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

by Philip Gourevitch

Now, to prove himself his brother’s keeper, he wanted to fix his brother’s killer with the mark of Cain.

I couldn’t help thinking how well Cain had prospered after killing his brother: he founded the first city—and, although we don’t like to talk about it all that much, we are all his children.

It occurred to me that this was the famous mob mentality of blind obedience to authority which was often described in attempts to explain the genocide.

Rwanda’s conventional hierarchies had reconstituted themselves behind the prison walls; “intellectuals,” civil servants, professionals, clerics, and merchants had the least uncomfortable cells, while the mass of peasants and laborers made do outdoors, crouching in the bony folds of their neighbors’ limbs in unroofed courtyards, and referred all questions to their leaders.

How does one go about teaching such a society independance?

Rwanda pleaded for bicycles, motorcycles, and pencils and pens from foreign donors, but these basic necessities were much slower in coming than expressions of “concern” that not enough was being done to protect the rights of the accused.

No one wants to do the dirty work

In other words, a true genocide and true justice are incompatible.

WHEN RWANDANS SPOKE of reconstruction and reconciliation, they spoke of the need to overcome or to liberate themselves from “the old mentalities” of colonialism and dictatorship, and from the perfect pecking order of intimidation and obedience that had served as the engine of the genocide.

In fact, during its first two years, the UN tribunal didn’t appear to be doing much.

When the un becomes a part of the problem.

I suggested that it might have to do with adversity. People who feel up against it sometimes develop a canny take on how the world works—the rawness of it, the absurdities—and sometimes, if they’re funny, they make fun of it.

It seemed to me that both jokes did have a logic, as all jokes must, but that what they were about was provincialism and foreign influence. They were about aspirations to the image and offerings of a broader modern world, and the opposing tug of traditional Rwandan insularity and conformity; about being caught between a past that you reject or at least want to escape and a future that you can only imagine in terms of imported styles, whose imposition you also reject and want to escape.

“No,” he told me, “it’s not funny. It’s going to take us a long time to overcome the old mentalities.”

After a century in which Rwandans had labored under the mystification and deceit of the Hamitic fable, whose ultimate perversity took the world-upside-down form of genocide, the RPF and its anti-Hutu Power allies described their struggle against annihilation as a revolt of realists.

“Honesty” was among their favorite words, and their basic proposition was that greater truth should be the basis of greater power. Under the circumstances, the last best hope for Hutu Power was to assert—in its usual simultaneous onslaught of word and action—that honesty and truth themselves were merely forms of artifice, never the source of power but always its products, and that the only measure of right versus wrong was the bastardized “majority rule” principle of physical might.

Isnt there some parallels with what some politicians are doing in America

With the lines so drawn, the war about the genocide was truly a postmodern war: a battle between those who believed that because the realities we inhabit are constructs of our imaginations, they are all equally true or false, valid or invalid, just or unjust, and those who believed that constructs of reality can—in fact, must—be judged as right or wrong, good or bad.

This is happening in many countries now.is it an inescapable phase of globalization?

While academic debates about the possibility of objective truth and falsehood are often rarified to the point of absurdity, Rwanda demonstrated that the question is a matter of life and death.

isnt this an education issue.with herds of people unable to comprehend

“We call it ikinamucho—that if you want to do something you are deceitful and not straight. For example, you can come to kill me”—he clutched his throat—“and your mission is successful, but then you cry. That is ikinamucho.”

Sitting with Sindikubwabo as he offered what sounded like a rehearsal of the defense-by-obfuscation he was preparing for the tribunal, I had the impression that he almost yearned to be indicted, even apprehended, in order to have a final hour in the spotlight.

Defence by obfuscation. Again sounds like a modern political trick in the USA

This was one of the great mysteries of the war about the genocide: how, time and again, international sympathy placed itself at the ready service of Hutu Power’s lies. It was bewildering enough that the UN border camps should be allowed to constitute a rump genocidal state, with an army that was regularly observed to be receiving large shipments of arms and recruiting young men by the thousands for the next extermination campaign. And it was heartbreaking that the vast majority of the million and a half people in those camps were evidently at no risk of being jailed, much less killed, in Rwanda, but that the propaganda and brute force of the Hutu Power apparatus was effectively holding them hostage, as a human shield. Yet what made the camps almost unbearable to visit was the spectacle of hundreds of international humanitarians being openly exploited as caterers to what was probably the single largest society of fugitive criminals against humanity ever assembled.

Absurdity in action. Too many people nott caring enough

And a colleague of hers said, “They wanted to show us a video of Rwanda in 1994, but we decided it would be too upsetting.”

We cannot change much without getting our hands in the mud

Humanitarians didn’t like to be called mercenaries, but “not to think—just to do,” as the UNHCR worker put it, is a mercenary mind-set.

“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.”

there developed among them an epidemic of what diplomats call clientitis: an overly credulous embrace of your clients’ point of view.

They can’t quite bring themselves to say that we should negotiate with the people who committed genocide.

don’t think it’s our culture, especially since I don’t see a lot of honesty in politics in many other countries. But in some other countries, when you try to tell lies you are exposed by strong institutions that work to know what exactly has been happening.”

