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We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda
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We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda

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We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families is the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.

An unforgettable firsthand account of a people's response to genocide and what it tells us about humanity.

This remarkable debut book from Philip Gourevitch chronicles what has happened in Rwanda and neighboring states since 1994, when the Rwandan government called on everyone in the Hutu majority to murder everyone in the Tutsi minority. Though the killing was low-tech--largely by machete--it was carried out at shocking speed: some 800,000 people were exterminated in a hundred days. A Tutsi pastor, in a letter to his church president, a Hutu, used the chilling phrase that gives Gourevitch his title.

With keen dramatic intensity, Gourevitch frames the genesis and horror of Rwanda's "genocidal logic" in the anguish of its aftermath: the mass displacements, the temptations of revenge and the quest for justice, the impossibly crowded prisons and refugee camps. Through intimate portraits of Rwandans in all walks of life, he focuses on the psychological and political challenges of survival and on how the new leaders of postcolonial Africa went to war in the Congo when resurgent genocidal forces threatened to overrun central Africa.

Can a country composed largely of perpetrators and victims create a cohesive national society? This moving contribution to the literature of witness tells us much about the struggle everywhere to forge sane, habitable political orders, and about the stubbornness of the human spirit in a world of extremity.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 4, 1999
ISBN9780374706487
Author

Philip Gourevitch

Philip Gourevitch is the author of We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families. He is a staff writer for the New Yorker and editor of the Paris Review.

Read more from Philip Gourevitch

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Rating: 4.542857142857143 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Many people don't want to read about the 'upsetting' events of Rwanda, but perhaps if more people read about these events they would be less likely to happen, or be ignored when the do happen. The issues surrounding the genocide are explained well and leave the reader feeling very disappointed in the UN and the world community as a whole of ignoring the events at the time
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    An incredible recounting of the Rwandan genocide that sheds a lot of light across the atrocity of the different players and motivations involved. It is harrowing and chilling but also incredibly well written. Well worth the read whether you are interested in Rwandan history or not.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Beautifully written and an extremely important topic. The author goes over how the genocide occurred, what happened during it, what happened after, and its repercussions. A must-read for everyone.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The title of the book comes from a letter written to Paston Elizaphan Ntakirutimana. In it, several Advent pastors, hiding in a hospital state, "We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families..." (p 42). Such a devastating cry for help...only to end in betrayal. But probably the most helpless and hopeless line in the book (for me anyway), was "I took it we were under attack, and did nothing because I had no idea what to do" (p 33). I can't imagine knowing full well murderers were coming for me, and yet having no idea how to save myself. Imagine having nowhere to go. Nowhere to hide. No way to protect yourself. Heartbreaking. Like macabre trick or treating, gangs went from town to town, just looking for people to massacre.I find myself asking over and over again how neighbors, friends, relatives, business partners could rise up against their brethren. To kill over and over again with such horrific brutality. Not just an impersonal shot to the head. Not just a quick execution from a far off distance, but an up-close and personal hacking, slashing, chopping; a hand to hand combat/rape/pillage with machetes and knives, sticks and stony rage. The willingness, the eagerness to turn on people you had once worked, lived, learned or played side by side. Colleagues killed colleagues. Neighbors annihilated neighbors. Teachers assassinated their students. Friends turned one another with surprising ease. Gourevitch tries to make sense of it in We Wish to Inform You... by going back historically and analyzing the time before the genocide. His style is to think about the subject from a distance and then living with it up close. He walks around a topic to scrutinize it from every angle. His focus was to ask what really happened and how its aftermath is understood today (at the time of his writing).

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A very difficult topic that was researched and investigated very thoroughly. The situation in Rwanda and the lack of international intervention is shameful. I found this book hard to read but was glad for the insight and the various points of view that the journalist shared. Well worth the read if you are attempting to learn about this awful period of time in Rwanda history.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    All at once, as it seemed, something we could have only imagined was upon us—and we could still only imagine it. This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.
    This was a very difficult book to read, and an even harder book to review. If it wasn't for my library's year-long reading challenge, and the prompt to "read a book written by a journalist", I never would have even picked this up. But I'm so glad I did, however horrible it was to read. It explained a lot of the questions I had about this dark time. My only other knowledge of the Rwandan Genocide came entirely from the film Hotel Rwanda, which really only showed a select part of the story, and left a great deal of context out. It's a fantastic film, and I do really recommend it, but this book definitely far surpasses it in terms of information and educational value.

    This book is split into two main parts, and in general, they follow first the events leading up to and including the massacre, and then the aftermath and recovery efforts (if some of them can even be called that). It's a tiring tale with apocalyptic elements straight out of a far-fetched science fiction novel. It feels a little unreal sometimes, this dark age story from just a few years before I was born. It feels anachronistic but then, looking at the world I live in now, so very relevant and intrinsically real.

    The massacre itself, this cruel act of genocide, was, and I feel wrong admitting this, my favorite part of the book. It was straightforwardly awful, and there was some part of it that was morbidly fascinating. Gourevitch addresses this phenomenon directly and gives excellent commentary on it without either condemning or condoning. This same very direct but equally objective perspective pervades the entire book, and I really appreciated it.

