We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda

We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda. By Philip Gourevitch. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1998. Pp. 355. $25.

International lawyers will ignore this journalistic account of the Rwandan genocide at their peril. To be sure, authors as diverse as Boutros Boutros Ghali' and Gerard Prunier2 have covered the same ground, and the horrific facts relating to the slaughter by Hutu genocidaires of one-half to one million people, mainly Tutsis, between April and July of 1994 are not in dispute. But Philip Gourevitch's narrative, based on interviews with survivors, witnesses, alleged perpetrators and government officials is a far more harrowing, and ultimately more compelling, version of events than is found in more scholarly accounts. Episodic instead of comprehensive, filled with empathy instead of cautious neutrality, and written in powerful muckraking prose, Gourevitch's book gives free rein to the anger-against both perpetrators and the international community-that others hold in check. The United Nations' (or Boutros Ghali's) version of the same set of facts appears lamely apologetic in comparison. And of all the accounts in print, Gourevitch's poses the most severe challenges to the hubris of the international community.

Gourevitch, a writer for the New Yorker and winner of the National Book Critics Circle nonfiction award for this account, describes the 100 days of systematic house-to-house killings that followed on the mysterious downing of President Habyaramira's plane in April 1994, as well as the resulting dilemmas for the post genocidal authorities who siezed control in July 1994. As does Prunier in his more meticulously researched (but drier account), Gourevitch situates his "stories from Rwanda" in a broader historical trajectory, indicating how the harmonious pre-colonial relations between Hutus and Tutsis degenerated into an apartheid-like regime that targeted the minority Tutsi for removal from the body politic. As with prior accounts, Gourevitch concludes that the killings were the product not of a chaotic descent into mob violence or "intractable" ancient hostilities but of a systematic campaign by media outlets such as Radio Libres des Milles Collines. The result, according to Gourevitch, was extensive complicity as well as victimization. Gourevitch suggests that millions of ordinary Rwandans, often armed only with machetes, were active killers or at least complicit bystanders.