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

This morning I finally finished reading We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch.

That I finished it off in about 4 sessions of reading bespeaks a great interest in the topic on my part. The topic so enthralled me that I went out and bought Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda by Romeo Dallaire yesterday after work. My interest in the subject started in the winter of 2005 when I saw Dallaire on BookTV speaking to an audience about his book. I found him to be an engaging speaker and the subject was perfect fodder for my morbid curiosity. It was, after all, a genocide. In addition to the obvious, I found that my knowledge of the topic was far out-weighed by my ignorance of it. I remember hearing of the genocide on the news – the people hacked to death with machetes, the hordes of refugees, and the White House engaging in verbal gymnastics to avoid labeling it a genocide. It's just a matter of common sense to know that the situation there was infinitely more complicated than the nightly news let on but the impending break-up with my girlfriend at the time sidetracked me from learning more. I don't even know if I had the desire to learn more at the time, to be honest, and I'm not quite sure why seeing Dallaire speak on the matter was so inspirational. His book ended up on my to-read list and a documentary film about his experiences in Rwanda played at the Wisconsin Film Festival a couple months later. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get a ticket to the showing. My interest waned but, a few months ago, I bought Gourevitch's book. It sat on my shelf until last week when I picked it off my shelf. Having just finished Greg Palast's Armed Madhouse, I was in the mood for something to take my mind off the evils of George Bush and the Republicans. And so I chose the topic of genocide. Rwanda hasn't been even a blip on the radar of the mainstream media here in the States for a long time. I don't recall it ever being much of a blip in the first place with O.J. Simpson hogging the spotlight. The story of the country trying to stand on two legs once more in the aftermath was overshadowed by the death of Princess Di and Monicagate. But it did get some media attention though perhaps not the right kind. When I finally got around one day to buying Dallaire's book, I found that it wasn't even in stock so I ended up bringing Gourevitch's tome home instead.

Gourevitch was not witness to the genocide itself. He was inspired by a visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. where there was the constant reminder of "Never Again". Well, it happened again and he went to Rwanda in the aftermath of the genocide. He spoke with politicians, aid workers, and, perhaps most important of all, the average folk on both sides. The book is not strictly chronological because it is not a strict history text. After quoting a Rwandan who said, "To me the Netherlands is just imagination. But it is real to me", Gourevitch states what it is exactly his book is about:

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.

He examines how Rwandans view one another and how Westerners view Africans.

The two major ethnic groups in Rwanda are the Hutus and the Tutsis. While Gourevitch goes into a bit of detail, I think it's important to note here the physical archetypes that distinguish them. Hutus are "stocky and round-faced, dark-skinned, flat-nosed, thick-lipped and squre-jawed" while the Tutsis are "lanky and long-faced, not so dark-skinned, narrow-nosed, thin-lipped, and narrow-chinned." Whatever we may think of these contrasts now, they were of great importance in the late 19th century. Explorer John Speke was, until I read this book, notable in my mind for having beaten Sir Richard Francis Burton in determining the source of the Nile by "discovering" Lake Victoria. His thoughts on race, however, would have a large role to play in Rwanda. Since the Tutsis had physical features that are more Caucasian, he posited that they were superior to the Hutus who had a Negroid appearance. European colonial powers divvied up Africa in 1885 and the area which is now Rwanda went to Germany. The land was given to Belgium after the German defeat in World War I. The Belgians eventually imposed a system of apartheid with racial identity cards being issued. Despite the Tutsis being the favored ethnic group of the Belgians, there was no ethnic strife until 1959.

On November 1, 1959, in the central Rwandan province of Gitarama, an administrative subchief named Dominique Mbonyumutwa was beaten up by a group of men. Mbonyumutwa was a Hutu political activist, and his attackers were Tutsi political activists, and almost immediately after they finished with him, Mbonyumutwa was said to have died. He wasn't dead, but the rumor was widely believed; even now, there are Hutus who think that Mbonyumutwa was killed on that night. Looking back, Rwandans will tell you that some such incident was inevitable. But the next time you hear a story like the one that ran on the front page of The New York Times in October of 1997, reporting on "the age-old animosity between the Tutsi and Hutu ethnic groups," remember that until Mbonyumutwa's beating lit the spark in 1959 there had never been systematic political violence recorded between Hutus and Tutsis – anywhere.

The civil unrest of 1959 marked the beginning of Hutu ascension into power. The country gained its independence in 1962 but Hutu violence against Tutsis forced hundred of thousands to flee and many fled to neighboring Uganda. Anti-Hutu sentiment fomented and the Rwandan Patriotic Front was born. In 1990, it fought its way into Rwanda from Uganda. Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana began a campaign against Tutsis and the government began assembling groups called interahamwe which would lash out against the Tutsis. The Arusha accords of August 1993 ostensibly ended the civil war and the U.N. was called in to help the peace process along by assisting the Rwandans in forming a new democratic government. The U.N. peacekeeping force was led by Dallaire. Then on April 6, 1994, President Habyarimana's plane was shot down while landing in the country's capital, Kigali, and almost immediately the genocide began which resulted in about 800,000 men, women, and children being killed over the course of 100 days. This pace way outdid the Nazis and it was mostly done with machetes.

