We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families

by Philip Gourevitch

Toward the end of the war in the Congo, when Kabila’s victory appeared inevitable, The New York Times ran an editorial headed “Tyranny or Democracy in Zaire?”—as if those were the only two political possibilities, and whatever was not one must be the other.

And this mattered not only to Rwanda but also to the world, he explained, because “each bloodletting hastens the next, and as the value of human life is degraded and violence becomes tolerated, the unimaginable becomes more conceivable.”