We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda
by Philip Gourevitch

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Book Reviews of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda

Book Review: "Jack is in"
Summary: 5 Stars

In the summer of 1994, in the span of about three months, close to one million Rwandans were massacred by their fellow Rwandans. In the civic sense, this is what happened. Ethnically, it was a band of Hutu extremists that incited genocide and drove fellow Hutus to kill Tutsi civilians and moderate (unsympathetic) Hutus. The rate of killings fast outpaced all previous incidences in the last one hundred years, even that of the Holocaust, yet it was one of the most obscure and ambiguous genocides outside of Rwanda proper. Foreign presses paid little attention to the massacres, Western governments remained passive, ignorant and sometimes even supportive of the killings all at the same time. The 1994 Rwandan genocide has become a case study in human destructiveness as well as a field in international relations and politics; an area that could be coined "international oblivion." To this day, the new Rwandan government and remaining Tutsis fear a second genocide, while others maintain that genocide is still going on in Rwanda. Hutu Power extremists, on the other hand, much like the Turks who deny that they massacred 1.5 million Armenians from 1915-1919, deny that there ever was a systematic attempt to kill every last Tutsi in the country.

In a genocide whose roots were in Rwanda's colonial legacy under Belgium, the two dominant ethnic groups in this central African country were Hutus (85%) and Tutsis (15%). Under colonialism, the Hutus were peasants and field workers, while the Tutsis were more affluent and owned land. Following independence in 1962 from Belgium, the country was very deeply divided along ethnic lines. Sporadic attacks and massacres of Tutsis took place. Tutsi exiles in neighboring Burundi and Uganda soon formed a fighting force, the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF). Peace accords signed by the country's President, Juvenal Habyarimana, brought slivers of optimism, but at the beginning of April 1994, he was assassinated by an unknown saboteur(s) as his plane was landing in Kigali, Rwanda's capital city. Within hours, Hutu extremists that had been growing in Rwanda for years seized the media and gave calls to join the ranks of extremism, encouraging the killing of Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Sometimes, they even pinpointed where Tutsis were hiding, so they could be killed. As part of the peace accords, a small number of peacekeepers, led by a Canadian general, Romeo Dallaire, were stationed in the country, and saw direct signs that genocide was being planned. The UN gave no authorization for this force to take action; when some peacekeepers were killed by Hutu extremists, the Belgian contingent fled, and other countries followed suit, leaving Rwanda on its own. Promises to stop genocide throughout the world remained hollow; so much for history and calls for "never again." The genocide only stopped when the RPF seized Kigali and forced the Hutu Power followers to flee into neighboring countries.

Philip Gourevitch has written a badly needed work on the Rwandan genocide. It is part memoir, part history and part current events. Drawing from his own personal experiences as a reporter in Rwanda in the crucial years following the genocide, he has written an unforgettable and profoundly disturbing work about Rwanda. I kept thinking that the things in Gourevitch's book had all the earmarks of some horror movie. The killings in the summer of 1994 were mostly mechanical; as the country was largely agricultural, with plenty of machetes used for cultivating and clearing old crops, those same machetes were used to hack up Tutsis. The killing was practically done by civilians, who incited other civilians to kill. In all, for a country of some eleven million people, there were only a few hundred Hutu Power extremists that seized vital components of the Rwandan media at a time when the country's President was assassinated. From there, the blood bath was only a short time away and thousands of civilians - maybe more - were amassed to do the job of death. Gourevitch provides a fascinating history of Rwanda, he chronicles the root causes that set the country onto a path of genocide, a detailed account of the genocide itself seen through the eyes of those who survived the machete blows, as well as the culpability of those like the French government and the Zairean leadership, who actively supported Hutu extremists by sending in troops to protect them and weapons to arm them.

Gourevitch is keen in outlining the guilt of the Western powers, as well as the hypocrisy of their conduct. The same governments who had prosecuted Nazis at Nuremberg did absolutely nothing to avert the genocide or stop it. When fleeing Hutus left the country after the RPF took hold and a new Rwandan government was installed, Hutu killers blended into the flow of refugees. Under the aid of the UN and various humanitarian organizations, they managed to organize and arm themselves, so that when they finally were forced to go back to Rwanda, they had the means to resume a campaign of terror (of a lesser size, of course, but for how long?). Many government officials in the West remained quick to deny their responsibility and oblivion. This is perhaps Gourevitch's most startling revelation to a Western reader.

The book also examines Rwanda after 1994, on the governmental, judicial, social and cultural level, to show what it means to survive in the wake of this catastrophe. Sadly, though there is some hope now, many Rwandans - Hutus and Tutsis together - already wonder when the next genocide will begin. This book is phenomenal. Gourevitch writes beautifully and eloquently in his guide to this catacomb in central Africa; readers will never forget it. Thank you Mr. Gourevitch!

Summary of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda

The "stories" in this book's subtitle are both the author's, as he repeatedly visits this tiny country in an attempt to make sense of what has happened, and those of the people he interviews. These include a Tutsi doctor who has seen much of her family killed over decades of Tutsi oppression, a Schindleresque hotel manager who hid hundreds of refugees from certain death, and a Rwandan bishop who has been accused of supporting the slaughter of Tutsi schoolchildren, and can only answer these charges by saying, "What could I do?" Gourevitch, a staff writer for the New Yorker, describes Rwanda's history with remarkable clarity and documents the experience of tragedy with a sober grace. The reader will ask along with the author: Why does this happen? And why don't we bother to stop it? --Maria Dolan

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