The book meanders along jumping around in history and from person to person. It begins will the recollections of some survivors and then gives the history of Rwanda. More survivors recounting the genocide and then the more proximate history of the late 1980s – early 1990s. There's a part in the first third of the book in which Gourevitch is traveling in Rwanda after the genocide and he remarks on how beautiful a country it is. His native companion questions this statement by saying something like, "Beautiful? It's stained with blood." I can't recall the exact quote but you get my gist. There are several parts like this where Gourevitch is traveling in the aftermath where I imagined that, while there was a lot of rebuilding to do, the country was generally calm. He'd see the countryside, meet people along the way, and then be at the home of someone he wanted to interview. But when you get to the last third of the book when he describes the aftermath itself, you come to realize that there was still plenty of fighting going on and plenty of Hutus killing plenty of Tutsis. Not at the genocidal rate of the spring/summer of '94 but still nothing to sneeze at.

The book is not filled with stories of children being hacked to death though they're there. And all the stories are heart-wrenching as well as disgusting. Gourevitch recounts how normality shifted very quickly with stories of people who lived together suddenly turning on one another. In the second chapter, there's the eternally sad story of the Seventh-Day Adventist mission in Mugonero, which is in the southwest of Rwanda. After the genocide began, refugees flooded the complex which included a hospital. Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana ran the church while his son, Dr. Gerard, ran the hospital. Ntakirutimana urged fleeing Tutsis to seek refuge in the complex. Then he and his son began to be seen with armed Hutus outside the complex. Dr. Gerard found out there were some Hutu refugees so he had them evacuated. Those inside wrote to the town's mayor and Pastor Ntakirutimana pleading for help. Ntakirutimana's answer was: "Your problem has already found a solution. You must die." And they did.

Gourevitch also interviewed Paul Rusesabagina, who was popularized in the film Hotel Rwanda. Most of the survivors that Gourevitch interviewed all seemed to still be in shock. They were caught up in asking themselves why they survived. Rusesabagina came across differently. It's hard to describe. He came across, not as having a happy face, but with having to deal more with his hero status than escaping the genocide. Rusesabagina didn't consider himself to be a hero – he was just doing what he thought many others around Rwanda were doing by sheltering hundreds of refugees in the hotel he managed. Unfortunately, he seemed to be alone in that endeavor. I've never seen Hotel Rwanda but I imagine it depicts how all of the hotel's phone lines were cut except for the one used by the fax. This allowed Rusesabagina to make calls. However, I wonder if the film depicts how a nearby church also had a phone line that worked but that the priest never used it once.

While all of this was happening, Dallaire and his rag-tag band of U.N. peacekeepers were being told by the U.N. to stay out the way. He had decided to disobey the order to leave Rwanda and his superiors sent him no help. In the aftermath of the bodies of American soldiers being dragged down a street in Somalia, President Clinton's White House did it's best to stay of Rwanda. The administration admitted that "acts of genocide may have occurred" but would not label the ongoing atrocities as genocide. When asked why, a State Department spokeswoman said, "there are obligations which arise in connection with the use of the term." When a group of 8 African countries asked the United States for armored personnel carriers so that they could send in troops, Clinton leased the APCs to the U.N. for $15 million rather than lending them directly. Worse were the French who, in June, actually sent in arms and troops to aid the Hutus. This was Operation Turquoise.

In early July, the RPF took the capital of Kigali and this led to Hutus fleeing for their lives. Those refugee camps we saw on TV in July of 1994 were inhabited, in large part, by people who committed the genocide. The West ignored the Tutsis when they were being decimated but immediately helped out these refugees. The camps became strongholds of Hutu power and interahamwes reorganized and crossed the border back into Rwanda to kill more Tutsis. One aid worker from the U.N. told Gourevitch:

"We're like robots, programmed to save some lives. But when the contracts are up, or when it gets too dangerous, we will leave and maybe the people we saved can get killed after all."

As Tutsis returned, the government hoped that people could change. How odd it seems that it was supposed that Hutus and Tutsis could immediately begin to live amongst one another and start rebuilding. Gourevitch criticized aid workers who thought this way. Aid workers wanted the victims to just "get over it" and move on, but how could you have all of your friends and family slaughtered and then just turn around and live with their killers? Tutsis returned to their homes only to find Hutus squatting there. Survivors found that their neighbors were the very people that tried to kill them. It seems impossible for the victims to co-exist peacefully with their killers. But how can you get the country moving forward again and not to lapse into another civil war? People accused and/or proven to have taken part in the genocide were thrown into prisons where it was, as you can imagine, dreadfully overcrowded. The Tutsis and Hutus needed to imagine one another differently but how do you make that happen?

For it's part, the West imagined Rwandans to be locked in eternal strife. Where once the people of Rwanda imagined themselves to all be Rwandans, things changed so they imagined themselves to be Hutus and Tutsis. This distinction was a brought about by the West and the West itself adopted it just like the Rwandans. Why didn't we intervene? To a large extent, as more than Rwandan told Gourevitch, there's only imaginary money to be made there.

I'm 2 or 3 chapters into Dallaire's book now…