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A required text for the 21st century Jan 10, 2000 (296 of 302 found this helpful)
In early May 1994 I stood on a bridge over the river that forms the border between Rwanda and Tanzania and observed corpses floating down towards Lake Victoria in an unbroken stream. As I write this, two Rwandan women are taking the unprecedented action of suing the United Nations for its failure to intervene in the worst act of genocide since WW2. UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, who played a kay role in UN decision-making in 1994, has confessed the UN's "failure" and expressed his own "deep remorse." 800,000 people died, most of them hacked to death with machetes by their neighbours. How this happened, and how the world utterly failed in its self-appointed role to prevent exactly such a holocaust, is the subject of this beautifully written, accessible and compelling book. Gourevitch wants to know WHAT happened, and through interviews with survivors, gives us the clearest and most comprehensive understanding I have yet seen. It is not pretty reading, although Gourevitch's dispassionate and sensitive writing makes it possible to get through material that in coarser hands would be impossible to stomach. He also describes the HOW. For years it was evident to the West - and most particularly to France and Belgium - that Hutu factions were gathering their strength to strike at the Tutsi minority. Every day Hutu radio stations ran violent anti-Tutsi propaganda, in which Tutsis and any moderate Hutus who were not interested in killing them were warned to prepare to die. When the killing began, it was simply the next logical step in a process that had long been underway. The case seems impossible to refute - indeed, the UN's internal investigation which published its report in December 1999 does NOT refute - that the genocide was both broadly predictable, and could have been ameliorated, if not altogether stopped, by effective international intervention. The legal knots the UN allowed to create for itself, so that "blue-helmets" felt they could not act to save a woman being raped and hacked to pieces, because their mandate allowed for only their own self-defence, are just one example of how international law can - sometimes - ENCOURAGE crimes against humanity. The lessons of Rwanda, painfully learnt, will influence the way the so-called "world community" responds to massive ethnic eruptions for a generation to come. To begin to understand this most painful event in recent human history, this book cannot be too highly recommended. If there is one small niggle, it is the lack of an index, something that I hope will be addressed in future editions.
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Raw and compelling, the abyss gazes back at you ... Nov 17, 2000 (200 of 206 found this helpful)
In a transcendent tour de force, Philip Gourevitch takes one of the most horrifying events of the late 20th century, and manages to find the elements of hope and meaning that make this book more than the sum of the body parts it describes as scattered around a church in Nyarubuye, Rwanda.
On the surface, "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families" is a graphic account of the 1994 genocide in which the "Hutu Power" government led its citizens to slaughter 800,000 of their Tutsi neighbors in only 100 days ... while the international community stood by and watched helplessly. In a greater sense, however, this is a story about how people imagine the world to be, and the terrible consequences that follow when they lose their humanity in trying to create such a world. It is about the nature of evil, and the power of forgiveness and justice to reclaim the future without forgetting the past.
This is a difficult and painful book to read, but not for the obvious reasons. The atrocities committed by the killers are brought to light in considerable detail, however Gourevitch does this in an almost semi-detached and dispassionate way. His real moral outrage seems to be reserved for the so-called "civilized" countries that could have stopped the genocide, but instead did nothing until it was too late ... and then compounded their foreign policy sins by aiding the Hutu murderers in refugee camps.
There is certainly plenty of blame to go around. Gourevitch provides extensive evidence that there were many warning signs of the impending massacres. He outlines the brief history of ethnic antagonisms that led to the crimes, and explains why the Clinton Administration, the United Nations (including current U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan), and the former colonial powers in Africa (such as France) all refused to intervene to halt the butchery. The French even took steps to keep it going. Gourevitch is particularly good at placing the genocide into a context that shows why our political leaders were too paralyzed to get involved and risk doing anything to save lives. Basically, it seems to come down to the fact that Rwanda has no oil, the victims were black, and the timing was all wrong (U.S. Rangers had just been shot to death and dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia only weeks earlier).
