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

by Philip Gourevitch

And afterward the world was a different place for anyone who chose to think about it. Rwandans had no choice. This was what interested me most about them: not the dead—what can you really say about a million murdered people whom you didn’t know?—but how those who had to live in their absence would do so.

The Rwanda I visited in the years after the genocide was a world in limbo.

SAID EARLIER that power largely consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality, even if you have to kill a lot of them to make that happen.

The answer is often a function of how broadly or narrowly the power is based: is it centered in one person, or is it spread out among many different centers that exercise checks on one another? And are its subjects merely subjects or are they also citizens? In principle, narrowly based power is easier to abuse, while more broadly based power requires a truer story at its core and is more likely to protect more of its subjects from abuse.

Respect for the constitution of the USA. This is what the founding fathers tried to do.

British historian Lord Acton in his formula “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

But like most truisms, Acton’s adage is not quite true: to take an example from American history, President Lincoln’s power was more absolute than President Nixon’s, yet Nixon was surely the more fundamentally corrupt of the two. So, when we judge political power, we need to ask not only what its base is but also how the power is exer...

Yet we seem to have a hard time taking seriously the notion that places where mass violence and suffering is so widespread that it is casually called “meaningless” might also be places where people engage in meaningful politics.

In the old days, according to Enzensberger—in Spain in the 1930s or the United States in the 1860s—people used to kill and die for ideas, but now “violence has separated itself from ideology,” and people who wage civil wars just kill and die in an anarchic scramble for power. In these wars, he asserted, there is no notion of the future; nihilism rules; “all political thought, from Aristotle and Machiavelli to Marx and Weber, is turned upside down,” and “all that remains is the Hobbesian ur-myth of the war of everyone against everyone else.” That such a view of distant civil wars offers a convenient reason to ignore them may explain its enormous popularity in our times. It would be nice, we may say, if the natives out there settled down, but if they’re just fighting for the hell of it, it’s not my problem.

For those who had endured, stories and questions tended to operate in a kind of call-and-response fashion—stories calling up questions, calling up more stories, calling up more questions—and nobody of any depth seemed to expect precise answers. At best they hoped for understandings, ways of thinking about the defiant human condition at the end of this century of unforeseen extremity. Quite often, I felt that these stories were offered to me the way that shipwrecked people, neither drowned nor saved, send messages in bottles: in the hope that, even if the legends they carry can do the teller no good, they may at some other time be of use to somebody, somewhere else.

Conrad’s Marlow said of England, “We live in the flicker—may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.”

Look up

“Tutsi genocide victim,” or “Hutu victim of the RPF,” you would have no way to perceive the deception.

In either case, the appeal to your sympathies and your sense of outrage would be the same.

The RPA operation to close the camp had gone awry, and at least two thousand Hutus were reported killed. Once again, a UN battalion had been on hand and had done nothing. I remember a news photograph of a UN soldier holding two dead babies, one in each hand, during the cleanup after the killings.

The anonymous dead and their anonymous killers become their own context. The horror becomes absurd.

General Sherman’s march through Georgia at the head of the Union Army near the end of the American Civil War,

In writing the history of events that are still unfolding in a state that is still unformed, it is impossible to know which tendencies will prevail and at what price.

Follow-up studies by international relief workers, and UN human rights monitors, found that at least ninety-five percent of these IDPs resettled peacefully in their homes.

Given all a success

but that was quickly revised down to between two and four thousand—the largest number of them crushed to death in the stampedes, many killed by the RPA, and quite a few hacked, bludgeoned, and even speared to death by interahamwe in their

Is there no hope

“Talk to people. They’re scared. They say, What about the Zaire camps, Burundi, Tanzania? What about revenge? What about justice? OK. When people are scared like that they’re also hopeful. They’re saying they have something to lose—some hope.”

said that I was resistant to the very idea of leaving bodies like that, forever in their state of violation—on display as monuments to the crime against them, and to the armies that had stopped the killing, as much as to the lives they had lost. Such places contradicted the spirit of the popular Rwandan T-shirt: “Genocide. Bury the dead, not the truth.”

i would have agreed five years ago. Now think of all the holocaust deniers

never saw Alexandre’s photographs, but I told him that his description of that moment, and of his own passage from a sense of unreality during the events to the reality of his pictures, was more disturbing, more vivid, and more informative than anything I believed the photographs themselves could tell.

When they were crushing on the gate at Zambatt, we were crushing back on it so it didn’t fall, and people started throwing babies over. You just catch them. You do things you’d never want to see a picture of.”

“Like walking over the bodies,” Alexandre said. “I feel very bad about that. It was very unreal and very insane, this decision to walk on dead people. I don’t know. I don’t know what was right or wrong, or if I feel guilty, but I feel bad. It was necessary. It was the only way to get through.”

Or, as Stalin, who presided over the murders of at least ten million people, calculated it: “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” The more the dead pile up, the more the killers become the focus, the dead only of interest as evidence.

But body counts aren’t the point in a genocide, a crime for which, at the time of my first visit to Rwanda, nobody on earth had ever been brought to trial, much less convicted. 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.

He appeared to be crawling toward the confession booth. His feet had been chopped off, and his hands had been chopped off. This was a favorite torture for Tutsis during the genocide; the idea was to cut the tall people “down to size,” and crowds would gather to taunt, laugh, and cheer as the victim writhed to death. The bones emerged from the dead man’s cuffs like twigs, and he still had a square tuft of hair peeling from his skull, and a perfectly formed, weather-shrunken and weather-greened ear.

