Rating: 
Summary: Beautifully Written But With Two Minor Flaws
Review: If I could, I would have given this book four and a half stars. It is a superbly written and haunting account of one of the worst events in 20th Century, the murder of hundreds of thousands of people in Rwanda in 1994. In a way, the genocide there was worse than the Holocaust because it happened as the author put it "with dazzling speed" (just in about 100 days).I only have these problems with the book: 1. The author is correct to link the vicious "Hutu Power" ideology that drove the massacre of the Tutsis to practices of the Rwandans' Belgian and German rulers. It's important, however, to remember that these colonial powers never intended or directly taught the Hutus and the Tutsis to slaughter each other. 2. The author tends to make the Tutsi rebels out too much as heroes. Unfortunately, they have committed massacres of their own since the 1994 genocide. Their doing so is understandable but hardly excusable. Finally, I have to say that I find it very annoying to hear the Rwandans complain that their country was betrayed by the United States and the UN. I believe that America and the UN should have acted to prevent the genocide, and their failure to do so is shameful. Yet in the end, it is important to remember whose hands were on the machetes. They weren't German, Belgian, American hands, they were those of the Hutu and sometimes the Tutsi. In the end, to find the real killers, the Rwandans only have to look in the mirror. They did it to themselves
Rating: 
Summary: pop culture association games
Review: Everyone knows the emotional resonance that movies and music have, how they tend to remind us of the time period we experienced them in. It's not quite as obvious with books, but this title I could not separate from when I read it: that is, after September 11th. I was in Pakistan at the time; I had been talking with many Afghanis and was familiar with their situation. So I was more than disconcerted at the sudden media attention on the muslim world and the blatant manipulation of the refugee situation by many different channels. The ideas in this book converged with everything swirling around me to produce a tremendous sense of outrage at 'the injustice of it all', for lack of a better description. This book is truly the most horrifying thing I've ever read; I can recognize some of it's technical and artistic faults, but I still surrendered myself to the power of the narrative. The context in which I read it certainly contributed to heightened emotions, but I do think the prose stands on it's own as a modern day 'world-gone-wrong' horror story regardless of your personal take on 9/11 and its aftermath.
Rating:
Summary: A necessary education
Review: Having just finished Gourevitch's book, it will certainly take a long time to sink in. I will have to return to it, to reread certain passages; I will have a copy of Nachtwey's "Inferno" beside me for a visual feedback, I will stop and put it away because it is overwhelming, and then I'll go back and try to understand it again. This is not a matter of understanding the book per se, so much as it is a process of understanding our responses to it, and our ability to reconcile the profound injustices it catalogs. For me a very telling phrase in the book was "...in fact, Mars is of a greater strategic interest to the West than Rwanda is. But human beings live in Rwanda..." In struggling to understand the turbulent time I - as a middle class American - have been so effectively sheltered from, this book came as a watershed. I can't trust the news anymore. I can't think of different cultures as 'other' anymore, and I can only do my best to stay informed and active to really, really make sure that this sort of thing doesn't happen again, ever. A full-scale genocide unfolded right under our OJ-occupied noses, folks, and almost a million innocents were slaughtered in the matter of few months. This is the story of what happened, and why, and what we all did - and didn't - do about it.
Rating:
Summary: Never Again - Yeah, Right
Review: Gourevitch, through numerous interviews with genocide survivors and participants, retells the story of the horrifying extermination campaign carried out by the machete-wielding Hutu ethnic majority against the Tutsi ethnic minority in Rwanda in 1994 (and subsequent years). Although you will certainly cringe at the nature of the atrocities and perhaps find it difficult to comprehend the nature of the Hutu contempt for the Tutsis (remember how Hitler mobilized an entire nation against the Jews, spurring previously unthinkable behavior), Gourevitch combines these tales with a thorough examination of how the UN, US, France and others actually enabled the slaughter of 800,000 plus individuals in just over three months. The book is not only a compelling work that explores the darkest depths of humanity, as well as the indomitable spirit of the inner soul, but it is a first-rate analysis of how a genocide of this magnitude could occur in the 20th century. Unfortunately, the book makes it readily apparent that the possibility of another genocide occurring somewhere in the world is not impossible given a set of circumstances similar to those present in Rwanda (i.e., no state that could prevent such a tragedy has a strategic interest in doing so). The book also offers another compelling example of why the UN is a body that leaves much to be desired when it comes to peacekeeping (inherently destined for failure) and humanitarian (always with a noble objective but poorly conducted) missions. Whether you're interested in Central African affairs, international affairs or human interest stories, you will be enthralled by Gourevitch's writing from beginning to end and discover how an ethnic group could be killed at a rate exceeding that of the Holocaust in the age of CNN.