    "It sometimes happens that some people tell lies and others tell the truth."
    The part that disgusted me beyond even the senseless slaughter itself was the reaction or lack thereof on the part of the international community, primarily regarding America and France. I guess people just want to ignore that the French actively supplied the Hutu aggressors and that the world refused to call this a genocide lest they be required to give any aid whatsoever. And when they were forced to help, they continued to help those doing the killing and ignored those who suffered the most. And why? For what? What could have possibly made these modern nations commit such atrocities?

    "You cannot count on the international community unless you're rich, and we are not[...] We don't have oil, so it doesn't matter that we have blood, or that we are human beings."
    And it makes sense: look at the USA's constant neglect of even its own people in recent years and throughout history, as seen in the Michigan water crisis, in post-hurricane Puerto Rico, and in the systematic abuse of African Americans and Mexican immigrants, particularly children. What seems, at face value, wrong and illogical -- that first world countries in the modern age could be so cruel and unusual against their fellow man -- is actually very, very believable.

    And when Rwanda tried to recover on its own, it was attacked again from all angles, from within and from without.

    "It's not so much the human rights concerns, it's more political. It's 'Let's kill this development, this dangerous development of these Africans trying to do things their own way.'"
    This book taught me that human nature is complicated and sometimes very extreme, that people hold grudges, sometimes senselessly and sometimes with good reason. That people can be tipped over the edge and will keep falling until either they or their enemy are dead. What I learned will stick with me forever. In this age of mass killings every other day, it's something I can hardly ever forget.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Don’t think this can’t happen in the United States. Look at how the powers that be and the media label and defame the right.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This was a much more political work than I had originally imagined from the emotive title. Nonetheless it was pretty readable and is really an account par excellence of the 1994 Rwanda massacre. Gourevitch considers the event from every possible angle:- the European influence that initially promoted the 'racially superior' minority Tutsis...and the later more egalitarian rulers who started pushing for the rights of the oppressed Hutu-the support of western governments of sundry entirely corrupt rulers-the pathetically ineffectual UN forces-and, perhaps most strikingly, the refusal of 'aid agencies' to do anything concrete to halt the killings;. A the Hutu aggressors fled to Zaire and set up huge refugee camps, billions of pounds of aid was diverted to these apparent victims- regardless of fact that many were guilty of horrific bloodshed. Gourevitch relates the naive, sunny assurances of youthful aid workers that the victims need to put it behind them and live in harmony...even as the culprits flood back in from Zaire, often resuming their violent activities...and facing no punishment.This is a sobering, thought-provoking work that shows the huge and impossible mess that Rwanda is up against; and the criminal inadequacy of those we look to for guidance (the UN! Peace keeping forces! Western governments!)
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book will stay with me for a long time. Not an easy read, and not a happy book, and there are no easy answers at the end. Brilliant, and terrible.

    If this book has a single theme, it is that "Never Again" is a hypocritical sham. It should be called "Never Mind We Don't Actually Care." Genocide can happen anywhere, even in places as ordinary as Rwanda, and when it happened nobody lifted a finger to help.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Philip Gourvetich's "We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families" is a heart-wrenching account of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. It's estimated 1 million Tutsis (and some Hutu moderates) were murdered in 100 days by the Hutu majority. That's something like five people killed every minute. Entire families were slaughtered even though there is little to distinguish the two ethnic groups from each other except for national identity cards.Gourvetich's book tries to answer the unanswerable: How could Hutus suddenly listen to those in power, pick up machetes and start beating, raping and murdering their neighbors and even family members en masse? How could the international community turn its back until much later, when it ended up responding by suppling refugee camps made up mostly of the murderers themselves? And how can a nation "heal" from this when Tutsi survivors are expected to live amongst the people who murdered their entire families, including their children and grandchildren? I'm not sure any of the questions are really thoroughly answered, nor can they be. The book was not exactly what I expected... I expected more stories from both Tutsi survivors and Hutu perpetrators, though I understand the latter was impossible as few Gourvetich interviewed would admit they participated in the genocide. The book is more often an exploration of the region's politics, which was still eye-opening and sad.Overall, the book is well written and thought provoking though at times difficult to read because of the subject matter.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    800,000 or more Rwandans were killed in 1994 by fellow Rwandans in the “most Christianized country in Africa.” According to one Christian leader, Muslims were the only religious community that didn’t kill during this episode. Journalist Phillip Gourevitch attempts to explain the bloodbath. His book, which concludes with the nation’s situation not yet solved, is the kind that is cited when later histories are written. It is impressive for how much he found to report and how deeply he has thought about what happened.The conflict seemed simple. Hutus slaughtered Tutsis—the old story of ethnic grievance. Except . . . until 1959 “there had never been systematic political violence recorded between Hutus and Tutsis—anywhere.” Finding the ignition points is vital to Gourevitch, for once set in motion Rwanda proved a genocide can happen far faster than seems imaginable, even when executed with rudimentary weapons. Among factors he identifies is the dark poison of colonial attitudes well-illustrated by François Mitterrand’s declaration that “In such countries, genocide is not too important.” Oh?Cue Stalin: “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.”“Why the killing?” wasn’t the only question to explore. For the rebuilding and healing of Rwandan society, there were others: How forgive the génocidaires? And, perversely, how trust Tutsis who didn’t flee Rwanda yet survived? Crucial questions, for the forces aligned with the genocide were afterward defeated by a rebel army formed of Tutsi refugees escaped from past persecutions. The Tutsi leader was General Paul Kagame. He comes across as a most impressive figure, so much so that Gourevitch might be mistaken for the General’s press secretary. And since the horrors recorded here tend to invest readers in the author’s judgments, there is a natural desire to believe in Kagame’s greatness, perhaps too uncritically.The book concludes with what possibly was as near to a symbol for hope as Gourevitch could discover in the circumstances, a hope, derived grotesquely, that it’s possible to reject insularity and identify as one with others who differ somehow. The scene’s heartbreaking character, considered with all the author has reported, can’t but make that hope seem the most perishable of aspirations.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    "God no longer wants you." So spoke a local pastor, a man of religion, as he ordered the massacre of 2,000 of his Tutsi neighbours and friends. The mass killings that took place in Rwanda in 1994 stand as the most hideous since Hitler and Stalin, yet they were aided by the French government, who supported the maniacal Hutu Power government. This book tears apart the excuses given by the Western powers as to why they didn't interfere, why they just let more than 800,000 Tutsis be obliterated without lifting one finger.

