Customer Reviews

We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories From Rwanda (Bestselling Backlist)

5 star:		(191)
4 star:		(40)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

In early May 1994 I stood on a bridge over the river that forms the border between Rwanda and Tanzania and observed corpses floating down towards Lake Victoria in an unbroken stream. As I write this, two Rwandan women are taking the unprecedented action of suing the United Nations for its failure to intervene in the worst act of genocide since WW2. UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, who played a kay role in UN decision-making in 1994, has confessed the UN's "failure" and expressed his own "deep remorse." 800,000 people died, most of them hacked to death with machetes by their neighbours. How this happened, and how the world utterly failed in its self-appointed role to prevent exactly such a holocaust, is the subject of this beautifully written, accessible and compelling book. Gourevitch wants to know WHAT happened, and through interviews with survivors, gives us the clearest and most comprehensive understanding I have yet seen. It is not pretty reading, although Gourevitch's dispassionate and sensitive writing makes it possible to get through material that in coarser hands would be impossible to stomach. He also describes the HOW. For years it was evident to the West - and most particularly to France and Belgium - that Hutu factions were gathering their strength to strike at the Tutsi minority. Every day Hutu radio stations ran violent anti-Tutsi propaganda, in which Tutsis and any moderate Hutus who were not interested in killing them were warned to prepare to die. When the killing began, it was simply the next logical step in a process that had long been underway. The case seems impossible to refute - indeed, the UN's internal investigation which published its report in December 1999 does NOT refute - that the genocide was both broadly predictable, and could have been ameliorated, if not altogether stopped, by effective international intervention. The legal knots the UN allowed to create for itself, so that "blue-helmets" felt they could not act to save a woman being raped and hacked to pieces, because their mandate allowed for only their own self-defence, are just one example of how international law can - sometimes - ENCOURAGE crimes against humanity. The lessons of Rwanda, painfully learnt, will influence the way the so-called "world community" responds to massive ethnic eruptions for a generation to come. To begin to understand this most painful event in recent human history, this book cannot be too highly recommended. If there is one small niggle, it is the lack of an index, something that I hope will be addressed in future editions.

In a transcendent tour de force, Philip Gourevitch takes one of the most horrifying events of the late 20th century, and manages to find the elements of hope and meaning that make this book more than the sum of the body parts it describes as scattered around a church in Nyarubuye, Rwanda.

On the surface, "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families" is a graphic account of the 1994 genocide in which the "Hutu Power" government led its citizens to slaughter 800,000 of their Tutsi neighbors in only 100 days ... while the international community stood by and watched helplessly. In a greater sense, however, this is a story about how people imagine the world to be, and the terrible consequences that follow when they lose their humanity in trying to create such a world. It is about the nature of evil, and the power of forgiveness and justice to reclaim the future without forgetting the past.

This is a difficult and painful book to read, but not for the obvious reasons. The atrocities committed by the killers are brought to light in considerable detail, however Gourevitch does this in an almost semi-detached and dispassionate way. His real moral outrage seems to be reserved for the so-called "civilized" countries that could have stopped the genocide, but instead did nothing until it was too late ... and then compounded their foreign policy sins by aiding the Hutu murderers in refugee camps.

There is certainly plenty of blame to go around. Gourevitch provides extensive evidence that there were many warning signs of the impending massacres. He outlines the brief history of ethnic antagonisms that led to the crimes, and explains why the Clinton Administration, the United Nations (including current U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan), and the former colonial powers in Africa (such as France) all refused to intervene to halt the butchery. The French even took steps to keep it going. Gourevitch is particularly good at placing the genocide into a context that shows why our political leaders were too paralyzed to get involved and risk doing anything to save lives. Basically, it seems to come down to the fact that Rwanda has no oil, the victims were black, and the timing was all wrong (U.S. Rangers had just been shot to death and dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia only weeks earlier).

Putting aside the official excuses for inaction, though, perhaps the best thing about this book is how Gourevitch tells so much of his tale in the words of the Rwandans themselves--both those accused of condoning or participating in the violence, and those who suffered from it.

