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

by Philip Gourevitch

I’M TELLING YOU this here, at the outset, because this is a book about how people imagine themselves and one another—a book about how we imagine our world.

All at once, as it seemed, something we could have only imagined was upon us—and we could still only imagine it. This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.

Think about the paranoia in america today

Clearly, in his experience, the oneness of humanity was not a fact but, as he kept saying, a theory, a principle—a proposition of the white priest.

In the name of universalism, he had learned to despise the people and the jungle he came from, and to love himself for disdaining that inheritance.

It was us against them—all of us against all of them: anybody who dared to suggest an alternative view was one of them and could prepare for the consequences.

The economic collapse of the late 1980s had left tens of thousands of young men without any prospect of a job, wasting in idleness and its attendant resentments, and ripe for recruitment.

The young with nothing to do

organized into small neighborhood bands, drew up lists of Tutsis, and went on retreats to practice burning houses, tossing grenades, and hacking dummies up with machetes.

They were practicing killing people.

“self-defense” militia members and villagers in the Bugesera region, south of Kigali, slaughtered three hundred Tutsis in three days.

massacres were invariably preceded by political “consciousnessraising” meetings at which local leaders, usually with a higher officer of the provincial or national government at their side, described Tutsis as devils—horns, hoofs, tails, and all—and gave the order to kill them, according to the old revolutionary lingo, as a “work” assignment.

In retrospect, the massacres of the early 1990s can be seen as dress rehearsals for what proponents of Hutuness themselves called the “final solution” in 1994.

been compelled by popular pressure to make substantial concessions to reform-minded oppositionists, and it required a dogged uphill effort for Habyarimana’s extremist entourage to prevent Rwanda from slipping toward moderation.

But the most crucial innovation at Bugesera was the use of the national radio to prepare the ground for slaughter, and the ratcheting up of the suggestive message of us against them to the categorically compelling kill or be killed.

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.

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

Yet it was the Germans, not the machinery, who did the killing.

In addition to ensuring obvious numerical advantages, this arrangement eliminated any questions of accountability which might arise.

If everybody is implicated, then implication becomes meaningless.

By regarding the genocide, even as he denied its existence, as an extension of the war between the RPF and the Habyarimana regime, Mbonampeka seemed to be arguing that the systematic state-sponsored extermination of an entire people is a provokable crime—the fault of the victims as well as the perpetrators.

In the light of Dallaire’s fax, Annan’s failure to mention Rwanda was striking.

Neighbors hacked neighbors to death in their homes, and colleagues hacked colleagues to death in their workplaces. Doctors killed their patients, and schoolteachers killed their pupils.

councilwoman in one Kigali neighborhood was reported to have offered fifty Rwandan francs apiece (about thirty cents at the time) for severed Tutsi heads, a practice known as “selling cabbages.”

had the impression, with him more than with others, that as he told it he was seeing the events he described afresh; that as he stared into the past the outcome was not yet obvious, and that when he looked at me, with his clear eyes a touch hazy, he was still seeing the scenes he described, perhaps even hoping to understand them. For the story made no sense: the major who had spared his life may have recognized Thomas, but to Thomas the major was a stranger.

To their minds, it seemed, their acts of decency exonerated the guilt of their crimes.

But to survivors, the fact that a killer sometimes spared lives only proved that he could not possibly be judged innocent, since it demonstrated plainly that he knew murder was wrong.

“the Vatican is too strong, and too unapologetic for us to go taking on bishops. Haven’t you heard of infallibility?”

Paul believed in free will. He understood his actions during the genocide in the same way that he understood those of others, as choices. He didn’t seem to think that he could be called righteous, except when measured against the criminality of others, and he rejected that scale.

But had the RPF not been pounding Hutu Power from across the valley, there would have been no convoy—and probably no survivors.

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.

Superficiality

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.

In fact, the Clinton administration’s ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, opposed leaving even the skeleton crew of two hundred seventy in Rwanda.

Her name is rarely associated with Rwanda, but ducking and pressuring others to duck, as the death toll leapt from thousands to tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, was the absolute low point in her career as a stateswoman.

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.

that far from being a matter of policy the massacres of Tutsis were the result of mass popular outrage following Habyarimana’s assassination; that the “population” had “risen as a single man” to defend itself; that the government and army wanted only to restore order; that the killing was an extension of the war with the RPF; that the RPF started it and was the greater offender—in short, that Rwandans were simply killing each other as they were wont to do, for primordial tribal reasons, since time immemorial.

