\\"God no longer wants you.\\" This chilling statement was uttered by a local pastor, a supposed man of religion, as he ordered the massacre of 2,000 of his Tutsi neighbours and friends. The mass killings in Rwanda in 1994 were among the most heinous since Hitler and Stalin. Shockingly, the French government aided the maniacal Hutu Power government. This book meticulously dissects the excuses provided by Western powers for their inaction, for allowing over 800,000 Tutsis to be wiped out without lifting a finger.

Gourevitch infuses his words with passion and details not only the history of Rwanda but also its connections to Uganda, what-was-then-Zaire, Burundi, and other African countries. In Rwanda, Tutsis were dehumanizingly called inyenzi, or cockroaches. When the government incited its Hutu citizens to cleanse the land, they eagerly took up their machetes. The question of how so many could kill so many others is explored. The book peels back the layers of Rwanda's national ethos, revealing an ingrained mob mentality often masquerading as 'community'.

\\"I cry, you cry. You cry, I cry. We all come running, and the one that stays quiet, the one that stays home, must explain. This is simple. This is normal. This is community.\\" When the rebel Tutsi group began to gain control, the Hutu murderers fled across the borders to camps funded by Western powers. The money was spent, enabling the Hutus to live well and later return to their original homes, while their maimed Tutsi neighbours were left to squat in burned-out villages.

\\"Do you know what genocide is? A cheese sandwich. Write it down. Genocide is a cheese sandwich. Genocide, genocide, genocide. Cheese sandwich, cheese sandwich, cheese sandwich. Who gives a shit?\\" We often look at the Holocaust and the Great Purge and think it could never happen where we live. But this book about Rwanda is really about the internal compass within each of us that leads us to be part of the mob, to avoid standing out. Maybe the zombies have already arrived, and they are us.

Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy. (Ralph Ellison)

Book Season = Year Round

The Rwanda genocide of 1994 was a horrifying event that occurred while I was in the midst of changing teaching jobs. It was like a specter haunting the television screen. Stalin's old line about one person's death being a tragedy and a million deaths being just a statistic seemed to apply. However, Philip Gourevitch's "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families" transforms those deaths, nearly a million in about a hundred days, into individual tragedies, of a nation, and of the so-called "international community".

The book is exquisitely crafted. Gourevitch writes with a delicate touch, not pounding home points or resorting to gratuitous Grand Guignol or Heart-of-Darkness-style drama. He allows individual stories to speak for themselves, including those of victims, aid workers, and even some of the killers. He also provides essential background information, such as how colonial fantasies turned local and tribal differences in Rwanda into ethnic divisions, the history of thirty-odd years of smaller, sporadic mass killings of Tutsis by Hutus, and the concerted Hutu Power campaign that led up to the genocide. Additionally, Gourevitch explains how a highly organized political system could mobilize its population to brutally and efficiently slaughter almost a million fellow Rwandans with machetes and small arms in just a few weeks.

Gourevitch is critical of the outside powers that failed to stop the killing despite clear warnings. He faults the French for seeing the genocidal Hutu government as a Francophone client and supporting it on realpolitik grounds, the US for finding excuse after excuse for its inaction and for blocking others' efforts to halt the killing, and the UN for its botched, haphazard, and counterproductive relief efforts. Like David Rieff, Gourevitch emphasizes that humanitarianism without a political context or goal often fails to address the root causes of disaster, such as well-organized mass murder by a highly organized political party, and only treats the symptoms.

This book is not only crucial for understanding Africa in the last twenty years but also for anyone interested in the politics of humanitarianism and the fate of efforts to make "human rights" more than a bitter joke. If you have an interest in international law, Africa, humanitarian aid, or any hope for the future, you should read this book.

I think a significant number of people will effortlessly give a favorable judgment on this book and discuss how appalling the Rwandan genocide was and how this account vividly brings it to life. However, this ignores the fact that, to be honest, this is not a well-written book. Just because it pertains to a historic atrocity that is still insufficiently understood by the West does not automatically make it good.

The most glaring shortcoming is that the book fails to delve deeply enough into the motives of the killers. For me, the most significant takeaway from the Rwandan genocide was that people who had been friends and neighbors for years could suddenly turn on each other in a sudden and gruesome manner. What compels an individual to do this, and what causes simmering ethnic conflict within a population to "tip" over into an extremely rapid genocide? I was extremely disappointed by what I regarded as a very inadequate treatment of these questions.

Instead, the majority of the book is a recounting of horrors. These can be quite powerful when Gourevitch removes himself and allows the Rwandan survivors to tell their own stories, similar to how some documentaries are at their best when the narrator/director steps aside. However, when Gourevitch re-enters the picture, it is annoying and actually detracts from the sheer power of the Rwandan story. I wanted to push him back out. This is particularly evident in his overly starry-eyed portrayal of Paul Kagame. Even if it is accurate, Gourevitch's account of him is so filled with hero worship that a) it is a bit off-putting; just tell his story without the embellishments and his heroism will emerge naturally! b) I can't take it seriously because it doesn't seem to make a genuine attempt at being unbiased.

In the book's favor, it makes some very interesting points about the misdirection of Western relief and the paralysis of "apolitical" aid agencies, which everyone should read and understand. A sub-essay extracted from this book on how the West exacerbated the situation in Rwanda even more than it already was on its own would easily earn five stars from me. It also traces the basic history of the conflict and situates it within the history of neighboring African governments. Explaining this kind of thing is where the narrator can be of great help, and I wish the author had focused more on this aspect and less on others!

Another major flaw that the book has, and which could easily be rectified in a new printing, is that it lacks an index.

Decimation means the killing of every tenth person in a population. In the spring and early summer of 1994, a program of massacres decimated the Republic of Rwanda. "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families" was an interesting telling of one of the darkest episodes in the 20th century. The book chronicles the Rwandan Genocide, where an estimated up to 1 million Rwandan Tutsis were brutally killed.

Author Philip Gourevitch, an American writer and journalist, and a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker and a former editor of The Paris Review, has a great writing style here that is both effective and engaging. The stories in the book were gathered by the author when he traveled to Rwanda. He drops a powerful quote early on, and it continues to describe the horrors of the genocide. The bird's eye view of the genocide is pretty grim, with 400,000 to 1 million Tutsis massacred by the Rwandan Hutus. What led to this mass murder and hatred? It's complicated, as Gourevitch explores in the book.

The Rwandan genocide will go down in history as particularly barbaric, with many victims tortured, hacked to death with machetes, or beaten with clubs. Ironically, the distinction between Hutus and Tutsis is a thin and tenuous line, and they may have even been ethnically part of the same group. Given this, what motivated the Hutus to kill their neighbors? The author suggests that it was a desire for power, rather than just hatred.

Overall, "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families" was a sobering look at a dark time in African history. Although the book was a bit long and could have been trimmed down in some areas, it is still a valuable read for anyone interested in learning about the Rwandan Genocide. I would recommend it with a caveat, and give it 3.5 stars.

"Decimation means the killing of every tenth person in a population, and in the spring and early summer of 1994 a program of massacres decimated the Republic of Rwanda..."