From Odette Nyiramilimo, a doctor who had several members of her immediate family killed, to Paul Rusesabagina, a hotel manager who protected 1,000 or more Tutsis from harm by using a mixture of simple bravery and shrewd psychology, the writer has extracted narratives of extraordinary courage under even the most brutal conditions. He struggles not to judge pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, the clergyman who ignored his doomed ministers' pleas to be spared the carnage, but cannot conceal his admiration for Rwandese Patriotic Front Major General Paul Kagame, who eloquently said: "People are not inherently bad. But they can be made bad. And they can be taught to be good." Contrasted with the American military intelligence officer who cynically compared the genocide to a cheese sandwich (because nobody cares about either), it is easy to understand why Gourevitch holds Kagame in higher esteem.

"We Wish to Inform You ..." is not a perfect book. As others have noted, it really needs an index (or at least a glossary) to help the reader keep track of the various acronyms of organizations (for example, RPF, FAR, UNAMIR), characters (Major General Romero Dallaire, Rwandan ex-President Habyarimana, and USAID worker Bonaventure Nyibizi) and groups (such as the "interahamwe" Hutu Power militias).

Also, Gourevitch begins to lose his focus on the genocide in the second half of his story. He spends a lot of time and dozens of pages pursuing blind alleys about the misguided humanitarian relief efforts in the nearby Congolese refugee camps, and getting sidetracked with the downfall of Zairean President Mobutu Sese Seko. When the author returns to Rwanda, and explores how the new government there had to struggle to pull the nation together again, he is clearly back on firmer ground. His investigation into the problems faced by survivors of the genocide, being asked to live peacefully alongside their former tormentors, is especially moving.

The mass murder of the Tutsis in Rwanda occurred even more efficiently and ruthlessly than did the Nazi measures to impose a "final solution" on the Jews during the Holocaust in World War II. And yet, for all of the promises that the Western democracies uttered 50 years ago to "never again" permit the attempted extermination of an ethnic group anywhere else, it did ... and very recently, too. The rate at which the Hutus killed the Tutsis was truly sickening, but maybe the way it was allowed to happen should trouble us even more.

As Gourevitch points out in this fine book, which won the coveted George K. Polk Award for Foreign Reporting, the nightmare that gripped Rwanda in April 1994 went largely uncovered by the international press. Americans heard little about it. "We Wish to Inform You ..." may change that. It ranks up there with "Night" by Elie Wiesel and "Forgotten Soldier" by Guy Sajer as one of the most disturbing but inspirational tales of human savagery and individual nobility one is ever likely to read. In a self-absorbed pop culture that too often force feeds the public a steady diet of happy talk, "We Wish to Inform You ..." offers a strong dose of perspective, with a sobering reminder that we share this planet with other people who have real problems.

There is always a danger in taking action. There is always a cost in not taking it. Maybe next time, when faced with such a bloodbath, the world will show some of the same simple human decency as those Hutu girls who, when told to separate themselves from the Tutsis, "could have chosen to live, but chose instead to call themselves Rwandans."

Several reviewers have lambasted this book for a variety of shortcomings: poorly written, poorly edited, he doesn't interview the right types of people, he talks too much about himself. I hope to briefly explain why I don't agree with ANY of these criticisms and hope that people will read this excellent book.

Poorly written/edited: I'm a writer/editor myself and the pages of this book flew through my fingers. I was totally absorbed. I found it well written, but if you're worried, I have a feeling the subject matter is so important, you wouldn't even notice if stylistically it wasn't your cup of tea.

Sources: He interviews the following types of people: Hutus who killed, Tutsis who were attacked, government officials of many countries, foreign aid workers. Don't believe the people who say he only interviews the power players and leaves out the voice of the common man. The hotel manager's (just a middle class Hutu who did what he thought was right) story is awesome and could make a movie as powerful as Schindler's List.

Too self-centered: Yes, Gourevitch brings in his own observations and experiences. I felt they were insightful and interesting. Part of his quest is to see how people deal with the genocide, how they internalize it and incorporate it into their existence. As an American going to Rwanda from New York to learn about this genocide, Gourevitch has an interesting perspective and I'm glad he didn't choose to bury it.

One more thing: Several reviews crticized a particular passage where he talks about the "postmodern war" of relativism versus right/wrong. These reviewers misunderstood the passage. He's not talking about the genocide itself, but he's talking about THE WAR OVER THE GENOCIDE. In other words, people who think genocide took place versus those who would deny it or call it something else (it was a war, many people were killed on both sides, etc). In my opinion Gourevitch is right on -- to call this event something other than genocide is either a case of denial or a relativistic fantasy -- nothing is wrong, it's all context. Yes the particular sentence was a little over the top, but these reviewers had a knee-jerk reaction to it that obscured their understanding of his prose.