Rating:
Summary: You Must Read This
Review: I was in college during the Rwandan genocide, and ever since I have been fascinated with Central African politics and events. This is truly one on the least understood places on earth, and certainly one of the grimmest. Gourevitch, who distinguished himself on the Rwandan issue in the pages of <i>New Yorker</i>, uses a series of powerful stories (some are more like anecdotes) to bring a human sense to something so inhuman: 1.2 million people killed (most with machetes) in just over eight weeks. Don't look for any solace in this book. If you read it, you will lose sleep. You will also be a lot smarter about something that we should all know more about.
Rating: 
Summary: Modern Atrocities
Review: Gourevitch's book is a gut-wrenching account of the 1994 genocide on the part of the Hutu government to kill 800,000 Tutsi neighbors, not because of the graphic nature but because of the complacency and ignorance of the rest of the world while this was happening. Gourevitch seems personally affected by the genocide, particularly when western nations 1) not only could have stopped the genocide but also 2) aided the Hutus in refugee camps. Gourevitch's blame falls on the Clinton Administration, the UN and General Kofi Annan and France. The fact that massacres were going to take place, he claims, was within the knowledge of all these different powers even before the massacre occurred. The bulk of Gourevitch's book is interviews with a cross-section of the Rwandan public who displayed courage, as well as those who didn't. The theme of genocide progresses throughout the book but then becomes subsumed in a narrative of various relief efforts with names that are difficult to keep track of (RPF, FAR, UNAMIR, etc.) Gourevitch writes as a journalist, and it differs in many ways from scholarly articles such as "Beyond Nuremberg" by David Cohen, which I read previous to We Wish To Inform You. In trying to draw parallel themes, I found that Gourevitch was seeking to expose how the murder of the Tutsis in Rwanda was carried out even more methodically than the Nazis' Final Solution. His point is particularly disconcerting after having read about the complex legalities of the Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals, only to have another genocide occur 50 years later, largely ignored by the public. Gourevitch's book effectively changes this, and brings the atrocities in Rwanda to the public, where they can no longer be ignored.
Rating:
Summary: Really good journalism; the author knows his stuff
Review: Phillip Gourevitch spent alot of time in Rwanda between the summer of 1995 and early 1997. This book is in many ways quite amazing. The author clearly knows a great deal about Africa and what is more makes it interesting even though I do not agree with every thing he says. The common conception in the West about conflicts in Africa is that they are based on ancient, insoluble ethnic hatreds which we in the West, with our tolerant, refined and orderly societies just cannot comprehend. This, of course, is a nice delusion for Westerners but like so much in the World today, the problems of Africa are substantially rooted in Western imperialism. This is never more so the case than in Rwanda where the Germans took control in the 1890's and then the Belgians after World War one. Hutus and Tutsis had lived together peacefully for centuries; it was very difficult to classify one as one or the other because there had been so much intermarriage over the years. It's not that Rwanda didn't have problems before the Europeans came but almost none of them had to do with ethnicity. John Hanning Speke, a British explorer in the Great Lakes region of Africa in the 1860's, had applied European racist pseudoscience to the case of Hutus and Tutsis and declared his conviction that Tutsis tended to be long boned with sharp features and apparently lighter skin in contrast to the Hutus whom he said had round, dark skinned "ugly" negroid