    Gourevitch brings passion to his words and outlines the history of not only Rwanda, but of its ties to Uganda, what-was-then-Zaire, Burundi, and other African countries. In Rwanda, a Tutsi was called an inyenzi, a cockroach. So when the government called on its Hutu citizens to cleanse the land, they immediately took their machetes and went to work. How could so many humans kill so many others? The book strips down the national ethos of Rwanda, showing an ingrain mob mentality often referred to as 'community'.

    "I cry, you cry. You cry, I cry. We all come running, and the one that stays quiet, the one that stays home, must explain. This is simple. This is normal. This is community."

    When the rebel Tutsi group started taking control, the Hutu murderers fled across the borders to camps...funded by the great Western powers. The money was spent, because it had to be spent, and Hutus not only lived well, but were then allowed to return to their original homes, while their maimed Tutsi neighbours squatted in burned-out villages.

    "Do you know what genocide is? A cheese sandwich. Write it down. Genocide is a cheese sandwich. Genocide, genocide, genocide. Cheese sandwich, cheese sandwich, cheese sandwich. Who gives a shit?"

    We always look at the Holocaust, and the Great Purge, and we say to ourselves, ah well, that would never happen where I live. While this book is about Rwanda, it is really more about the internal compass inside every human being which points us to being part of the mob, to not stand out. Maybe the zombies have already arrived, and they are us.

    Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy. (Ralph Ellison)

    Book Season = Year Round

    2 people found this helpful

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I didn't finish this history of the conflict between the Hutus & Tutsis in Rwanda because it was, frankly, boring. However, I did listen to it for about 4 hours and set it down with a couple of important points to consider.Just as the Dutch did in South Africa and Hitler did in Germany, power was gathered by creating hatred between two groups who had peacefully coexisted for a very long time. I felt a shiver run up my spine when I saw the parallel to what is happening in my own country, the United States, as Trump and his Conservative Coalition create and exacerbate divisions between Democrats and Republicans. Seriously, it is terrifying!The second idea, much less frightening, yet certainly creating food for thought, is that history is told by folks who have adopted a perspective of particular groups, at the expense of other groups. I will have to chew on this for a while.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is not an easy book to review. Rwanda and the world's response to it is a mess. The genocide in Rwanda is an important subject, not only for the fact that it happened, but also because it is still denied to have happened by those that caused it, and that the international community did so little to prevent it, to punish those that caused it, and to prevent it from reoccurring. My complaint about the book is the authors approach to telling the story. In the beginning Gourevitch seems to be telling how he learned about the genocide, rather than reporting the events. Ultimately, he gets the facts out, but without obvious clarity. He then shifts to a more traditional reporting stance as the deaths pile up...literally. The reader at that point may assume that the main event is over, but then Gourevitch shifts to reporting on what folks say (or don't say) about what happened. Occasionally, he shifts to commentary mode, but then shifts back to "roving reporter". We eventually learn that, like an earthquake, this genocide also has its significant "aftershocks", causing further misery. Throughout this aftershock period, Gourevitch makes a number of very insightful observations, such as, "So survival can seem a curse, for one of the dominant needs of the needy soul is to be needed." For me, the strength of the book is the author's persistence to find what really happened and why, not just the statistics or the gore.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Great book -sad that it was written but important that it was. Yet more proof that we are not all equal. Betrayal of a small country in Africa by the West and more importantly by the impotence of the United Nations (both intentional and. non-intentional.A must read -Ask yourself, "do we have a world force that is capable of helping any people in the midst of a revolution?" Unfortunately the answer appears to be no, only groups and governments looking to gain an advantage on the world stage.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The title of this book is a sentence from a letter written by a group of Tutsi pastors writing on behalf of themselves and their congregants from the place they've taken refuge to their spiritual superiors. Despite their pleas, help is not forthcoming and most are slaughtered. Approximately 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis were slaughtered by their Hutu neighbors in 100 days during the spring of 1994. The government and Hutu power brokers had been encouraging the slaughter in the public media for months.