This is not an objective book, but given the subject how could the author NOT be emotionally moved to make a judgment about people who would deny this event its importance in world history? I applaud his efforts.

IN the province of Kibungo, in eastern Rwanda, near the Tanzanian border, there's a rocky hill called Nyarubuye, with a church where many Tutsis were slaughtered in April 1994. A year after the killing, I flew to Nyarubuye in a United Nations helicopter, low over the hills in the morning mists, with the banana trees like green starbursts dense over the slopes. The uncut grass blew back as we dropped into the centre of a parish schoolyard. A lone soldier materialised, and shook our hands with shy formality. I stepped up into the open doorway of a classroom. At least 50, mostly decomposed cadavers covered the floor, wadded in clothing, their belongings strewn about and smashed. Macheted skulls had rolled here and there. The dead looked like pictures of the dead. They did not smell. They did not buzz with flies. They had been killed 13 months earlier, and they hadn't been moved. Skin stuck here and there over the bones, many of which lay scattered from the bodies, dismembered by the killers, or by scavengers - birds, dogs, bugs. The more complete figures looked a lot like people, which they were once. A woman in a cloth wrap printed with flowers lay near the door. Her fleshless hip bones were high and her legs slightly spread, and a child's skeleton extended between them. Her torso was hollowed out. Her ribs and spinal column poked through the rotting cloth. Her head was tipped back and her mouth was open; a strange image - half agony, half repose. I had never been among the dead before. What to do? Look? Yes. I had come to see them. The dead had been left unburied at Nyarubuye for memorial purposes - and there they were, so intimately exposed. I didn't need to see them. I already knew, and believed, what had happened in Rwanda. Yet looking at the buildings and the bodies, and hearing the silence of the place, with the grand Italianate basilica standing there deserted, and the beds of exquisite, death-fertilised flowers blooming over the corpses, it was still strangely unimaginable. All this is common In Africa. But Why? Please buy this book

Henry Kissinger was once asked why he invested so little time on Latin American diplomacy. His response was a sarcastic echo of Hitler's justification for the annexation of Czech Sudetenland: "South America is a dagger aimed at the heart of Antarctica."

And so it is with Rwanda, relegated to the interior of continent that is a geopolitical second-class citizen. At the same time Americans were building a museum to memorialize the Jewish Holocaust in World War II, our government, along with the U.N. bureaucracy and most of the rest of the world, was washing its hands of the blood in Rwanda.

Here is an exceptional piece of both political reporting and literature that brings light to a dark corner of modern history. If you're thinking about reading this book, I urge you to look at the reviews. Listen to what the readers are saying, the unanimity of feeling. It's so rare to see a review site where not one person trashes a book. And yet this book is so moving and powerful, I think it would take cynicism to the point of inhumanity to deny its impact.

I had read Romeo Dallaire's "Shake Hands with the Devil", which is a harrowing first-person account of the events in Rwanda. Dallaire was the commander of the woefully understaffed U.N. "peacekeeping" force, a force that could do little more than bear witness to the genocide that was unfolding around them. But if you have to read one book about Rwanda, it should be Peter Gourevitch's "We wish to inform you..."

It is not only difficult to put down because of its narrative force, but starting from the personal stories of genocide witnesses he is able to zoom out and see the larger picture in which the rest of the world is complicit. As Gourevitch observes, if what happened in Central Africa happened in Europe, it would have been considered a World War. Why were we so oblivious in the West? Are all men created equal?

To say it's a "must read" book really doesn't do it justice. You're denying yourself something important if you don't read it.

PRODUCT ADVISORY--Do not read this book (or this review) if any of the following are true:

You have no stomach for descriptions of graphic violence and human cruelty.

You believe and want to keep believing that serious problems in faraway countries should always be handled by the U.N.

You cherish a belief that people are rational.

If any of those statements applies to you, you'll have serious issues with this book. It's not for the faint of heart or queasy of stomach, it forces the reader to come to terms with the ineffectiveness of international institutions, and, most importantly, it shows the full dark potential of man's cruel, brutish, irrational side.

Gourevitch's book is difficult to read but impossible to put down. He writes excellently and knowingly about a difficult topic many people chose to remain ignorant of: the slaughter of 800,000 Rwandans over the space of a few short months in 1994.

Few people outside Rwanda realized what was happening until it was too late, and no one of consequence took any meaningful action to stop the massacres--the U.N. and the U.S., stung by their failure in Somalia less than a year before, sat on the sidelines. Meanwhile, mobs of Hutus, whipped into a frenzy by radio broadcasts spewing anti-Tutsi propaganda, hacked hundreds of thousands of people to death with machetes.

