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

by Philip Gourevitch

“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.”

We wish to inform you that we have heard that tomorrow we will be killed with our families.

Because of all this mixing, ethnographers and historians have lately come to agree that Hutus and Tutsis cannot properly be called distinct ethnic groups.

Hutus were cultivators and Tutsis were herdsmen. This was the original inequality: cattle are a more valuable asset than produce, and although some Hutus owned cows while some Tutsis tilled the soil, the word Tutsi became synonymous with a political and economic elite.

Rwandans had no alphabet; their tradition was oral, therefore malleable; and because their society is

fiercely hierarchical the stories they tell of their past tend to be dictated by those who hold power, either through the state or in opposition to it.

to a very large extent power consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality—even,

Hutu and Tutsi identities took definition only in relationship to state power; as they did, the two groups inevitably developed their own distinctive cultures—their own set of ideas about themselves and one another—according to their respective domains.

The Belgians could hardly have pretended they were needed to bring order to Rwanda. Instead, they sought out those features of the existing civilization that fit their own ideas of mastery and subjugation and bent them to fit their purposes.

Colonization is violence, and there are many ways to carry out that violence.

The identity cards made it virtually impossible for Hutus to become Tutsis, and permitted the Belgians to perfect the administration of an apartheid system rooted in the myth of Tutsi superiority.

But the political struggle in Rwanda was never really a quest for equality; the issue was only who would dominate the ethnically bipolar state.

until Mbonyumutwa’s beating lit the spark in 1959 there had never been systematic political violence recorded between Hutus and Tutsis—anywhere.

That legitimate grievances lie behind a revolution does not, however, ensure that the revolutionary order will be just.

At least a hundred thousand Burundian Hutus were killed in the spring of 1972, and at least two hundred thousand fled as refugees—many of them to Rwanda.

Since 1959, the diaspora of exiled Rwandan Tutsis and their children had grown to include about a million people; it was the largest and oldest unresolved African refugee problem.

Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building. A vigorous totalitarian order requires that the people be invested in the leaders’ scheme, and while genocide may be the most perverse and ambitious means to this end, it is also the most comprehensive. In 1994, Rwanda was regarded in much of the rest of the world as the exemplary instance of the chaos and anarchy associated with collapsed states. In fact, the genocide was the product of order, authoritarianism, decades of modern political theorizing and indoctrination, and one of the most meticulously administered states in history.

The specter of an absolute menace that requires absolute eradication binds leader and people in a hermetic utopian embrace, and the individual—always an annoyance to totality—ceases to exist.

Killing Tutsis was a political tradition in postcolonia Rwanda; it brought people together.

A Hutu who thought there was anything to be implicated in would have to be an accomplice of the enemy.

the mobilization for the final extermination campaign swung into full gear only when Hutu Power was confronted by the threat of peace.

The genocide had been tolerated by the so-called international community, but I was told that the UN regarded the corpse-eating dogs as a health problem.

The authors and signers of the Genocide Convention knew perfectly well that they had not fought World War II to stop the Holocaust but rather—and often, as in the case of the United States, reluctantly—to contain fascist aggression. What made those victorious powers, which dominated the UN then even more than they do now, imagine that they would act differently in the future?

The desertion of Rwanda by the UN force was Hutu Power’s greatest diplomatic victory to date, and it can be credited almost single-handedly to the United States.

if it was a genocide, the Convention of 1948 required the contracting parties to act. Washington didn’t want to act. So Washington pretended that it wasn’t a genocide.

denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good.

Overpopulation doesn’t explain why hundreds of thousands of people agreed to murder nearly a million of their neighbors in the course of a few weeks. Nothing really explains that.

when we judge political power, we need to ask not only what its base is but also how the power is exercised, under what circumstances, toward what ends, at what price, and with what success.

In the case of Rwanda, to embrace the idea that the civil war was a free-for-all—in which everyone is at once equally legitimate and equally illegitimate—is to ally oneself with Hutu Power’s ideology of genocide as self-defense.

“Genocide. Bury the dead, not the truth.”

The more the dead pile up, the more the killers become the focus, the dead only of interest as evidence. Yet turn the tables, and it’s clear that there is greater cause for celebration when two lives are saved instead of one.

