We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Shall Be Killed with Our Families
Gourevitch, Philip & Langan, John
AGAIN 'NEVER AGAIN' We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Shall Be Killed with Our Families Stories from Rwanda Philip Gaurevitch I iirmr, Shaw- i'V Ciroux. i?'<, >.»' pp. John Langan Philip...
...Faced in the future with such monstrous evil, the international community must possess the solidarity to send humanitarian aid, and when necessary, initiate military intervention...
...The staggering death toll was the sum of many local events, a slaughter in which the killers, often the victims' neighbors, were urged on by radio announcers and shadowy messengers...
...Gourevitch identifies those responsible as the genocidaires, proponents of Hutu power who had gathered around the regime of General Juvenal Habya-rimana...
...Police officers who had previously guarded them joined their attackers...
...Gourevitch is an impassioned and thoughtful observer...
...Habyarimana came to power in 1973 and ruled Rwanda as a dictator until being killed, along with the president of Burundi, in a spectacular and suspicious plane crash on April 6,1994...
...Still, Gourevitch does struggle to come close to a great mystery of evil, and he makes us attend to great crimes...
...They worked within a paranoid culture where fear, passivity, and conformity made it nearly impossible for individuals to resist the orders of those who spoke in the name of authority...
...John Langan Philip Gourevitch, who has written extensively on Rwanda for the New Yorker, gives us a lengthy and elliptical title that calls out for some explanation...
...Its chronology also can be difficult to follow...
...This the reader will find on page 42, in a letter written by seven Adventist pastors who, along with their families and two thousand others, had taken refuge in a church and hospital complex at Mu-gonero in western Rwanda during the genocidal onslaught that swept the central African nation in 1994...
...The United Nations' persistent inability to agree on realistic and flexible instructions for its troops is also roundly criticized...
...The death of Habyarimana launched the genocide, and the genocidaires continued to be active even after the Hutu government was overthrown in July 1994 by Tutsi rebels supported by Uganda...
...As Gourevitch's account makes plain, the killing was planned by people who knew perfectly well what they were doing...
...For those whose actions helped the genocidaires to carry out their criminal project, or whose inaction allowed victims to be devastated by the forces of injustice and cruelty, contrition is long overdue...
...But whatever the timidity and incompetence of the UN and United States, neither could measure up to the craven behavior of France, a sanctimonious jackal that supplied arms and legitimacy to the lethal Hutu regime in the hope of procuring favor...
...You must die...
...policy in the region...
...As Gourevitch convincingly demonstrates, the killings were no accidental or impulsive event...
...The ministers and their families were massacred the following day...
...The failure of Christianity in what was the most heavily Christianized country in Africa raises other, alas all-too-familiar and sobering, questions...
...This shocking betrayal and abandonment by a trusted church leader is a poignant detail in one of the most desolate and blood-soaked landscapes in the history of humanity, a genocide that killed 1 million people...
...John Langan, S.J., teaches at the Rose Kennedy School of Ethics, Georgetown University...
...This kind of attention must be the beginning of any new and morally sound U.S...
...But this is not a work that gives much pleasure or comfort...
...Gourevitch dismisses economic factors or overpopulation as possible motives...
...That policy must pay attention to the stresses and vulnerabilities of the local cultures, to the real political and moral differences among the contending parties, to the appalling sufferings of the victims, and the abiding trauma of Rwandan society...
...soldiers in Somalia...
...Subsequently, the Hutu killers went on to establish miniregirnes of fear and violence in refugee camps, especially in Zaire...
...Rwanda did not have the massive machinery of death or the bureaucratic schedules of the Holocaust, but the genocide was fomented and orchestrated with the same fiendish effectiveness...
...We Wish to Inform You is readable and moving...
...Worse, UN personnel observed and even facilitated massacres of refugees and other victims...
...Although Rwanda had more than 8 million people living in an area the size of Maryland (that's a population density of more than 800 to the square mile), it was well situated economically and had an enviable history as a recipient of foreign aid...
...Looking Commonweal 2 4 February 26,1999 beyond Rwanda, Gourevitch condemns the United States for its neglect of Africa in the aftermath of the 1991 killing of U.S...
...Nor are its arguments foolproof, its evidence complete, or its documentation thorough...
...In the case of Rwanda, as in the case of European Jewry, there should emerge a clear and vigorous international consensus: "Never again...
...With a few notable exceptions, the Hutus were the perpetrators...
...Gourevitch emphatically repudiates the suggestion of any rough moral equivalence between the actions of the Hutu and Tutsi during the 1994 civil war...
...The president of their church, who later fled to the United States, responded to their plea, "Your problem has already found a solution...
Vol. 126 • February 1999 • No. 4
