COMING SOON FROM VOICE OF WITNESS
A POWERFUL NEW BOOK OF ORAL HISTORIES FROM CONGO
Edited by Joe Bavier
The situation in Congo represents one of the worst humanitarian emergencies today. We ask the people who know this complicated story best —the Congolese and Rwandan people who have endured (and hoped) across the years to tell their side of this story. In their own words, they recount their experiences of losing their homes, land, livelihoods and families as a direct result of political violence. Those living abroad in exile or forced to flee to neighboring countries recount their escapes, of cutting through fences, swimming across crocodile-infested rivers and escaping military gunfire as they tried to make their way to safety. This book includes men and women of every age, class and political conviction, from farm laborers to academics, from former child soldiers to artists.
We are currently conducting interviews in Eastern Congo and Rwanda for the book, due out in 2011. These include stories of:
RWANDAN REFUGEES who fled across the country and survived. They describe growing up in Rwanda, fleeing to Congo, and the horror of being pursued across a country the size of western Europe.
FORMER CHILD SOLDIERS from Ituri, where an ethnic conflict provoked by Kampala, Kigali, and Kinshasa grew out of the broader war and set the stage for some of the most brutal killing of the last decade.
CONGOLESE TUTSIS living in camps in Rwanda and Uganda after fleeing the anti-Rwanda/Tutsi backlash, which led to another Rwandan invasion less than two years later and set off a conflict that still hasn’t ended.
Read an excerpt here.