features and that the Tutsis were descended from an Ethiopian tribe of Caucasoid ancestery, had descended from King David, and so on. The Germans and the Belgians were influenced by these ideas and used selected Tutsis as their henchman in the context of a sort of aparthied rule against the Hutus. The old "divide and rule" strategy." By the late 1950's, an primitive form of fascism had developed among various Hutu political demagogues and intellectuals and the Belgians eventually switched their allegiance to them so that they could be in control when Rwanda was granted independence in 1962 (In contrast Tutsis have often been the oppressors and killers of Hutus in neighboring Burundi). Hutus subjected Tutsis to regular government sponsored violence and massacres from 1959 under Belgian rule until about 1973 when Major General Habyarimana who had been directing the violence against Tutsis that year seized power and ruled with extreme brutality and corruption though he generally stopped government sponsored violence against Tutsis until the late 80's when a deteriorating economy made him and his apparatus make full use of the ethnic card and mobolize the severely impoverished, ignorant Hutu masses. The state sponsored violence and indoctrination of hatred increased to really terrifying degrees until early April 1994 when Habyarimana's plane was shot down over Rwanda's capital Kigali apparently in a veiled coup by his "Hutu Power" leaders who killed him and blamed it on the Tutsis and used it as an excuse to launch a mass movement of Hutus to literally wipe out Tutsis in Rwanda. Habyarimana's and Hutu Power's leading patron from the 70's onward was France which made a fortune selling tools of violence and repression to the dictator. Indeed Gorevitch says that there is evidence that the immortal president Mitterand's son, an arms dealer and sometime government official, had some involvement in the marijuna business in partnership with some of Habyarimana's generals. The United States did not much care what was going on in Rwanda as long as "stability" was assured though they were ready to give Habarimana anything he needed. During the genocide in April-June 1994 the United STates explicitly supported measures that severely crippled the UN force in Rwanda. U.S. officials refused to term what was happening as "genocide" because if they called it genocide then they would be compelled to do something about it. After the worst part of the slaughter was over France sent a "peacekeeping force" with the thinly veiled purpose of backing the Hutu regime against the "Tutsi dominated" Rwandese Patriotic Front rebel army though they backed off when the RWP became the dominant military force and took power in Kigali. Millions of Hutu refugees fled to Zaire and other countries often forced by the Hutu militias which then were more or less allowed to control the refugee camps by the aid agencies which provided them and the international community did nothing to disband the Hutu killers. In Zaire, the West's favorite African gangster Mobutu Sese Seko who had been a close friend of Habyarimana supported the Hutu militias providing the services of his notorious so-called army as they rampaged throughout Northern Zaire engaging in massive ethnic cleansing against ethnic Tutsis and murderous raids into Rwanda. This in turn caused Rwanda and its ally Uganda to increasingly support the Anti-Mobutu rebels led by Laurent Kabila and intervene militarily. Kabila and his allies seemed to have killed a large number of Hutu civilians, many of them used as sort of human shields by the Hutu death squad leaders. The late Kabila and now his son Joseph have been warring with their former allies since August 1998, before this book was published. Kabila accused Rwanda and Uganda and their guerilla allies of trying to take permanently the territory which they occupy and rob it of its resources while they accused him of giving his support to the Hutu militias or something along those lines.
