Abstract
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda By Philip Gourevitch, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998, 353 pages; $25.00
In 1994, the tiny central African republic of Rwanda endured a three-month wave of genocidal violence that left nearly one million Tutsis and Hutus dead. Many of the victims were brutally raped or tortured before being hacked or shot to death by the Hutu Power militia (the interahamwe) and government soldiers.
Philip Gourevitch, a staff writer for the New Yorker who arrived in Rwanda 10 months after the Hutu killing spree had ended, remarks that the massacre–“performed largely by machete”–was carried out “at dazzling speed: of an original population of seven and a half million, at least 800,000 people were killed in just a hundred days.”
Based largely on the personal accounts of Tutsi survivors, Gourevitch s book is a grim chronicle of the Hutu government's genocidal campaign against both the Tutsi minority and Hutu moderates who opposed the killings. The author argues that the genocide was not simply a product of tribal hatred; it was the result of a systematic political campaign by Hutu extremists that exploited ethnic tensions dating from the colonial era. The campaign was further fed by a deluge of weapons, and it was abetted by indecisive world leaders who stood by as the country was engulfed in violence.
The author is particularly critical of the international community's response. He argues that because world leaders were aware of the impending catastrophe months before it happened, their failure to prevent the carnage made them complicit.
The title of Gourevitch's book is drawn from a letter written by seven Seventh-Day Adventist ministers to their Hutu superior, Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, on the eve of the outbreak of violence in April 1994. In the letter, the ministers–who were Tutsis–plead with Ntakirutimana to persuade the village mayor to protect them and their families. Their desperate plea would not be heeded. Evidence suggests that Ntakirutimana himself was one of the principal architects of the slaughter of Tutsis in the Rwandan province of Kibuye.
Three month earlier, in January 1994, the head of the U.N. mission in Rwanda, Gen. Romeo Dallaire, had sent a fax to Kofi Annan, then undersecretary for peacekeeping. Dallaire reported credible evidence that an extremist Hutu organization was planning a massive slaughter of Tutsis. The source of this evidence was a high-ranking Hutu Power official in charge of preparing the interahamwe for the anti-Tutsi extermination campaign.
According to Gourevitch, U.N. officials reacted to Dallaire's fax in the same way that Ntakirutimana reacted to the Tutsi ministers' plea for help: they ignored it. In explaining the U.N.'s failure to act on Dallaire's warning, then-U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali said, “Such situations and alarming reports from the field, though considered with the utmost seriousness by U.N. officials, are not uncommon within the context of peacekeeping operations.”
“Don't rush me!”
But as the author demonstrates, the United Nations was well aware of the dangerous tide of events in Rwanda even before Dallaire's fax. “It was hardly a secret,” writes Gourevitch, that the market in the Rwandan capital of Kigali was a Hutu Power arms bazaar, where grenades and Kalashnikov rifles were on display at affordable prices; that “French, or French-sponsored, arms shipments” were continually arriving; that the government was importing machetes from China “in numbers that far exceeded the demand for agricultural use”; and that many of these weapons were being handed out to young men for no known military purpose “at a time when Rwanda was officially at peace for the first time in three years.”
Instead of bolstering U.N. forces and granting Dallaire's request to confiscate weapons and provide protection for his informant, the U.N. peacekeeping office instructed him to share his intelligence information with Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana–despite evidence that the plans for the extermination campaign came directly from the president's cabinet.
On April 12, several weeks after the killings began, the U.N. Security Council ordered the withdrawal of all but 200 peacekeeping troops from Rwanda. The “desertion of Rwanda by the U.N. force,” writes Gourevitch, “was Hutu Power's greatest diplomatic victory.” And that victory, he argues, can be credited almost entirely to the United States, which used its power and influence in the Security Council to block U.N. involvement in the growing crisis.
Coming on the heels of the U.N. debacle in Somalia, many observers thought it understandable that some U.N. member states–particularly the United States–would be reluctant to participate in any more U.N. peacekeeping missions. But U.N. inaction had the tragic consequence of leaving the Hutu génocidaires free to carry out their final solution.
The hapless U.N. forces, ordered to use their weapons only in self-defense, were left in the unenviable position of being spectators to the carnage. The author ironically remarks that the peacekeepers demonstrated their marksmanship only by shooting dogs. “The genocide had been tolerated by the so-called international community, but I was told that the United Nations regarded the corpse-eating dogs as a health problem.”
Gourevitch does an exceptional job of exploring the roots of the genocide and debunking the widely accepted notion that it was a spontaneous expression of primordial hatred. He points out, for example, that Tutsis and Hutus are so intermingled that ethnographers are no longer able to divide them into two distinct ethnic groups and that their conflict is hardly “ancient.” The first recorded incident of political violence between the two groups occurred in 1959.
In his account of the colonial and post-colonial history of Rwanda, the author describes how both the Belgians and the French first instigated anti-Tutsi sentiment in the region. Ethnic tension was ruthlessly exploited by the divisive identity politics of Hutu extremists. Gourevitch fails, however, to mention how Tutsi massacres of Hutus in neighboring Burundi added to the growing ethnic tension in the region. In this, and in his thinly veiled admiration for the leader of the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front–whose 1990 invasion of Rwanda caused an anti-Tutsi backlash in the country–Gourevitch demonstrates his decidedly pro-Tutsi bias.
But how to account for the collective brutality of the killings, in which “neighbors hacked neighbors to death in their homes, and colleagues hacked colleagues to death … doctors killed their patients, and schoolteachers killed their pupils”? It is a daunting question that does not have an easy answer.
Many moderate Hutus opposed the massacre, but most “overcame their disagreement and killed.” The author attributes much of this paradox to Hasan Ngeze, an editor of the Hutu Power mouthpiece Kangira. Ngeze reputedly wrote the widely circulated and immensely popular “Hutu Ten Commandments.” The eighth commandment: “Hutus must stop having mercy on the Tutsis.”
Because Hutu community leaders regarded these commandments as law, writes Gourevitch, “during the genocide, the work of the killers was not regarded as a crime. … It was the law of the land, and every citizen was responsible for its administration.”
The author explains that the killings were not a chaotic outburst; rather, they were the result of decades of political organizing and indoctrination by Hutu extremists.
Stories of brutality and thoughtless violence dominate much of his narrative, but Gourevitch also writes about the heroic resistance of those who opposed the violence and the hopeful attempts by Rwandans to rebuild society. He concludes his book with a courageous story of Hutu and Tutsi schoolgirls who, when asked by Hutu militants to separate themselves by ethnicity, stated that they were Rwandans. They were all killed.
“Rwandans have no need for more martyrs,” writes Gourevitch. “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?”