    Philip Gourevtich , a writer for the New Yorker, compiles an extensive review of not only the genocide itself, but the history of the Tutsis and Hutus, the historical involvement of France and Belgium and their creation of a rift that didn't previously exist for their own national interests, and the lack of interest by the outside world in the African tragedy. While the personal stories and the political situation of the genocide itself are engrossing, it seems that the horror gets lost in the author's need to cover not only the crisis, but ancient Rwandan history, international response to the horror, his reaction to the policies of aid agencies, and the attitude of other African nations as they take advantage of the refugees and international aid.

    I enjoyed this book but think it would have had more of an impact had it been more tightly edited. I was glad I had previously watched the movie "Hotel Rwanda" which gave a more emotional picture of the human betrayal and bravery of the Rwandans, and heartbreak of the international military force forbidden to intervene in the slaughter.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book is an account of the genocide that occurred in Rwanda in 1994, when 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered by Hutus in the period of 3 months. They were killed, mostly with machetes, in the most horrific ways imaginable, while the rest of the world turned their eyes away.
    Philip Gourevitch explains just how the genocide came to pass, and what the aftermath was in the following four years.
    Along with the facts, this book raises so many questions – How can a person hack to death someone in their own family? How does one “survive” this kind of event? Why didn’t somebody from outside Rwanda (i.e. a European nation or the United States) step in to help put down the killers? How could the Tutsis live side-by-side with the Hutus after the refugees returned?
    Gourevitch interviewed survivors, killers, government officials, business people, and professional soldiers among others. He writes with amazing clarity and detail regarding the timeline of events. His access to the people he interviewed was incredible. He must have been nearly fearless in his attempts to gain the truth.
    This book is an important chronicle of a horrendous event. Just like the Holocaust, this is an event which shouldn’t be forgotten.
    ~Stephanie
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    3.25 starsThis is a history of Rwanda leading up to, focusing on, and continuing beyond the genocide in 1994. This wasn't quite what I expected. I was expecting stories from the survivors of the genocide, and there was some of that, but there was also a lot of history and politics, as well. So, for me, some parts were more interesting than others. Overall, it was o.k.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Philip Gourevich's account of the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda is soul shattering and haunting. One of the most important case studies of Rwanda's aftermath.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    As another reviewer pointed-out, this book haunts you. The title refers to a line from a letter seeking aide written by a group of Tutsi Seventh Day Adventist ministers to their bishop, a Hutu, requesting that he intervene on their behalf. Not only did he not help them, by some accounts he assisted in their slaughter. Between April and June, 1994 roughly 800,000-1,000,000 Tutsis were killed in Rwanda. G. reveals the background of the genocide. He shows the government radio and print media calls to kill building. He tells us that Hutus who protested or refused to kill might be killed themselves. Most damning of all he reveals the lack of response from the International Community.This book lacks an index and bibliography. A study of this book paired with the movie Hotel Rwanda, and the book Machete Season for a powerful unit on violence and personal responsibility.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Outstanding account of the war in Rwanda. I saw the author on Chalie Rose, I think, and I knew I had to read it. So many things go on in the world and it's just a headline to me but this war was happening when I was a cognizant adult and I cared about it. It seemed that the world was standing by as people in Yugoslavia and Rwanda were being slaughtered. This book changed the way I feel about war and it made me feel cynical, maybe in a good way. I began to realize how cruel an entire government or even the world could be.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Excellent reminder of how easy it is to follow along.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A vivid, unsettling, and ultimately heartbreaking history the Rwandan genocide, this is one of those books that might permanently alter the way you see the whole of humanity. While it's clearly written for a general audience, "We Wish to Inform" does a fairly good job of describing the complex political and social situation that precipitated the massacre and illustrating the genocide's visceral brutality shocking pace, and surprisingly low-tech modus operandi. He's also scathing when describing the developed world's equivocal and halfhearted response to the massacre. Still, while one of the cover's blurbs describes Gourevich's account as "definitive," it struck me as anything but. The author isn't interested in counting every body or providing a moment-by-moment timeline of the events of '94. The question he is most interested in answering is what, exactly, motivated a large population of Hutus to take up arms against their defenseless neighbors, with whom they'd lived in relative peace for most of their lives. While the author delves as deeply as he can into the psychological conditions and ethnic divisions that facilitated the genocide, I'm not sure that he comes away with a really satisfactory answer to this quesiton, which will surely frustrate some of his readers. His book's a useful document, and it's essential reading for Western readers who know little about this awful chapter of African history and would like to know more, but real clarity seems to elude his, and everybody else's, grasp. Part of this may have something to do with the relative silence of the massacre's Hutu participants: Gourevich interviews only one member of a Hutu death squad, and he seems unwilling to divulge his real reasons for participating in the killing or contemplate the nature of his guilt. I'd be interested to know what the massacre's participants have to say for themselves now that more than fifteen years have passed since the events described in this book.Where Gourevich's book succeeds is in convincing his readers that the Rwandan genocide was a complex and exceptional event and not, as has been argued, just another example of "Africans acting like Africans." Gourevich works hard to make it clear that while some Rwandans acted dishonorably and others honorably when the massacres began, they all made conscious choices and reacted to specific historical circumstances. In a sense, Gourevich is doing precisely what the best historians, and the best storytellers, set out to do: rescuing individuality from the passage of time and his readers' own prejudices. While not "definitive," then, "We Wish to Inform..." is an overwhelmingly sad and necessary book, and one hopes that its relative success makes a recurrence of the mistakes made before, during and after the Rwandan genocide a bit less likely.