Putting aside the official excuses for inaction, though, perhaps the best thing about this book is how Gourevitch tells so much of his tale in the words of the Rwandans themselves--both those accused of condoning or participating in the violence, and those who suffered from it.
From Odette Nyiramilimo, a doctor who had several members of her immediate family killed, to Paul Rusesabagina, a hotel manager who protected 1,000 or more Tutsis from harm by using a mixture of simple bravery and shrewd psychology, the writer has extracted narratives of extraordinary courage under even the most brutal conditions. He struggles not to judge pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, the clergyman who ignored his doomed ministers' pleas to be spared the carnage, but cannot conceal his admiration for Rwandese Patriotic Front Major General Paul Kagame, who eloquently said: "People are not inherently bad. But they can be made bad. And they can be taught to be good." Contrasted with the American military intelligence officer who cynically compared the genocide to a cheese sandwich (because nobody cares about either), it is easy to understand why Gourevitch holds Kagame in higher esteem.
"We Wish to Inform You ..." is not a perfect book. As others have noted, it really needs an index (or at least a glossary) to help the reader keep track of the various acronyms of organizations (for example, RPF, FAR, UNAMIR), characters (Major General Romero Dallaire, Rwandan ex-President Habyarimana, and USAID worker Bonaventure Nyibizi) and groups (such as the "interahamwe" Hutu Power militias).
Also, Gourevitch begins to lose his focus on the gen
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Gourevitch props our eyes open to the decimation of Rwanda. Feb 2, 1999 (39 of 40 found this helpful)
WE WISH TO INFORM YOU THAT TOMORROW WE WILL BE KILLED WITH OUR FAMILIES Stories from Rwanda Philip Gourevitch Farrar Straus, Giroux $25.00 356 pp.
In 1994, the Hutu majority in Rwanda committed genocide upon their minority countrymen, the Tutsi. 800,000 people were killed in 100 days, three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust. In April, while British husbands rushed off with umbrellas to their jobs, Hutu husbands picked up machetes and killed their Tutsi wives. In Germany during May, dancers gyrated to ubiquitous techno-rock, while the leading pop singer in Rwanda urged his Hutu countrymen over the state-sponsored radio to "Kill the cockroaches-"the Tutsis. As the Kiwanis met in Des Moines in June, neighborhood "work groups" of Hutu men and women gathered to go over "hit lists" prepared by the government. During the time it took you to read the above, at least five Tutsis were killed, day by day, week by week, through July.
And not a single foreign government or international agency intervened.
Why bother? After all, isn't this an "age-old animosity between the Tutsi and Hutu ethnic groups," as the NEW YORK TIMES stated. Haven't they been committing atrocities against each other for centuries? Aren't those poor refugees in the news from Zaire as much victims as the victims in Rwanda?
No, no, and emphatically no, replies Philip Gourevitch in this book, selected by the NEW YORK TIMES as one of the year's ten best books of 1998. Until the Belgians issued identity cards during their colonial rule, no formal delineation between the two tribes was common, let alone violent. The "superior" Tutsi myth was simply a repetition of the incredibly specious Hamitic myth, that claimed the Tutsi were "nobler," "aristocratic" primarily because they had more refined, i.e., Caucasian-like features. No massacre had ever occurred prior to one incident in 1959. Those "refugees?" If they were in a camp outside Rwanda, they were one of the 2 million Hutu that fled . when the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front re-took the country. In other words, they could easily have been killers, not victims. One by one, Gourevitch demolishes those conventional myths with which the rest of the world deflected their responsibility.
But he does more than that. Like Leontius in Plato's REPUBLIC who, upon seeing a pile of bodies, ran to them opening his eyes wide with his fingers, crying "There you are, curse you, have your fill of the lovely spectacle," Gourevitch rushes to unimaginable places. Once there, filled with both desire to see and disgust at the sight, Gourevitch puts down prose which props our eyes wide open to the horror of Rwanda, past and present.
