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Title: We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch ISBN: 0-312-24335-9 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 01 September, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.61 (137 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: More than an important book
Comment: "Odette nodded at my notebook, where I was writing as she spoke. 'Do the people in America really want to read this? People tell me to write these things down, but it's written inside of me. I almost hope for the day when I can forget.'" Gourevitch, p. 238.
Philip Gourevitch's "We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families" is more an important book - it is a testament to humanity. Gourevitch tells the story surrounding the 1994 genocide in Rwanda through historical facts and personal accounts, including his own. His work provokes many emotions: anger, despair, sadness, and finally, hope. It reflects on the chain of events that caused neighbors who had lived together peacefully for centuries to hack each other to death and on the international community's failure to help, especially after it claimed that genocide will "never again" happen after the Holocaust. However, interwoven in the horrifying accounts of death and the shameful negligence of the international community are stories of hope and strength that shows the beauty of a scarred people.
Rwandan history is an often overlooked chapter in our history that needs to be told. Gourevitch does an excellent job in doing this, and by reading his work readers can listen to people whose story would otherwise never be heard.
Rating: 4
Summary: Raw and compelling, the abyss gazes back at you ...
Comment: 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."
Rating: 5
Summary: Excellent writing and journalism.
Comment: This was an excellent book. It gives an adequate undertsanding of the history of the region, an account of the genocide and also a very interesting look at the aftermath and the results of the ongoing fighting that eventually lead to the ousting of Joseph Mobutu (Sese Soko).
Gourevitch does not fall into the 'old ethnic hatreds' trap and duly notes that Hutu-Tutsi animosity is a fairly recent development in central African society. This is a profoundly dynamic account of one of the most horrible examples of human depravity in history, and it reminds the world of the on-going problem with the so-called international community and its incredible impotence in the face of evil.
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Title: "A Problem from Hell" : America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power ISBN: 0060541644 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 06 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild ISBN: 0618001905 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: October, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: When Victims Become Killers : Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda by Mahmood Mamdani ISBN: 0691102805 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 12 August, 2002 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: The Graves Are Not Yet Full: Race, Tribe, and Power in the Heart of Africa by Bill Berkeley ISBN: 0465006426 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 05 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda by Michael Barnett ISBN: 0801488672 Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr Pub. Date: September, 2003 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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