But from whom should the RPA have protected the IDPs if not from itself? The answer implicit in the Kibeho verdict was that the primary danger had been created by the génocidaires in the midst of the camp and by the international humanitarian organizations that had been content to let them stay there. In other words, the RPA judged itself to have taken the side of the Hutu masses against the Hutu Power leaders who had caused them so much anguish. The court was asking that the killings at Kibeho be thought of as the Norwegian nurse had suggested when I lay on the hospital floor in Butare—not as a measure of the new order, but as the ugly endgame of the old order.

This was what mattered in Uganda: he was a foreigner.

Kagame agreed: being a Tutsi, or a monarchist, was an ancestral problem, and neither identity seemed likely to do anyone much good.

Political leaders often love to tell about their childhoods, those formative years, happy or sad, whose legend can be retroactively finessed to augur greatness.

“The problem isn’t the equipment,” Kagame told me. “The problem is always the man behind it. Does he understand why he is fighting?” In his view, determined and well-disciplined fighters, motivated by coherent ideas of political improvement, can always best the soldiers of a corrupt regime that stands for nothing but its own power. The RPF treated the army as a sort of field university. Throughout the war, officers and their troops were kept sharp not only by military drill but also by a steady program of political seminars; individuals were encouraged to think and speak for themselves, to discuss and debate the party line even as they were also taught to serve it. “We have tried to encourage collective responsibility,” Kagame explained. “In all my capacities, in the RPF, in the government, in the army, my primary responsibility is to help develop people who can take responsibility indiscriminately.”

You don’t allow armed people freedom to do what they want. If you are equipped to use force, you must use it rationally. If you are given a chance to use it irrationally you can be a very big danger to society. There’s no question about it. Your objective is to protect society.”

So one waited, and wondered what the war would be like, and with time it occurred to me that this anxious expectation was a part of it: if the next war was inevitable, then the last war never ended.

In the meantime, all talk of reconciliation and national unity ran up against the fact that the next war would be a war about the genocide.

For, while the RPF and the new government required that the genocide be recognized as, in Kagame’s words, “the defining event in Rwandan history,” Hutu Power still sought to make its crime a success by making it indistinguishable from the continuum of Rwandan history.

Think about the rebranding of the American civil war

But Kagame imposed institutional checks on his own power—who else could impose them?—and when he said that he could remove those checks, he was only stating the obvious.

A UNICEF study later posited that five out of six children who had been in Rwanda during the slaughter had, at the very least, witnessed bloodshed, and you may assume that adults had not been better sheltered. Imagine what the totality of such devastation means for a society, and it becomes clear that Hutu Power’s crime was much greater than the murder of nearly a million people. Nobody in Rwanda escaped direct physical or psychic damage.

He spoke of all the woes of his tiny trashed country as a set of problems to be solved, and he seemed to relish the challenge.

The process might be ugly: against those who preferred violence to reason, Kagame was ready to fight, and, unlike most politicians, when he spoke or took action, he aimed to be understood, not to be loved.

“It is to deny what the history of the world tells us is true to suppose that men of ambition and talents will not continue to spring up amongst us. And, when they do, they will as naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passion as others have so done before them … whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or of enslaving freemen.”

Bonaventure believed that survival was meaningless until one found “a reason to survive again, a reason to look to tomorrow.” This was a widely held view in Rwanda, where depression was epidemic.

So survival can seem a curse, for one of the dominant needs of the needy soul is to be needed.

To keep busy is very, very important.”

A year’s tea and coffee harvests had been lost, and vandals had left all the tea factories and about seventy percent of the country’s coffee-depulping machines inoperable.

And these people wanted a better rwanda? A lesson for people looking for violence

One might suppose that a simple desire not to go mad would inspire such people to renounce forever any hope of again calling Rwanda “home.” Instead, the exiles began rushing back to Rwanda even before the blood had dried. Tens of thousands returned immediately on the heels of the RPF, and hundreds of thousands soon followed. The Tutsi returnees and throngs of fleeing Hutus jockeyed past one another at the frontiers.

What possessed these people, a great many of whom had never before set foot in Rwanda, to abandon relatively established and secure lives in order to settle in a graveyard? The legacy of exclusion, the pressures of exile, and the 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.

But if fast money was the objective, there was no need for mid-career Rwandan professionals, living in exile with little children whose heads had never been at risk of being chopped off by a neighbor, to move their entire families into the country.

Those who had spent the past three decades in Uganda being called Rwandans were, in fact, deeply Ugandan, and people called Rwandans who had lived in Burundi seemed alien to them.

“Fourteen meters deep,” Edmond said. He told me that his brother-in-law had been a fanatically religious man, and on April 12, 1994, when he was stopped by interahamwe at a roadblock down the street and forced to lead them back to his house, he had persuaded the killers to let him pray. Edmond’s brother-in-law had prayed for half an hour. Then he told the militiamen that he didn’t want his family dismembered, so they invited him to throw his children down the latrine wells alive, and he did. Then Edmond’s sister and his brother-in-law were thrown in on top.

Then he told me that he knew who his brother’s killer was, and that he sometimes saw the man around Kigali.