What distinguishes genocide from murder, and even from acts of political murder that claim as many victims, is the intent. The crime is wanting to make a people extinct. The idea is the crime. No wonder it’s so difficult to picture. To do so you must accept the principle of the exterminator, and see not people but a people.

while “both sides to the armed conflict perpetrated crimes against humanity in Rwanda,” the “concerted, planned, systematic and methodical” acts of “mass extermination perpetrated by Hutu elements against the Tutsi group” in Rwanda “constitute genocide,” and that no evidence had been found “to indicate that Tutsi elements perpetrated acts committed with intent to destroy the Hutu ethnic group as such.”

human rights organizations often describe the entire Rwandan genocide as a single “major human rights violation,” which is exactly the same term these organizations use for the death penalty in the United States.

here was a society whose soul had been shredded, where an attempt had been made to extirpate an entire category of humanity, where hardly a person could be found who was not related to someone who had either killed or been killed, and where the threat of another round remained intensely real; and here were young foreigners, who had been sent in the name of humanitarianism, saying that Rwandans should quit making excuses.

germ of homicidal animosity for one another, the exiled Rwandans got along peacefully in Uganda, in Kenya, in Tanzania, and—until Hutu Power politics spilled over in the early 1990s—in Zaire. Only in Burundi did refugees find the politics of Hutu and Tutsi inescapable.

So did a widespread determination to defy the genocide, to stand and be counted in a place where one was meant to have been wiped out.

“When humanitarian aid becomes a smoke screen to cover the political effects it actually creates, and states hide behind it, using it as a vehicle for policymaking, then we can be regarded as agents in the conflict.”

But the UNHCR opposed forced repatriation—unless, as Gerald Gahima at Rwanda’s Justice Ministry reminded me, you happened to be a Vietnamese boat person in Hong Kong.

it became clear that their organizations’ first commitment was not to protecting people but to protecting their mandates. “Everything is lies here,” Father Victor, the Mokoto monk, told me in Goma. “All these organizations—they will give blankets, food, yes. But save lives? No, they can’t.”

the noncombatants at Mugunga weren’t so much refugees as hostages, being held as a human shield.

During the first nine and a half months of 1996, the fact that the Mobutist–Hutu Power alliance in eastern Zaire was slaughtering thousands of people and forcing hundreds of thousands more from their homes did not seem to excite the international press.

Never before in modern memory had a people who slaughtered another people, or in whose name the slaughter was carried out, been expected to live with the remainder of the people that was slaughtered, completely intermingled, in the same tiny communities, as one cohesive national society.

“People think this is a matter that we should have got over and forgotten, and—no, no, no, no, we are dealing with human beings here.”

In Rwanda, he was telling me, a person who says, “The genocide made me do it,” leaves everyone in the entire society with a sense of total jeopardy.

Since the Holocaust, discussions of genocide have become almost inextricably bound up in a discourse about the obligations of memory. But in Rwanda—where Pacifique Kabarisa, who worked for the organization African Rights, told me that many genocide survivors “regret that they weren’t killed”—forgetting was longed for as a symptom of minimal recovery, the capacity to get on with life.

OFTEN FOUND it helpful to think of central Africa in the mid-1990s as comparable to late medieval Europe—plagued by serial wars of tribe and religion, corrupt despots, predatory elites and a superstitious peasantry, festering with disease, stagnating in poverty, and laden with promise. Of course, a key process that had helped European peoples pull toward greater prosperity and saner governance was colonialism, which allowed for the exporting of their aggressions and the importing of wealth. Ex-colonies don’t enjoy such opportunities as they tumble into the family of modern nation-states; whatever forms of government they come up with, in their struggles to build sustaining political traditions, are likely to be transitional.

But Uganda, a decade after the ravages of Idi Amin and Obote, set a standard of promise that had to make anyone who called the Congo or Rwanda “impossible” or “hopeless” think again.

It’s not possible to manage radically different societies exactly in a uniform way. Yes, there are some essentials which should be common, like universal suffrage, one person one vote, by secret ballot, a free press, separation of powers. These should be common factors, but not the exact form. The form should be according to situations.”

But the traditions and particular circumstances which produced Jefferson are unlikely to be found afresh in Africa, and it’s doubtful that those who yearn for such a man again would be prepared to tolerate the fact that Jefferson’s leisure to think and write as grandly as he did was financed in large measure by his unrepentant ownership of slaves.