The Foreign Service Journal, November 2005

facilitate the repatriation of Hutu refugees in the Congo, rooted in a failure to understand that these unhappy victims were not being permitted to return to Rwanda by the leaders who controlled their camps. The magnitude of that mis- judgment was exposed when more than 600,000 Hutus cascaded back into Rwanda in four days in Novem- ber 1996, once Kabila and his Rwandan allies had broken the hard-liners’ grasp. (The generally successful Rwandan reabsorption of these refugees marked one of the signal achievements of the Tutsi-led government of Paul Kagame.) At times, the dual approach of interspersing a personal account of the author’s time in the region into chapters of detailed policy analysis leads to a loss of focus. For exam- ple, a brief chapter on a visit to the mountain gorillas and the fate of the family dogs, while presumably in- tended to give the reader a break, interrupts the flow between analysis of the justice system for genocide perpetrators and the refugee prob- lem. (Then again, perhaps that is inevitable in a work which forms part of an ADST series of “memoirs and occasional papers.”) I also found Gribbin’s final “reflections” duplica- tive of conclusions clear from a narra- tive already rich in analysis. However, these are small flaws in a thoroughly readable account, interesting in its detail and incisive on the issues. It should be required reading for all students of Africa’s Great Lakes region and the general subject of genocide. n Retired FSO Dane F. Smith Jr. served as ambassador in Senegal and Guinea, and is currently an adjunct faculty member at Ameri- can University. 68 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 5 B O O K S u