We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda

Rating:
Summary: Good read but get ready to be depressed and/or angry
Review: The book does a good job of explaining what happened in Rwanda and the author makes a good attempt at trying to understand and explain the reasoning behind the genocide. He makes it very clear that the West was quite hypocritical in its actions (or lack of) and bundled big time. He also does a good job in explaining what happened before and after the massacres, not just the massacres themselves.

I also recommend checking out the Frontline show on Rwanda, which just as interesting as this book.

Rating:
Summary: Startling, horrific, spiritual...
Review: ...and profound, moralistic, factual, wonderfully written...I could go on all day with descriptors. If you have never read anything about Rwanda, start with this book. It is not a dryly written history by some university professor. Gourevitch actually visited Rwanda shortly after the 1994 massacres, which was very dangerous. He carefully researched everything firsthand, and his writing is simply flawless. He questions everything morally and spiritually, using the biblical Cain and Abel story as a backdrop and constant reference point. If you are interested in Africa, history, peace studies, the bible, sociology, psychology, politics...you will enjoy this book, want to talk about and share this book, and be thinking about this book for a long time to come.

Rating:
Summary: The machete and masu as tools of state policy
Review: Rwanda, 'the land of a thousand hills' is a beautiful country. Green and mist shrouded - "eucalyptus trees flash silver against brilliant tea plantations; banana trees are everywhere." Apart from Kigali, the urban capital, the country is largely agricultural. There are also many churches dotting the hillsides. From April to early July 1994 Rwanda was no longer green and there was no pastoral tranquility. The countryside was stained red with blood and churches and schools were no longer sources of the simple life but were instead sites for gruesome massacres of tens of thousands of people.

What makes the Rwandan genocide by extremist Hutus and their militia, the interahamwe, so chilling, and the telling of it in WE WISH TO INFORM YOU... so beyond comprehension, is not only the scope of it - 800,000 people butchered in about 100 days, but also the familiarity surrounding the killings. These were "neighbors, schoolmates, colleagues, sometimes friends, even in-laws." A further degree of revulsion is added when you consider the choice of weapon used - mostly machete, knife, and masu (nail studded club). It shows that the killers cared little for anonymity; the massacres were not, metaphorically speaking, at arms length, but were instead very personal - the murderers wanted their victims to know who killed them.

Obviously the big question this crime poses is why?, and Philip Gourevitch like everyone else when faced with a genocide, struggles with the answer. He says "considering the enormity of the task, it is tempting to play with theories of collective madness, mob mania, a fever of hatred erupted into a mass crime of passion, and to imagine the blind orgy of the mob, with each member killing one of two people." The book however makes it clear that this is an unsatisfactory explanation. Something else was at work, sustaining the killing once the initial frenzy had passed, driving hundreds of thousands of Hutus who "worked as killers in regular shifts" to keep butchering Tutsis. Gourevitch says plainly "mass violence must be organized; it does not occur aimlessly. Even mobs and riots have a design, and great and sustained destruction requires great ambition."

Can we then allow ourselves to breathe a little easier now that we know that this evil does not arise spontaneously from within but must first be stoked by external forces? Can we simply blame the state, politics, economics, cultural history, and the ancient memory of injustices? In Rwanda's case add colonialism, religion and ethnicity to the mix. Left as a mere description of the attrocities, this book would simply be sensationalism, but it is far from that. Gourevitch explores the history of Rwanda and while he shows that there are many contributing local factors, his book also shows up the complicity of the international community in two ways:

(1) There were very visible signs for all to see that trouble was brewing; the genocide therefore was preventable. Particularly so since there was a history of Hutu persecution of the minority Tutsi and there had been a previous slaughter of 10,000 Tutsis in 1959.

(2) Belgium and France were blinded by colonial perceptions and interpretations of the issues, seeing a 'tribal war' and a 'peoples genocide'. The latter being used as explanation in that the Hutus were rising up against attacks by the Tutsi dominated guerilla group - the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). The UN and the US were simply immobilized by policy. In the case of the UN, policy was ineffective, and for the US, there was simply a policy vacuum when it came to Rwanda.

