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

by Philip Gourevitch

No doubt, the promise of material gain and living space did move some killers. But why hasn’t Bangladesh, or any other terribly poor and terribly crowded place of the many one might name, had a genocide? 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. Consider all the factors: the precolonial inequalities; the fanatically thorough and hierarchical centralized administration; the Hamitic myth and the radical polarization under Belgian rule; the killings and expulsions that began with the Hutu revolution of 1959; the economic collapse of the late 1980s; Habyarimana’s refusal to let the Tutsi refugees return; the multiparty confusion; the RPF attack; the war; the extremism of Hutu Power; the propaganda; the practice massacres; the massive importation of arms; the threat to the Habyarimana oligarchy posed by peace through power sharing and integration; the extreme poverty, ignorance, superstition, and fear of a cowed, compliant, cramped—and largely alcoholic—peasantry; the indifference of the outside world. Combine these ingredients and you have such an excellent recipe for a culture of genocide that it’s easy to say that it was just waiting to happen. But the decimation had been utterly gratuitous.