Rating:
Summary: More than a record of carnage
Review: Philip Gourevitch is a journalist with a great story and the talent to write an interesting, informative, and intelligent book. He knows that we love to hear sad stories, and disasters always catch our attention. There are many moving stories here told by Rwandans he interviewed, and they effectively portray the suffering that Tutsis suffered at the hands (or rather, machetes) of their friends and neighbors. But when something happens like the events in these accounts, you eventually stop marveling at the gruesome nature of the slaughter, and you instead wonder about how such a thing happened in the first place, and why, with the world as witness, so little was done to prevent or end it. The story of Rwanda is disturbing because you can't just read this book the way you would watch "Schindler's List"-that is, fifty years after the fact, with a clear delineation between good and evil, knowing that we were not on the side of evil. These massacres occurred in 1994. America and other industrial nations were aware of it, and we didn't play the good guys. We let it go on, while we absorbed OJ Simpson's crime drama as it unfolded on TV. Covering the story from before the genocide to its aftermath, Gourevitch is clearly disturbed by the lack of international response to the situation, and our half-hearted attempts to help. The real moral questions of this book concern not just Hutu Power and their propaganda and ethnic hatred, but also us. Discussions of whether America should have intervened in the crisis always involve questions of what our "national interests" are, but do we have the right to feel such indignant, self-serving rage when we hear other stories about the Holocaust if we are unwilling to act when Tutsis in Africa are being killed as a race? The stories that the people involved tell in this book are chosen well. Gourevitch wants to gain insights from the interviews into what exactly was going on, and how such seemingly inhuman acts could occur. If he did not succeed in finding all the answers to his and our questions, he at least imparts a work that seriously investigates a tragic and troubling event that should affect anyone interested in the global community.
Rating:
Summary: The Best Non-Fiction Book I've Ever Read
Review: Don't be put off by the subject matter. Yes, there's some pretty horrifying stuff in here. But these stories are being told by survivors, so you don't get emotionally attached to people and then have a filmaker or author twist the screws by having them get tortured to death. In other words, it's not just an important book (although it is that). It's also a pleasure to read - it isn't "work". And, although the subject matter seems specific (Rwanda in the latter half of the twentieth century), the book is a lot bigger than that. Just read it.
Rating:
Summary: Where were we while Rwandans were being slaughtered?
Review: I just wrote a paper for a class called "International Intervention" on how the international community can help prevent or resolve conflicts. My paper was on Sierra Leone and its diamond-fueled civil war fought against the government of Sierra Leone by Charles Taylor's rebel force the RUF. Charles Taylor is not a rogue, he is the American-educated president of Liberia who in order to steal Sierra Leone's diamonds, is instigating and fueling the RUF rebels fighting against the government of Sierra Leone (and the people of Sierra Leone who are being killed and mutilated every day). When 800,000 Rwandans were being slaughtered, I was just returning from a working trip from Haiti where I helped draft the "Administration of Justice Sector" project paper for the U.S. Agency for International Development. Ever since then (1994), I have been facinated with African countries with strong ties to European or American cultures such as Haiti (influened by the French and the Americans); Sierra Leone and Liberia (British and American) and Rwanda (with Belgian and French). Haiti is in the North American Hemisphere, I know...but it's made up of former African slaves who overthrew the white rulers and were then black-balled from trade and other commercial activities by European nations and the United States, stunting their economic and social development. To date, Haiti is the poorest country in the hemisphere populated with the likes of Canada and the U.S. (wealthy countries). If you want to know how 800,000 people were slaughtered as the world watched, this book is a clearly voiced, compassionate yet objective reportage from a fine writer from whom we will hear more in the future, I am sure. The UN, in its bureaucratic ineptitude as shown in Burundi, Somalia and Rwanda, isn't worth the effort...yet remains one of the only mechanisms that could actually DO something like stop the killings. Why? By the nature of its design, it is a world government with military strength...and if there is to be an "international community," then the UN has to be factored in. What happened in Bosnia (how NATO bombed the Serb-held territories) and UN ground troops participated in 'peace-keeping' should have happened in Rwanda. That is, the UN or regional organizations (just as the Organization of African Unity with backing from wealthier countries like the U.S.) should have intervened. Why did we (the rest of the world), just watching as Rwandans get slaughtered?? We are still watching as Sierra Leone (and now Guinea) is going the same fate as Rwanda--interminable civil war and its destruction to life, property, and the future--this needs to be stopped by the outside. Do you want to know more about Africa and its conflicts? Start with Rwanda by reading Philip Gourevitch's haunting and elegant book which does not have a redundant word. Then I suggest you read the historical background of the Congo (which Rwanda is part of) such as "King Leopold's Ghost" by Adam Hochschild (review by me forthcoming). Let's think about this...why are we just standing by as people lay dying?
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