I have read elsewhere that the US position was guided by our previous experience in Somalia and I believe that. What also seems to have been at work here is the influence of two writers and their work on the thinking, and inaction, of the Whitehouse on the Rwandan genocide. Samuel Huntington's CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS and Robert Kaplan's essay THE COMING ANARCHY, spoke about 'new tribalism' and 'virulent nationalism'; ideas which also contributed to the paralysis that gripped the Pentagon when it came time to contemplate involvement in ENS (ethnic, nationalistic and secessionist) warfare. It's a well known fact that president Clinton quoted Kaplan as defense (contrary to the author's intention) against US involvement in Bosnia. The same thinking was applied here.

ENS, new tribalism or whatever other euphemism or jargon jingling sound bites policy makers choose to come up with, genocide is a crime against humanity and there is no obfuscating the issue. Inaction in the face of it is almost as great a crime as the killings. This is the blunt, condemnatory message of WE WISH TO INFORM YOU...

Rating:
Summary: African Holocaust and the International Community
Review: This is a tragic book, that leaves the reader with the impression that humanity is still a far cry from its ideals. Rwanda is a country familiar with bloodshed, whose people followed their leaders in killing their countrymen. Doctors killed their patients and fellow doctors, teachers massacred their students, priests murdered their congregants, and neighbor rose up against neighbor. There was no rationality or reason given for these killings, and there was no power struggle or past wrong being avenged. It was murder only for the sake of elimation of another human. No higher justification (not that there ever could be a rational justification) was needed.

There was only chaos and bloodshed - and the international community did nothing to stop it. When they did intervene, they were incompetent, and spent most of their time and money aiding the aggressors and not the victims. President Clinton did all he could to keep American troops out of Rwanda, and the French, who colonized Rwanda, and should have felt some responsibility for the country, did little until it was too late.

This is a story of tribal brutality, and international indifference. This book does not stray far beyond those themes. Read this book and you will understand the Hobbesian rational.

Rating:
Summary: Review for the book on the Rwandan massacres
Review: "We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda," by Philip Gourevitch, is the shocking story of the genocide that occurred in Rwanda in 1994. What actually happened in Rwanda during those fateful months in 1994 had, prior to this book, never been explained to the outside world in such in-your-face detail and clarity. I regretfully admit that I did not attempt with any great resolve to piece together the various stories that trickled in from Rwanda that year. To me, at age nineteen, it was far away, it was confusing, it was chaotic, the tribes were unfamiliar and seemed equally at fault, and of course, there was the Somalia debacle fresh in my mind. It was in response to these commonly held views that Gourevitch's book stands as an indictment. Gourevitch writes angry. He's angry at the West for what he sees as shirking their responsibilities. He's angry at the indifference that the average American felt at the time, and he's angry at the lack of coverage Rwanda received in the western media. Gourevitch's main claim is that it was clearer and more one sided than the limited media reports that the media reported at the time indicated. It was the Hutu Power movement in Rwanda that organized the massacre of Tutsis. It was not chaotic. The West could have halted the massacres rather early on. Gourevitch supports his claims with personal witnesses to the atrocities and reports from the UN observers (and they literally were just observers) that he cleverly weaves together. His book does a great service in familiarizing western eyes to this relatively unknown topic. It is an interesting book in that it exposes some latent biases that the West held towards Rwanda and African conflicts in general. Anyone who has ever said that the international community would never sit by while another genocide happened should read this book.

Rating:
Summary: Extremely Important
Review: This is a beautifully written account of the way ordinary people get through life, in a country that has been bathed in blood over a period of years. It is compelling, and important to understand. The author conducts moving interviews with a number of people, and elicits responses that make you want to cry. If anyone out there wants to get involved in some way, you could do an online search for UNHCR, which is the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. They have a very user friendly website, I recommend it. If anyone wants to click on "see more about me" under my name at the beginning of this review, my e-mail address is listed there. You could e-mail me. I am connected to a group of citizens trying to help with the development of public libraries in Rwanda, in the hope that literacy and education will have some impact on the situation there. If you decide to get involved with this, be aware that they need materials having to do with scientific education there. Rwandans need doctors, engineers, agronomists, etc., and many average Americans have books just lying around in their homes that could totally transform a Rwandan child's life. I hope to hear from you.