What went wrong? The simplest answer was that Rwanda’s Hutu Power regime was sapping its frontline military effort in favor of completing the genocide, just as the Germans had done in the final months of World War

From the start of the war with the RPF in 1990, Hutu extremists had promoted their genocidal aspirations with the world-upside-down rhetoric of Hutu victimization. Now Hutu Power had presided over one of the most outrageous crimes in a century of seemingly relentless mass political murder, and the only way to get away with it was to continue to play the victim. In yielding Rwanda to the RPF and leading vast flocks into exile, the Hutu Power leaders could retain control of their subjects, establish a rump “refugee” state in UN-sponsored camps, and pretend that their worst fears had been justified.

But individual discomfort aside, the signal achievement of the Opération Turquoise was to permit the slaughter of Tutsis to continue for an extra month, and to secure safe passage for the genocidal command to cross, with a lot of its weaponry, into Zaire.

Broadcasts like Ruggiu’s had done a good job of convincing even those without blood on their hands that staying behind was not an option. But flight was often blind—a function of family ties, or mass panic, rather than of reason or individual choice.

Or else you got the story straight—these were people who had killed or who had been terrified into following the killers into exile—and you heard, or read, or could not but infer, that this nearly perfect scene of hell on earth was some sort of divine retribution, that the cholera was like a biblical plague, that the horror had been equalized, and it was all much more than you could stomach, never mind comprehend, and your heart was wrenched.

and an epidemic that came out of bad water and killed tens of thousands eclipsed a genocide that had come out of a hundred years of insane identity politics and resulted in nearly a million murders.

So the génocidaires scored another extraordinary public-relations victory through the deft manipulation of mass anguish, and—of all things—an appeal to the world’s conscience.

He said: “I haven’t even started my real mourning of the apathy and the absolute detachment of the international community, and particularly of the Western world, from the plight of Rwandans. Because, fundamentally, to be very candid and soldierly, who the hell cared about Rwanda? I mean, face it. Essentially, how many people really still remember the genocide in Rwanda? We know the genocide of the Second World War because the whole outfit was involved. But who really is involved in the Rwandan genocide? Who comprehends that more people were killed, injured, and displaced in three and a half months in Rwanda than in the whole of the Yugoslavian campaign in which we poured sixty thousand troops and the whole of the Western world was there, and we’re pouring billions in there, still trying to solve the problem. How much is really being done to solve the Rwandan problem? Who is grieving for Rwanda and really living it and living with the consequences? I mean, there are hundreds of Rwandans whom I knew personally whom I found slaughtered with their families complete—and bodies up to here—villages totally wiped out … and we made all that information available daily and the international community kept watching.”

The belief was that the price to the world of such a risk would not be as great as the price of inaction.

sixty-five percent of Germans believed that it was a good thing their country had been defeated. And I wondered:

What about the other 35

“A cheese sandwich,” he said. “Write it down. Genocide is a cheese sandwich.” I asked him how he figured that. “What does anyone care about a cheese sandwich?” he said. “Genocide, genocide, genocide. Cheese sandwich, cheese sandwich, cheese sandwich. Who gives a shit? Crimes against humanity. Where’s humanity? Who’s humanity? You? Me? Did you see a crime committed against you? Hey, just a million Rwandans. Did you ever hear about the Genocide Convention?”

“That convention,” the American at the bar said, “makes a nice wrapping for a cheese sandwich.”

Very much true today

IN JULY OF 1995, a year after the installation of Rwanda’s new government, Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa visited Kigali and delivered a sermon at a football stadium, begging the assembled multitude: “Please, please, please, our sisters and brothers, please, please, keep quiet. Please, please, stop crying!”

So it was strange to be told that a crime perpetrated by Rwandans against Rwandans was a crime against African pride and progress, and that the shame of it was a private African affair rather than a shame to all humanity.

Isnt he trying to create a differenn t idenntiitiy from tthe tutsi hutu narrative. Here strive as Africans and be united

You knew, by the statistics, that most of the people you saw were Hutu, but you had no idea who was who; whether that girl, who stared blankly at your oncoming car and at the last minute winked and broke into a wide grin, was a massacre survivor, or whether she was a killer, or both, or what.

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.