Such Current praise for the political system in the usa

Mobutu was the longest-ruling despot in Africa. His ascent to power, between 1960 and 1965, had been accomplished with the careful assistance of the CIA and various bands of white mercenaries through the violent suppression of the popularly elected Congolese national movement, and his endurance was due, in large measure, to his genius for turning the misery of his neighbors to his own advantage.

Mobutu’s principle, then, was a double negative: to erase the corrupt memory that had erased the genuine national memory, and thus to restore that original chain of memory.

One is reminded of Pol Pot, who returned to Cambodia after studying in Paris, changed his country’s name to Kampuchea, chucked out the calendar, proclaimed “Year Zero,” and slaughtered a million or more of his countrymen to eradicate Western influences.

was almost as if we wanted Zaire to be the Heart of Darkness; perhaps the notion suited our understanding of the natural order of nations.

But ten dollars wasn’t enough to buy a Tutsi his life: the going rate for transport to the border was between twelve and fifteen dollars. Eight hundred of the Tutsis who had been attacked at Mokoto were now packed into a sodden and steaming thatch schoolhouse in Kitchanga, and they were too poor to pay for their own “ethnic cleansing.”

In Washington, where 1996 was a presidential election year, one Clinton administration official was reported to have told a meeting of the National Security Council that the main policy concern in Rwanda and Zaire was that “we don’t want to look like chumps.”

This is the kind of politics that ultimately destroys a country

France remained Hutu Power’s biggest advocate. The attitude toward Kagame’s warnings among the Africa hands at the Quai d’Orsay seemed to be: let him try. (In 1995, the new French President, Jacques Chirac, had refused to invite Rwanda’s new President, Pasteur Bizimungu, to an annual conference of Francophone African leaders in Biarritz, which opened with Chirac presiding over a moment of silence to honor the memory of President Habyarimana—and not the dead of the genocide that had been committed in Habyarimana’s name.)

“I say to them, ‘We told you to separate those groups. You have failed. If you—the whole world put together—are unable to do this, how can you expect us to do much better? You hold us to a standard that has never existed on this earth. You want us to wake up one morning and have everything right—people walking hand in hand with one another, forgetting about the genocide, things moving smoothly. It sounds nice to talk about it.’”

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.

"That 's one problem solved, and it has created another problem, which we also have to solve." He then proceeded to name a lot of problems-housing , justice, the economy, education, the demobilization of thousands of ex-FAR soldiers returning from exile, and, above all, "this issue of ethnicity."

He could have killed anybody—such a person who does not even fear being killed. It means there’s some level of insanity that has been created.”

I’m sure that every individual, somewhere in his plans, wants some peace, wants to progress in some way, even if he is an ordinary peasant. So if we can present the past to them and say, ‘This was the past that caused all these problems for you, and this is the way to avoid that,’ I think it changes their minds quite a bit. And I think some people can even benefit from being forgiven, being given another chance.”

Had the war in the Congo happened in Europe, it would probably have been called a world war, and to Africans the world was at stake.

Had he not involved himself in Rwanda, I think he could have stayed, just like that, as he had been doing for the last thirty-two years—just do nothing to develop Zaire, but stay in what they call power, by controlling the radio station, and so on.”

Evidently, it did not occur to them that such a country as Rwanda can refuse to accept the insignificance of its annihilation; nor had anybody imagined that other Africans could take Rwanda’s peril seriously enough to act.

I 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.

Toward the end of the war in the Congo, when Kabila’s victory appeared inevitable, The New York Times ran an editorial headed “Tyranny or Democracy in Zaire?”—as if those were the only two political possibilities, and whatever was not one must be the other.

Taking a truly nuanced view of the world is hard

Museveni’s complaint was with what might be called cosmetic democracy, in which elections held for elections’ sake at the behest of “donor governments” sustain feeble or corrupt powers in politically damaged societies.

“These people seem to say that the developed parts of the world and the undeveloped parts of the world can all be managed uniformly. Politically this is their line, and I think this is really rubbish—to be charitable. 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.”

He was a student of how the great democracies emerged from political turmoil, and he recognized that it did not happen quickly, or elegantly, or without staggering setbacks and agonizing contradictions along the way.

“I think we should start accusing these people who actually supported the camps, spent a million dollars per day in these camps, gave support to these groups to rebuild themselves into a force, militarized refugees. When in the end these refugees are caught up in the fighting and they die, I think it has more to do with these people than Rwanda, than Congo, than the Alliance. Why shouldn’t we accuse them? This is the guilt they are trying to fight off. This is something they are trying to deflect.”

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

“With my countrymen—Rwandans—you never know what they will become tomorrow.” Although he didn’t mean it that way, this struck me as one of the most optimistic things a Rwandan could say after the genocide, not unlike General Kagame’s claim that people “can be made bad, and they can be taught to be good.”

During their attack on the school in Gisenyi, as in the earlier attack on the school in Kibuye, the students, teenage girls who had been roused from their sleep, were ordered to separate themselves—Hutus from Tutsis. But the students had refused. At both schools, the girls said they were simply Rwandans, so they were beaten and shot indiscriminately. Rwandans have no need—no room in their corpse-crowded imaginations—for more martyrs. None of us does. But mightn’t we all take some courage from the example of those brave Hutu girls who could have chosen to live, but chose instead to call themselves Rwandans?