Rencontre : Michel Bussi

Description

april 6, 1944. A bolt of lightning rips the sky over Kigali. The Rwandan president’s Falcon explodes in mid-air. A hundred days of terror and bloodshed begin. The perpetrators of the missile attacks were never identified. But someone knows the truth.

Christmas 2024. Jorik, a retired soldier, his daughter Aline and his granddaughter Maé travel to Rwanda. For Jorik, it’s a dizzying plunge into the twists and turns of his past, in the footsteps of his wife who died thirty years earlier. She kept a diary in which massacres, complicities, names and faces were recorded.

Michel Bussi has carried the subject of this book with him since his first year as a teacher-researcher in political geography at the University of Rouen… in 1994. He alerted his students in particular to the silence of the French media, to the then predominant thesis of an “inter-ethnic” war, and to the complexity of the causes of the genocide and its tragic scale.

This text is the sum total of several thousand hours of book-reading, French and international investigative reports, trial reports, staff notes on each military operation, screenings of news reports and documentaries, interviews with specialists, testimonials from survivors and survivors, and a decisive trip to 2023 with journalist Patrick de Saint-Exupéry.

Registration required, signing from 6pm.