The Contribution of Women to Peace and Reconciliation

the period of the first two republics), and finally the ultimate transition
to action (in 1994).
There were, as we have said, additional factors to nurture and grow the
idea of exterminating the Tutsis:
Various authors have, each according to his or her own taste, taken one
or the other of these factors as the cause of the genocide; one could
also argue that it was the combination of all these factors which made
the genocide possible or even inevitable, when the mixture reached an
irreversible stage, a point of no return. But no single element – population
pressure, poverty, etc. – can reasonably explain the genocide by itself.
The following factors are often forgotten or have not attracted
enough attention from analysts:
The harassment of the inyenzi
The fear of Tutsi superiority
Hutu triumphalism
Burundi as a mirror
The routine of killing, or the trivialization of the act of killing a Tutsi.
The harassment of the inyenzi created a sort of obsessive complex in
the country, the feeling of being constantly under siege, which lasted
throughout the two republics and until the genocide. The inyenzi are
cockroaches which attack under cover of darkness, and when light
comes, are elusive. They became a metaphor for the Tutsi, an irreducible
force, and one impossible to get rid of; in short, the Tutsi/inyenzi became
an image of a fate impossible to be rid of. Another symbol was the bird
maten, which every morning buries its mother, who always returns to
its heels, and whom it must re-bury the next day, and forever.
The fear of Tutsi racial superiority, inoculated by Western ideology, fuelled
by stereotypes of colonial language, and transformed into reality by the
Tutsi monopoly on power, embedded itself among the Hutu like a cancer,
and continued to gnaw , feeding a deep resentment.
This obsession may explain the persistent animosity during the genocide
with which the killer not only killed, but killed with refinement
and jubilation (agashinyaguro).
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