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I was assigned this book in college for a poli sci course on human rights. And I didn't read it. I felt bad, but the reading for that class got overwhelming and I was working on my thesis and...Anyway, I wanted to read it. So I finally did one summer. Right after taking a graduate course on nationalism too. This book is incredibly powerful, and Gourevitch does an amazing job at searing our emotions (how on earth did we let this slide?) without simply appealing to our guilt. What a wicked reminder of how much growing up we as humans have left to do.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The author makes a powerful case for why we have to look at things that are ugly, painful and into the darkest places that human beings can go. You cannot "enjoy" or "love" a book like this. I am not sure I could read it again. The book will, however, stay with me and I will recommend it to everyone I know as required reading.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Moving, immediate, journalistic account of the genocide in Rwanda in the 1990's. The author interviews participants after the genocide is complete and shows a society trying to regain its balance.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Okay, it's only been three years. I started We wish to inform you yesterday, but the details were so grim I had to stop reading for a while and do something a little less painful. This morning, I was startled to read an interview in Oprah with Paul Rusesabagina, the man who hid 1,268 people in his hotel during the terrible civil war described in We wish to inform you. A hard book to read, but obviously it is one I should be reading. Later:A very hard book for me to read. In the years it has been sitting on my shelf, I've picked it up a hundred times and then put it back down...too dark, I thought...too bleak...too depressing. It is every one of these things, dark, bleak, depressing. But it cannot be ignored. We must look closely at this horror, to understand it, to think about it, to know this is also part of who we are as human beings, awful as that is to admit. Can we figure out the whys of how this happened? Can we find ways to stop it from happening again? I am not sure, but I know that I want to try.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    'During the genocide, I didn't know - I thought so many people did as I did, because I know that if they'd wanted they could have done so.' - Paul RusesabaginaWow.This was one of those books where reading just a few pages was not really an option. I liked this book because the first half tells the story of what happed during the Rwandan genocide, and the second half tells why it happend. The author, Philip Gourevitch, doesn't flinch at pulling punches, he doesn't shy away from saying 'x screwed up', or from taking sides, and he isn't afraid to said that intolerance is intolerable or that Rwandans are people with motives and politics, rather than some backward primordial tribal people.Mr. Gourevitch makes a few very simple, should-be-obvious, yet completely overlooked points about the genocide that I think are central to understanding what happened:1) The causes were not as straightforward or pithy or about nothing as was commonly described by outsiders or the develped world2) That essentially the genocide was political strategy, and that it was not simply a case of descent into an anarchic scramble for power, nor was it an end but rather a means.3) Rwandans, especially the Hutu Power refugees, are not babes in the wilderness, or naive, and have self-motivations and strategies, and have been able to manipulate and utilize the international community for their own benefit.This book lays the groundwork for a compelling argument that the international community has a moral imperative to take the side of preventing loss of human life and should be able to committ troops - really commit troops - to do so.This is not a dry book, but nor is it a weepy book - it presents personal stories through the genocide, profiles of how Rwandans see themselves and the time 'Before' and up to 1998, but also a sharp look at the West and developed nations.Overall highly recommended, but not for the faint of heart reading at teatime.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    'During the genocide, I didn't know - I thought so many people did as I did, because I know that if they'd wanted they could have done so.' - Paul RusesabaginaWow.This was one of those books where reading just a few pages was not really an option. I liked this book because the first half tells the story of what happed during the Rwandan genocide, and the second half tells why it happend. The author, Philip Gourevitch, doesn't flinch at pulling punches, he doesn't shy away from saying 'x screwed up', or from taking sides, and he isn't afraid to said that intolerance is intolerable or that Rwandans are people with motives and politics, rather than some backward primordial tribal people.Mr. Gourevitch makes a few very simple, should-be-obvious, yet completely overlooked points about the genocide that I think are central to understanding what happened:1) The causes were not as straightforward or pithy or about nothing as was commonly described by outsiders or the develped world2) That essentially the genocide was political strategy, and that it was not simply a case of descent into an anarchic scramble for power, nor was it an end but rather a means.3) Rwandans, especially the Hutu Power refugees, are not babes in the wilderness, or naive, and have self-motivations and strategies, and have been able to manipulate and utilize the international community for their own benefit.This book lays the groundwork for a compelling argument that the international community has a moral imperative to take the side of preventing loss of human life and should be able to committ troops - really commit troops - to do so.This is not a dry book, but nor is it a weepy book - it presents personal stories through the genocide, profiles of how Rwandans see themselves and the time 'Before' and up to 1998, but also a sharp look at the West and developed nations.Overall highly recommended, but not for the faint of heart reading at teatime.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I read this book for a political anthropology course in college and it completely blew my mind. This book woke me up and shook me. I had no idea about any atrocities in Rwanda until I read this brilliant book - how sad is that? Gourevitch has written a superb book that details and informs the public about the genocides in Rwanda. He explores the magnitude of the destruction that occurred in that country, along with the disgusting ways in which the world did not answer the calls for help that were being shouted by the peoples being massacred on a daily basis. This book provokes emotions and instigates discussions and is generally a wonderful book to read.

