of the work of Hélène Dumas and other scholars also leads him to minimise the destruction of family and social ties between perpetrators and victims, despite the extensive evidence provided by survivors’ testimonies and historical research. More seriously still, in his discussion of the genocide’s death toll, the author presents as matters of "major controversy" estimates that conflate the number of Tutsi exterminated in 1994 with the number of Hutu killed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) between 1994 and 1999. By drawing in particular on the highly controversial work of Christian Davenport and Allan Stam, this presentation perpetuates a confusion characteristic of genocide denial narratives, which seek to blur the distinction between the genocide against the Tutsi and other acts of violence committed in the region. This approach is all the more troubling because the author largely overlooks the seminal research of Jean-Pierre Chrétien and barely engages with the collective volume Les médias du génocide, despite its essential contribution to understanding the development and dissemination of exterminationist ideology. Through the accumulation of these methodological choices, omissions and historically questionable comparisons, the book does more than offer a debatable interpretation of the genocide against the Tutsi: it contributes to obscuring our understanding of it, downplaying its ideological foundations and diminishing its historical specificity.