In a bar one evening, he meets an aid worker who speaks of stepping on the dead to help the living. Later in his travels, but earlier in the book, Gourevitch visits the scene of a massacre, a church now kept as a shrine. A member of his group steps on a skull, offending the author-"Then I heard another crunch, and felt a vibration underfoot. I had stepped on one, too." The dead cannot be denied their presence anywhere in Rwandan life, then or now. Time and again Gourevitch's narrative resonates with such revelations.
The author also pursues both perpetrator and persecuted to question them. He travels all the way to Texas to interview the Hutu minister who received the note from which the title was taken. There, in "an expensive-looking new community," he finds the man, indicted by the FBI for presiding over the slaughter of hundreds in his congregation. He denied everything, in terms eerily echoing claims from the Holocaust: "I never saw anything...I never went anywhere. I stayed at my office." Another man, the "Minister of Justice of Rwanda in exile" claims only Tutsis who sympathized with the RPF forces were killed. Did that include "the fetuses ripped from the wombs of Tutsis, after radio announce
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In Defense Of This Excellent Book Oct 3, 2002 (18 of 18 found this helpful)
Several reviewers have lambasted this book for a variety of shortcomings: poorly written, poorly edited, he doesn't interview the right types of people, he talks too much about himself. I hope to briefly explain why I don't agree with ANY of these criticisms and hope that people will read this excellent book.
Poorly written/edited: I'm a writer/editor myself and the pages of this book flew through my fingers. I was totally absorbed. I found it well written, but if you're worried, I have a feeling the subject matter is so important, you wouldn't even notice if stylistically it wasn't your cup of tea.
Sources: He interviews the following types of people: Hutus who killed, Tutsis who were attacked, government officials of many countries, foreign aid workers. Don't believe the people who say he only interviews the power players and leaves out the voice of the common man. The hotel manager's (just a middle class Hutu who did what he thought was right) story is awesome and could make a movie as powerful as Schindler's List.
Too self-centered: Yes, Gourevitch brings in his own observations and experiences. I felt they were insightful and interesting. Part of his quest is to see how people deal with the genocide, how they internalize it and incorporate it into their existence. As an American going to Rwanda from New York to learn about this genocide, Gourevitch has an interesting perspective and I'm glad he didn't choose to bury it.
One more thing: Several reviews crticized a particular passage where he talks about the "postmodern war" of relativism versus right/wrong. These reviewers misunderstood the passage. He's not talking about the genocide itself, but he's talking about THE WAR OVER THE GENOCIDE. In other words, people who think genocide took place versus those who would deny it or call it something else (it was a war, many people were killed on both sides, etc). In my opinion Gourevitch is right on -- to call this event something other than genocide is either a case of denial or a relativistic fantasy -- nothing is wrong, it's all context. Yes the particular sentence was a little over the top, but these reviewers had a knee-jerk reaction to it that obscured their understanding of his prose.
This is not an objective book, but given the subject how could the author NOT be emotionally moved to make a judgment about people who would deny this event its importance in world history? I applaud his efforts.
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Africa my Continent Why? Feb 3, 2000 (25 of 27 found this helpful)
IN the province of Kibungo, in eastern Rwanda, near the Tanzanian border, there's a rocky hill called Nyarubuye, with a church where many Tutsis were slaughtered in April 1994. A year after the killing, I flew to Nyarubuye in a United Nations helicopter, 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 centre of a parish schoolyard. A lone soldier materialised, and shook our hands with shy formality. I stepped up into the open doorway of a classroom. At least 50, 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 13 months earlier, and they hadn't been moved. Skin stuck here and there over the bones, many of which lay scattered 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 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 the beds of exquisite, death-fertilised flowers blooming over the corpses, it was still strangely unimaginable. All this is common In Africa. But Why? Please buy this book