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Summary

In 1972, a localised rebellion against the Tutsi-dominated state triggered a ‘selective’ genocide against the Hutu population. This chapter considers the actions and representations of the rebellion, then examines the phases of genocidal repression: massacres in the areas affected by the rebellion, the elimination of prominent politicians, and the decentralised arrest and disappearance of key individuals across the countryside. It explores the processes of legal triage that authorised the murder of civilians through the categorisation of suspicious classes of local intellectuals, teachers, priests and successful traders. It devotes special attention to the role of the youth league in the local repression, partly captured by the control of information and the bureaucratisation of violence. It then considers the different faces of truth in violence: total state denial, the use of frank truth as hopeless protest, the lingering possibilities of loyalty to official truth, and the construction of new truths in the aftermath. The chapter ends with the popular renditions of a postcolonial order, in the nature of violent authority and ethnic community, as being revealed through violence.