can’t count the number of times I’ve heard “Tutsi aggression” invoked as the reason for the war in the Congo, but it is not the origin of the conflict, as the quote from the BBC at the beginning of this chapter might have you believe. By limiting ourselves to the simplistic “Hutu militia killed half a million Tutsi,” we are suggesting that there is a reason for that violence implicit in those identities, that something about being Hutu and Tutsi caused the violence. While ethnicity is probably the strongest form of social organization in the region, we need to scratch behind that surface, to
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