Abstract
Special file coordinated within the journal by: Camille Evrard, Muriel Gomez-Perez, Martin Mourre, Florent Piton, Nathaniel Powell and Romain Tiquet
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This special dossier revolves around a set of reactions to the report, most often relating to aspects other than the French question, to the methodology and to the conclusions of the commission. Marie-Eve Desrosiers, thus highlights what she considers to be a "presentist bias" in the way in which the commission analyzed the period corresponding to the first months of the civil war at the end of 1990.
Ornella Rovetta questions the possibility of "writing history in commission", that is to say on the basis of an archival corpus and in a chronology defined less by a question of research than by political power.
Via an analysis that she describes as "gender-specific", Caroline Williamson Sinalo highlights the oversight of gender perspectives in the report, not only when it examines the violence and cruelty practices committed before and during the genocide against the Tutsi, but also the accusations of rape made against French soldiers during operations Noroît and Turquoise between 1990 and 1994.
Proposing a rise in generality based on the content of the Duclert report, Étienne Smith is interested on the one hand in the way in which the report examines the tensions and contradictions which crossed the military institution in relation to Rwanda between 1990 and 1994, on the other hand, to the way in which this same institution reacted to the publication of the commission's conclusions.
The dossier of reactions to the Duclert report ends with a text with a singular status, because it does not emanate strictly from an academic personality, in the person of the Senegalese writer Boubacar Boris Diop. In this text, which we are delighted to publish simultaneously in Wolof, he offers a contextualization of the Duclert report, which he clearly emphasizes that it is one step among others – and undoubtedly not the last – on the road to "truth".
Several other texts complete this set of articles. A Varia article by Florent Piton on the historiography of the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda, an interview with François Graner, Survival activist and very committed to the Rwandan issue, as well as several reading reports.