To his great credit, Gourevitch gets beyond statistics, facts and figures, telling stories that bring these events to life in horrifying, vivid detail. Readers feel the terror of Tutsis who had their Achilles tendons cut, who were left writhing in pain on the ground while their assailants ate, drank, and came back to kill them after dinner.

While writing this book, Gourevitch traveled extensively in Rwanda and elsewhere, even as the aftershocks of the massacre reverberated through the surrounding nations. This research paid off well, and he paints an indelible picture of a country and a region wracked by a massive human catastrophe. Indeed, "We Wish to Inform You" reads like a travelogue from hell, a visitor's guide to a blood-soaked patch of God's green earth where the perpetrators of genocide now live side by side with the friends and family of their victims.

Other reviewers have criticized this book for meandering too much after the initial descriptions of the massacres. These passages, though, work well to illustrate how the U.N., having sat on its hands during the killings, bungled their aftermath, and how the problems in Rwanda were ultimately best solved by Rwandans and other Africans. And that is perhaps the best and most surprising thing about Gourevitch's book; after all the bloodshed and all the killing and all the cruelty, it ends on a note of peace, optimism--and humanity.

This book has been very highly praised. Is it really that good? As far as I'm concerned, yes, it is.

That does not mean that those who want to learn something about the genocide in Rwanda ought to read this book and no others! But this book ought to be one of the ones that you do read.

Gourevitch explains that there really was a carefully planned genocide, in which about 800,000 of Rwanda's 900,000 Tutsis were slaughtered in about 100 days, decimating (reducing by 10%) the population of the country as a whole. He shows that many rather ordinary Rwandans carried out these murders, often with machetes. And there are a number of individual stories that make it all horrifyingly real to us readers. Although I often dislike an anecdotal approach to events, I think Gourevitch does a superb job with it.

There are numerous issues that beg to be discussed, and Gourevitch addresses them. He shows how the genocide was planned, he describes how it was accomplished, and he shows the extent of retaliation for it. Throughout, he manages to keep his moral compass. He properly dismisses excuses by the killers that there was nothing they could do, or that they were merely following orders, or merely giving orders. Nor does he try to make the intentional attempt to get rid of all Tutsis equivalent to incidents in a war to conquer or liberate parts of Rwanda.

Some of the issues Gourevitch raises deal with responsibility of other nations. Where was the UN in all of this? Or France? Or the United States? He points out that there is a Genocide Convention whose premise is "that a moral imperative to prevent efforts to exterminate whole peoples should be the overriding interest animating the action of an international community of autonomous states." Germany was indeed conquered in 1945, its leaders were brought to justice, the country was then reconstructed. Does the international community have the same attitude about similar threats today? Obviously not. In fact, France tended to support and arm the Hutu killers. The United Nations never obtained the authority to try to stop any of the atrocities. And the United States helped delay sending more UN forces, so that even had the UN decided to try to take action, it would have been unable to do so at the height of the massacres.

Rwanda is an overwhelmingly Catholic nation, and I wondered about the role of the Church in the genocide. After all, the killers and victims tended to be of the same religion. It was disappointing to discover how little the church leaders did to speak out against the killings, let alone stop them.

Of course, reading about such terrible inhumanity does make one wonder about our species as a whole. Are we humans really this awful? Well, yes, sometimes we are. But this book also left me with a feeling of hope and a sense that we can do much better. I think the book made me realize that if we were to show just a little more respect for truth and human rights and pay just a little more attention to events, we would be likely to avoid tragedies such as this one.

As Joseph Stalin stated: "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic."

I picked up Gourvitch's book on my way to Rwanda. I was sent on a humanitarian medical mission to help the government upgrade what was left of a ravaged, dilapidated, central hospital's medical system.

This book was my first read during my two week stay in Rwanda/Kigali. Unnerving, I was reading it while I sumptuously dined at the only five star hotel. I just finished my meal when I got to the part where Gourvitch mentions that it was at this hotel that scores of killing and atrocities occurred. Distressing.

Later, the next weekend, after I finished the book, I went to a hotel disco and the dance floor was full of Hutus and Tutsis dancing together. Very bizarre, for my Western mind to grasp, considering that just eight years ago 99.9% of those on the dance floor witnessed violence, 79.6% experienced death in their family and 57.7% watched the gore of killing or maiming with machetes. Not to mention how many were victims themselves or how many were perpetrators.