Rating:
Summary: A life changing experience
Review: The genocide in Rwanda was a tragedy beyond belief, especially considering that after the Jewish Holocaust of WW2, the international community had sworn never to allow such a mass murder to happen again. Yet as thousands of people screamed out in pain and anguish for their lives to be saved, for the violence to stop, for justice to prevail, no one heeded their cries. Reading this book, and others on this genocide, opened my eyes to the painful truth of what happened in Rwanda. It broke my heart, realizing there was no rescuer, no savior for the hundreds of thousands of murdered persons who perished in 100 days. No happy ending. No white knight (or whatever color) galloping in to save the day. Philip Gourevitch eloquently writes about what happened, uncovering the bitter truth of Western inaction and describing the horrific scenes of evil in the course of the genocide. The victims, whether they be Hutu or Tutsi, appear real to the reader, never seeming too unrealistic as to turn someone away from the book. Gourevitch makes them on paper what they were in real life: human beings, and this affects the reader even more. Reading this book is a life changing experience, as the reader is forced to ask painful questions during and afterwards about what happened, why it happened, and why it was allowed to happen. Why do human beings do this to each other? Why didn't anyone stop it? Why didn't enough people care enough to bring it to the spotlight of public attention? Gourevitch, in a significant part of the book, writes of how the murderers, the Hutu Power militia, were saved, fed and protected by international aid agencies and governments who arrived too late to save the genocide's victims. The irony is painful, and even more such for Americans such as myself is the realization that America is to blame for the prolonging of the genocide, and for a majority of the lack of action on the part of other nations. Gourevitch exposes the American government's heinous actions: denying a genocide was even occuring at first, and once the bodies were piling up, trying to label it something other than a genocide so that America wouldn't be forced to act to halt the holocaust. When African nations sought to put an end to the genocide, America dragged its heels and did its best to slow the effort. As a young man raised in a family full of military veterans and fierce patriots, it is shameful for all of us to believe our government, our nation, would do such a heinous thing, but it did, and from the truth perhaps some good can occur. More genocides are going to occur in the very near future, whether they be in Sudan, Indonesia, Burundi, one of the former Soviet Republics, or anywhere else, and the call to arms will be made to prevent/stop the genocide occuring. Will anyone answer?

Rating:
Summary: Genocide in the "Modern" world
Review: Excellent book-explores how Western countries failed to prevent or intervene with the mass killing in Rwanda in 1994...Beautifully written, this book leaves you seriously contemplating world problems...

Rating:
Summary: People here are confusing the subject matter with writing...
Review: This is an interesting book but was a very painful one for me to get through... and not because of the subject matter....

This book was successful in getting people to read it. Good stories, good title, pretty book to look at. And really, the stories told in it are enough to break ones heart: genocide carried out with machetes and directed by radio; children whom have lost everything; a society totally broken like few others in modern history. The authors successes in this book stem from how powerfully gripping his subject matter was. His failures come about through the fact that this book is poorly written and his somewhat smugly dispassionate yet mixed with idealistic style just doesn't get the story across so well.

I have read many books-- many journalistic accounts and history books and books about the state of the world and the state of Africa. This book by this author adds nothing new to the dialogue in my head; in fact, it lessened my want to address many of the questions that it raises. The 'whys' and 'hows' and 'wheres' of genocide and civil war are not as simple as the autor seems to indicate; if these were such simple problems, there would be more simple answers.

I wholeheartedly recommend that people avoid reading this book and instead read more cleverly constructed books for their information. Robert Kaplan's 'The Ends of the Earth' has a neat section on Africa; Elie Kedourie's classic book on Nationalism explains what it tries to do better than this watered down sop; there are also a slew of books that can better relate stories of ethnic fratricide. It is a shame that this book is the most well-known of the books on Rwanda.

Rating:
Summary: Should be read by everyone
Review: An excellent account of a horrifying event in history, and an indictment of the Western powers which stood by and did nothing.

The book is accessible and brillianty written, and despite its topic it does not crush the spirit. Gourevitch chronicles chronicles every extreme of good and evil, form the priest who refused to help a group of desperate Tutsis, saying "you must die, God no longer wants you", to the Hutu hotel manager who risked his life and saved a thousand refugees armed only with a few friends in high places and a drinks cabinet to bribe the genocidal soldiers.

The book is a work of journalism, not academia and so people who want a comprehensive and fully referenced work may want to look elsewhere. At times the author does perhaps treat the RPF too uncritically. Howvever, these are minor complaints when the importance of the book as a whole is considered. As a document of genicide, and as an insight into the dark side of the human soul, this is comparable to Primo Levi's "If This is a Man"