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

"The best reason I have come up with for looking closely into Rwanda's stories is that ignoring them makes me even more uncomfortable about existence and my place in it." (p. 19)

In 1994, nearly 1 million people were killed in the space of 90 days. According to Philip Gourevitch, a journalist with The New Yorker, "The dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust. It was the most efficient mass killing since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki." Gourevitch made several visits to Rwanda between 1995-1998 in order to understand the 1994 genocide and its human and political aftermath. With my only source of information at the time having been the mainstream American press, it was very interesting to understand how Rwanda's colonial history set the stage for ethnic conflict. Gourevitch also clearly laid out the political dynamics both in Rwanda and its neighbors, Zaire and Uganda, and described some of the unintended consequences of western humanitarian aid. Quoting a Red Cross representative: "When humanitarian aid becomes a smoke screen to cover the political effects it actually creates, and states hide behind it, using it as a vehicle for policymaking, then we can be regarded as agents in the conflict." (p. 269)

This book is written in a literary style that makes it quite accessible. It is a difficult book to read in that it describes unbelievable acts of violence and cruelty, and casts American and European political leaders in a (deservedly) harsh light. But to me, it's important to understand "what really happened" if we have any hope of preventing such atrocities from occurring. After the Holocaust we said, "never again" ... can we say it now, and make it stick? ( )