| Title | Date | Section |
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families
Philip Gourevitch | 10-03-2002 | Genocide |
| An account of a people's response to genocide and what it tells us about humanity. It chronicles what has happened in Rwanda since 1994, when the government called on the Hutu majority to murder the Tutsi minority. Some 800,000 people were exterminated in a hundred days. A Tutsi pastor, in a letter to his church president, a Hutu, used the chilling phrase that gives the book its title. The author descibes the anguish of genocide's aftermath: mass displacements; revenge and the quest for justice. |  |
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Linda Melvern
"A People Betrayed - The Role of the West in Rwandan Genocide" | 01-09-2000 | Genocide |
 | The best academic account on Rwandan genocide.
Linda Melvern has studied hundreds of documents, (she) can be admired for unravelling the background to the genocide and researching official documents. Translating these into readable English is a triumph in itself. Conflict brings out the worse and best in people: the book describes not so much faults of institutions as the actions of individuals who come over as heroes and villains.
Melvern's account of the U.N. Security Council deliberations that spring confirms what was obvious from the general U.N. paralysis. The Western powers, including the U.S., spent most of April 1994 pretending the genocide … |
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| The Rwanda Crisis
Gerard Prunier | 01-02-1998 | Genocide |
| Offering an up-to-date historical perspective which should enable readers to fathom how the brutal massacres of 800,000 Rwandese came to pass in 1994, this volume includes a new chapter that brings the analysis up to the end of 1996. Gerard Prunier probes into how the genocidal events in Rwanda were part of a deadly logic - a plan that served central political and economic interests - rather than a result of primordial tribal hatreds, a notion often invoked by the media to dramatize genocide. |  |
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Road to Hell : The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity
Michael Maren | 01-12-1997 | UN |
 | '...I think this book should be retitled to reflect that 95% of the information is on Somalia and the charities & aid organisations there. I was hoping for a broader look at foreign aid rather than one case study. Nevertheless, this book was compelling at the beginning...'
'...While some of of the arguments made against international relief by Mr. Maren in his book are correct, he goes a bit too far in damning the whole aid sector just by using a few, highly personalized accounts of aid gone wrong to illustrate his point..' |
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Season of Blood: a Rwandan Journey
Fergal Keane | 01-04-1996 | Genocide |
| Fergal Keane was the reporter for the BBC's "Panorama" television documentary on Rwanda. This book, by Keane, is an account of the history of the country, including the colonial period, and an analysis of what led to one of the greatest human tragedies of the century. |  |
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Linda Melvern
"The Ultimate Crime - Who Betrayed the UN and Why" | 01-01-1995 | UN |
 | "......the 1990’s has seen something of proliferation of books on the UN. Linda Melvern’s book deserves a place on or very near the top of the pile....this is a hidden history of the UN, indeed of the post 1945 world which will be of value to academics and the general reader. It is a major work of fact and argument which deserves considerable attention from those wanting to know how the UN worked during its first 50 years". |
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