In this outstanding book, Philip Gourvitch lays it all out, and it is brutal and gruesome. His writing is forceful and forthright. He directly indites the U.S. and Europe, citing their deliberate indifference to the genocide. He writes, "Rwanda had presented the world with the most unambiguous case of genocide since Hitler's war against the Jews, and the world sent blankets, beans and bandages ... hoping that everyone would behave nicely in the future. Especially damning is France's complicity with the Hutus.

There are a few areas of shortcomings. The lack of an index and noticeable is Philip Gourvitch remiss to lay any blame at the door step of any of the African nations for their disengagement.

Also, if you selected this book, hoping to have a rational and sane answer for how and why this insanity happened, how 1,000,000 people could be hacked to death by friends, family, teachers, physicians and coworkers in 100 days; you will come away empty handed.

But, this is not a shortcoming of Philip Gourvitch book. For there can never be adequate explanation for such demonic decimation. The genocide of Rwanda, the base brutality, the inhumanity, the cries and pleading prayers of the victims and the vacuum of morality and compassion have made these actions uncircumscribible.

Finally, this book should be read in several sittings. The despairing denseness of the inhumane acts are too heavy to be comprehended without breaks, ie "Hutus young and old rose to the task. Neighbors hacked neighbors to death in their home and colleague hacked colleague to death in their work place. Doctors killed their patients, and school teachers killed their pupils.. Highly Recommended.

This book starts with a close-up view of some horrific and shocking stories of massacres in Rwanda during the genocide of Tutsis by Hutus in 1994. It's immediately gripping. Then Gourevitch pulls back a bit, to explore the immediate circumstances of the genocide. Finally, the lens is adjusted all the way to wide angle, to encompass the history of Hutu and Tutsi identity and conflict, the causes and implications of the conflict in Africa and the rest of the world. It's the kind of context that's nearly impossible to come by through news reporting or concise historical texts. Along the way, Gourevitch shares his own meditations and commentary as a visitor, investigator, journalist, and human in Rwanda. This is not a dry, objective historical text, nor is it a purely sensationalist fictionalized view of the genocide. It is that rarest of nonfiction texts--a personal, historical, and political view that gives the reader a clearer picture of what is usually portrayed as a muddy conflict between savages. I highly recommend this book to anyone.

I liked the book so much that I felt a sudden sorrow as I read the last page. I just wanted to keep reading on and on. I have read a lot of articles and books on Rwanda, but this one is just exceptional. This is the closest I have come to comprehending what took place in Rwanda. The book uses several key individuals to narrate the stroy of all other
Rwandans and their experiences in the genocide. Philip Gourevitch did an extraordinary job, and I think the book is very well-deserving of its five-star rating. I could hardly keep my fingers off the book for the whole period.

The book explains how the "international community" not only sat and watched the genocide unfold, but also demonstrates how this "international community" HELPED the Hutu extremists kill more people by feeding and funding them. There were many times when I stopped reading and simply glared into the ceiling to ask myself if what I was reading was really true. Doctors killed patients, doctors killed fellow doctors, patients killed doctors, neighbours killed fellow neighbours, and family members and friends killed each other. Some priests, nuns, and prominent politicians also carried their machetes and rifles and helped out too. Children as young as seven were also participants in the horror. Whole villages were wiped out in a matter of days, and whole families were decimated. What is most striking is that the genocide started long before 1994. Numerous Tutsis were being massacred in the 50's and 60's (and further on)...and nobody did anything. April 1994 was largely a culmination of the impunity that had been tolerated for decades. One does wonder how all the survivors today live knowing that the very killers who killed their families are living among them, unpunished.

Gourevitch also goes into the camps in North and South Kivu (near the border with the DRC), and explains the workings of Hutu malitia there. He intelligently delves into the post -'94 politics of Uganda, Rwanda, and the DRC - as well as the workings of Mobutu and other politicians. I had a much deeper understanding of politics in Central Africa when I finished the book. The book also ends with an interview with Rwanda's current president (Kagame), and his own insight into what happened, and also what's in store for Rwanda's future.

I would recommend this book any day. In fact, I advise anyone who gets the chance to go ahead and read it. It gave me a better appreciation of life, the sad reality of world politics, and a profound sense of regret for what happened in Rwanda. I don't take it lightly either, that I finished this book on my birthday.