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We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families - Philip Gourevitch

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Part One

Leontius, the son of Aglaion, was coming up from the Peiraeus, close to the outer side of the north wall, when he saw some dead bodies lying near the executioner, and he felt a desire to look at them, and at the same time felt disgust at the thought, and tried to turn aside. For some time he fought with himself and put his hand over his eyes, but in the end the desire got the better of him, and opening his eyes wide with his fingers he ran forward to the bodies, saying, There you are, curse you, have your fill of the lovely spectacle.

—PLATO, The Republic

1

IN THE PROVINCE of Kibungo, in eastern Rwanda, in the swamp- and pastureland near the Tanzanian border, there’s a rocky hill called Nyarubuye with a church where many Tutsis were slaughtered in mid-April of 1994. A year after the killing I went to Nyarubuye with two Canadian military officers. We flew in a United Nations helicopter, traveling low over the hills in the morning mists, with the banana trees like green starbursts dense over the slopes. The uncut grass blew back as we dropped into the center of the parish schoolyard. A lone soldier materialized with his Kalashnikov, and shook our hands with stiff, shy formality. The Canadians presented the paperwork for our visit, and I stepped up into the open doorway of a classroom.

At least fifty mostly decomposed cadavers covered the floor, wadded in clothing, their belongings strewn about and smashed. Macheted skulls had rolled here and there.

The dead looked like pictures of the dead. They did not smell. They did not buzz with flies. They had been killed thirteen months earlier, and they hadn’t been moved. Skin stuck here and there over the bones, many of which lay scattered away from the bodies, dismembered by the killers, or by scavengers—birds, dogs, bugs. The more complete figures looked a lot like people, which they were once. A woman in a cloth wrap printed with flowers lay near the door. Her fleshless hip bones were high and her legs slightly spread, and a child’s skeleton extended between them. Her torso was hollowed out. Her ribs and spinal column poked through the rotting cloth. Her head was tipped back and her mouth was open: a strange image—half agony, half repose.

I had never been among the dead before. What to do? Look? Yes. I wanted to see them, I suppose; I had come to see them—the dead had been left unburied at Nyarubuye for memorial purposes—and there they were, so intimately exposed. I didn’t need to see them. I already knew, and believed, what had happened in Rwanda. Yet looking at the buildings and the bodies, and hearing the silence of the place, with the grand Italianate basilica standing there deserted, and beds of exquisite, decadent, death-fertilized flowers blooming over the corpses, it was still strangely unimaginable. I mean one still had to imagine it.

Those dead Rwandans will be with me forever, I expect. That was why I had felt compelled to come to Nyarubuye: to be stuck with them—not with their experience, but with the experience of looking at them. They had been killed there, and they were dead there. What else could you really see at first? The Bible bloated with rain lying on top of one corpse or, littered about, the little woven wreaths of thatch which Rwandan women wear as crowns to balance the enormous loads they carry on their heads, and the water gourds, and the Converse tennis sneaker stuck somehow in a pelvis.

The soldier with the Kalashnikov—Sergeant Francis of the Rwandese Patriotic Army, a Tutsi whose parents had fled to Uganda with him when he was a boy, after similar but less extensive massacres in the early 1960s, and who had fought his way home in 1994 and found it like this—said that the dead in this room were mostly women who had been raped before being murdered. Sergeant Francis had high, rolling girlish hips, and he walked and stood with his butt stuck out behind him, an oddly purposeful posture, tipped forward, driven. He was, at once, candid and briskly official. His English had the punctilious clip of military drill, and after he told me what I was looking at I looked instead at my feet. The rusty head of a hatchet lay beside them in the dirt.

A few weeks earlier, in Bukavu, Zaire, in the giant market of a refugee camp that was home to many Rwandan Hutu militiamen, I had watched a man butchering a cow with a machete. He was quite expert at his work, taking big precise strokes that made a sharp hacking noise. The rallying cry to the killers during the genocide was Do your work! And I saw that it was work, this butchery; hard work. It took many hacks—two, three, four, five hard hacks—to chop through the cow’s leg. How many hacks to dismember a person?

Considering the enormity of the task, it is tempting to play with theories of collective madness, mob mania, a fever of hatred erupted into a mass crime of passion, and to imagine the blind orgy of the mob, with each member killing one or two people. But at Nyarubuye, and at thousands of other sites in this tiny country, on the same days of a few months in 1994, hundreds of thousands of Hutus had worked as killers in regular shifts. There was always the next victim, and the next. What sustained them, beyond the frenzy of the first attack, through the plain physical exhaustion and mess of it?

The pygmy in Gikongoro said that humanity is part of nature and that we must go against nature to get along and have peace. But mass violence, too, must be organized; it does not occur aimlessly. Even mobs and riots have a design, and great and sustained destruction requires great ambition. It must be conceived as the means toward achieving a new order, and although the idea behind that new order may be criminal and objectively very stupid, it must also be compellingly simple and at the same time absolute. The ideology of genocide is all of those things, and in Rwanda it went by the bald name of Hutu Power. For those who set about systematically exterminating an entire people—even a fairly small and unresisting subpopulation of perhaps a million and a quarter men, women, and children, like the Tutsis in Rwanda—blood lust surely helps. But the engineers and perpetrators of a slaughter like the one just inside the door where I stood need not enjoy killing, and they may even find it unpleasant. What is required above all is that they want their victims dead. They have to want it so badly that they consider it a necessity.

