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

by Philip Gourevitch

Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building.

She meant that 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.

at French fears of an Anglophone conquest of Rwanda. “If they wanted people here to speak French, they shouldn’t have helped to kill people here who spoke French.”

memory of, or longing for, a homeland all played a part. 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.

“each bloodletting hastens the next, and as the value of human life is degraded and violence becomes tolerated, the unimaginable becomes more conceivable.”