We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda
By Philip Gourevitch
1998, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York
356 pages, US$10.50 from <http://www.amazon.com>
REVIEW BY SIMON TAYLER
Stories from Rwanda is an historical account of how, in the space of around two months in 1994, nearly 1 million Rwandan people were killed by their compatriots. Despite the fact that most of the slaughter was performed with basic technology (machete blows were the cause of most deaths), the mass murder of 1994 was "the most efficient mass killing since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki".
The Hutu Power government that organised the killing did so in the name of cleansing Rwanda of its Tutsi population, but it also killed those Hutus it identified as being sympathetic to Tutsis, or who were opposed to the Hutu Power clique.
Stories from Rwanda is an account of how those who survived the massacres tried to pick up the pieces of their lives. It documents how the new leadership that displaced the Hutu Power government tried to reconstruct a displaced and traumatised nation.
In part, Stories from Rwanda is also the story of how Western governments stood by and did nothing to stop the slaughter, instead appearing more concerned with maintaining relationships with their traditional client states. It is the story of how much of the aid that was sent in the name of helping the victims of the genocide actually did more to save the Hutu Power clique and its accomplices. It is a damning account of how the people of the Central African region continued to suffer as a consequence of the failure of many countries (the US and France in particular) to act in accordance with their obligations under international law.
But what makes Philip Gourevitch's book so valuable, is that it is as much a book about ideas as a retelling of the historical events they inspired.
Interspersed between the personal stories and historical events, Gourevitch carefully compels his audience to understand how such an event can take place. Much of his narrative discusses how a set of dangerous (not to mention inevitably false) ideas about racial identity can be used to create situations in which hundreds of thousands of people can be slaughtered by their neighbours, friends, colleagues and teachers.
Gourevitch denounces the idea that the genocide was driven by traditional ethnic tensions. He traces how European colonialists applied their pseudo-scientific eugenicist ideas to artificially divide Rwandan society into its competing Tutsi and Hutu castes, and how the post-colonial governments that followed inherited and maintained those ideas. He cuts through the notion that the genocide in Rwanda was a divisive, irrational and spontaneous outburst, arguing instead that it was a carefully planned way for the country's Hutu Power elite to maintain its power and privilege.
The book contains very little discussion of the systematic mass rape of women that accompanied outright murder during 1994; an aspect of its history that Rwanda's legal system and society are still grappling with today. Gourevitch's discussions on ideas are sometimes confused and contradictory, and sometimes he seems to get lost trying to think his way through a problem.
Nonetheless, this book is an essential read for anyone who wants to understand how whole communities can be mobilised to carry out unspeakable acts, and why the West seems to stand so often on the side of those who organise them. It is an invaluable starting point for those who want to understand not just the situation in Rwanda, but also what is happening in Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda.
From Green Left Weekly, February 2, 2005.
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