So I still had much to imagine as I entered the classroom and stepped carefully between the remains. These dead and their killers had been neighbors, schoolmates, colleagues, sometimes friends, even in-laws. The dead had seen their killers training as militias in the weeks before the end, and it was well known that they were training to kill Tutsis; it was announced on the radio, it was in the newspapers, people spoke of it openly. The week before the massacre at Nyarubuye, the killing began in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali. Hutus who opposed the Hutu Power ideology were publicly denounced as accomplices of the Tutsis and were among the first to be killed as the extermination got under way. In Nyarubuye, when Tutsis asked the Hutu Power mayor how they might be spared, he suggested that they seek sanctuary at the church. They did, and a few days later the mayor came to kill them. He came at the head of a pack of soldiers, policemen, militiamen, and villagers; he gave out arms and orders to complete the job well. No more was required of the mayor, but he also was said to have killed a few Tutsis himself.

The killers killed all day at Nyarubuye. At night they cut the Achilles tendons of survivors and went off to feast behind the church, roasting cattle looted from their victims in big fires, and drinking beer. (Bottled beer, banana beer—Rwandans may not drink more beer than other Africans, but they drink prodigious quantities of it around the clock.) And, in the morning, still drunk after whatever sleep they could find beneath the cries of their prey, the killers at Nyarubuye went back and killed again. Day after day, minute to minute, Tutsi by Tutsi: all across Rwanda, they worked like that. It was a process, Sergeant Francis said. I can see that it happened, I can be told how, and after nearly three years of looking around Rwanda and listening to Rwandans, I can tell you how, and I will. But the horror of it—the idiocy, the waste, the sheer wrongness—remains uncircumscribable.

Like Leontius, the young Athenian in Plato, I presume that you are reading this because you desire a closer look, and that you, too, are properly disturbed by your curiosity. Perhaps, in examining this extremity with me, you hope for some understanding, some insight, some flicker of self-knowledge—a moral, or a lesson, or a clue about how to behave in this world: some such information. I don’t discount the possibility, but when it comes to genocide, you already know right from wrong. The best reason I have come up with for looking closely into Rwanda’s stories is that ignoring them makes me even more uncomfortable about existence and my place in it. The horror, as horror, interests me only insofar as a precise memory of the offense is necessary to understand its legacy.

The dead at Nyarubuye were, I’m afraid, beautiful. There was no getting around it. The skeleton is a beautiful thing. The randomness of the fallen forms, the strange tranquillity of their rude exposure, the skull here, the arm bent in some uninterpretable gesture there—these things were beautiful, and their beauty only added to the affront of the place. I couldn’t settle on any meaningful response: revulsion, alarm, sorrow, grief, shame, incomprehension, sure, but nothing truly meaningful. I just looked, and I took photographs, because I wondered whether I could really see what I was seeing while I saw it, and I wanted also an excuse to look a bit more closely.

We went on through the first room and out the far side. There was another room and another and another and another. They were all full of bodies, and more bodies were scattered in the grass, and there were stray skulls in the grass, which was thick and wonderfully green. Standing outside, I heard a crunch. The old Canadian colonel stumbled in front of me, and I saw, though he did not notice, that his foot had rolled on a skull and broken it. For the first time at Nyarubuye my feelings focused, and what I felt was a small but keen anger at this man. Then I heard another crunch, and felt a vibration underfoot. I had stepped on one, too.

RWANDA IS SPECTACULAR to behold. Throughout its center, a winding succession of steep, tightly terraced slopes radiates out from small roadside settlements and solitary compounds. Gashes of red clay and black loam mark fresh hoe work; eucalyptus trees flash silver against brilliant green tea plantations; banana trees are everywhere. On the theme of hills, Rwanda produces countless variations: jagged rain forests, round-shouldered buttes, undulating moors, broad swells of savanna, volcanic peaks sharp as filed teeth. During the rainy season, the clouds are huge and low and fast, mists cling in highland hollows, lightning flickers through the nights, and by day the land is lustrous. After the rains, the skies lift, the terrain takes on a ragged look beneath the flat unvarying haze of the dry season, and in the savannas of the Akagera Park wildfire blackens the hills.

One day, when I was returning to Kigali from the south, the car mounted a rise between two winding valleys, the windshield filled with purple-bellied clouds, and I asked Joseph, the man who was giving me a ride, whether Rwandans realize what a beautiful country they have. Beautiful? he said. You think so? After the things that happened here? The people aren’t good. If the people were good, the country might be OK. Joseph told me that his brother and sister had been killed, and he made a soft hissing click with his tongue against his teeth. The country is empty, he said. Empty!

It was not just the dead who were missing. The genocide had been brought to a halt by the Rwandese Patriotic Front, a rebel army led by Tutsi refugees from past persecutions, and as the RPF advanced through the country in the summer of 1994, some two million Hutus had fled into exile at the behest of the same leaders who had urged them to kill. Yet except in some rural areas in the south, where the desertion of Hutus had left nothing but bush to reclaim the fields around crumbling adobe houses, I, as a newcomer, could not see the emptiness that blinded Joseph to Rwanda’s beauty. Yes, there were grenade-flattened buildings, burnt homesteads, shot-up facades, and mortar-pitted roads. But these were the ravages of war, not of genocide, and by the summer of 1995, most of the dead had been buried. Fifteen months earlier, Rwanda had been the most densely populated country in Africa. Now the work of the killers looked just as they had intended: invisible.

From time to time, mass graves were discovered and excavated, and the remains would be transferred to new, properly consecrated mass graves. Yet even the occasionally exposed bones, the conspicuous number of amputees and people with deforming scars, and the superabundance of packed orphanages could not be taken as evidence that what had happened to Rwanda was an attempt to eliminate a people. There were only people’s stories.

Every survivor wonders why he is alive, Abbé Modeste, a priest at the cathedral in Butare, Rwanda’s second-largest city, told me. Abbé Modeste had hidden for weeks in his sacristy, eating communion wafers, before moving under the desk in his study, and finally into the rafters at the home of some neighboring nuns. The obvious explanation of his survival was that the RPF had come to the rescue. But the RPF didn’t reach Butare till early July, and roughly seventy-five percent of the Tutsis in Rwanda had been killed by early May. In this regard, at least, the genocide had been entirely successful: to those who were targeted, it was not death but life that seemed an accident of fate.

I had eighteen people killed at my house, said Etienne Niyonzima, a former businessman who had become a deputy in the National Assembly. Everything was totally destroyed—a place of fifty-five meters by fifty meters. In my neighborhood they killed six hundred and forty-seven people. They tortured them, too. You had to see how they killed them. They had the number of everyone’s house, and they went through with red paint and marked the homes of all the Tutsis and of the Hutu moderates. My wife was at a friend’s, shot with two bullets. She is still alive, only—he fell quiet for a moment—she has no arms. The others with her were killed. The militia left her for dead. Her whole family of sixty-five in Gitarama were killed. Niyonzima was in hiding at the time. Only after he had been separated from his wife for three months did he learn that she and four of their children had survived. Well, he said, one son was cut in the head with a machete. I don’t know where he went. His voice weakened, and caught. He disappeared. Niyonzima clicked his tongue, and said, But the others are still alive. Quite honestly, I don’t understand at all how I was saved.

Laurent Nkongoli attributed his survival to Providence, and also good neighbors, an old woman who said, ‘Run away, we don’t want to see your corpse.’ Nkongoli, a lawyer, who had become the vice president of the National Assembly after the genocide, was a robust man, with a taste for double-breasted suit jackets and lively ties, and he moved, as he spoke, with a brisk determination. But before taking his neighbor’s advice, and fleeing Kigali in late April of 1994, he said, I had accepted death. At a certain moment this happens. One hopes not to die cruelly, but one expects to die anyway. Not death by machete, one hopes, but with a bullet. If you were willing to pay for it, you could often ask for a bullet. Death was more or less normal, a resignation. You lose the will to fight. There were four thousand Tutsis killed here at Kacyiru—a neighborhood of Kigali. "The soldiers brought them here, and told them to sit down because they were going to throw grenades. And they sat.

Rwandan culture is a culture of fear, Nkongoli went on. I remember what people said. He adopted a pipey voice, and his face took on a look of disgust: ‘Just let us pray, then kill us,’ or ‘I don’t want to die in the street, I want to die at home.’ He resumed his normal voice. When you’re that resigned and oppressed you’re already dead. It shows the genocide was prepared for too long. I detest this fear. These victims of genocide had been psychologically prepared to expect death just for being Tutsi. They were being killed for so long that they were already dead.

I reminded Nkongoli that, for all his hatred of fear, he had himself accepted death before his neighbor urged him to run away. Yes, he said. I got tired in the genocide. You struggle so long, then you get tired.

Every Rwandan I spoke with seemed to have a favorite, unanswerable question. For Nkongoli, it was how so many Tutsis had allowed themselves to be killed. For François Xavier Nkurunziza, a Kigali lawyer, whose father was Hutu and whose mother and wife were Tutsi, the question was how so many Hutus had allowed themselves to kill. Nkurunziza had escaped death only by chance as he moved around the country from one hiding place to another, and he had lost many family members. Conformity is very deep, very developed here, he told me. In Rwandan history, everyone obeys authority. People revere power, and there isn’t enough education. You take a poor, ignorant population, and give them arms, and say, ‘It’s yours. Kill.’ They’ll obey. The peasants, who were paid or forced to kill, were looking up to people of higher socio-economic standing to see how to behave. So the people of influence, or the big financiers, are often the big men in the genocide. They may think that they didn’t kill because they didn’t take life with their own hands, but the people were looking to them for their orders. And, in Rwanda, an order can be given very quietly.

As I traveled around the country, collecting accounts of the killing, it almost seemed as if, with the machete, the masu—a club studded with nails—a few well-placed grenades, and a few bursts of automatic-rifle fire, the quiet orders of Hutu Power had made the neutron bomb obsolete.

Everyone was called to hunt the enemy, said Theodore Nyilinkwaya, a survivor of the massacres in his home village of Kimbogo, in the southwestern province of Cyangugu. "But let’s say someone is reluctant. Say that guy comes with a stick. They tell him, ‘No, get a masu.’ So, OK, he does, and he runs along with the rest, but he doesn’t kill. They say, ‘Hey, he might denounce us later. He must kill. Everyone must help to kill at least one person.’ So this person who is not a killer is made to do it. And the next day it’s become a game for him. You don’t need to keep pushing

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