We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families - Stories from Rwanda
by Philip Gourevitch
Farrar, Straus
and Giroux
"One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic."
-Josef Stalin
Within the pages of "We wish to inform you..." author Philip Gourevitch
does his best to reveal the profound human tragedy behind the nearly one million
lives lost in Rwanda's 1994 genocide, an event that has largely (and tragically)
slipped from the memory of the western world.
The author tells the story of a premeditated wave of murder on a scale not
seen since the killing fields of Cambodia, or the human devastation unleashed
during the Holocaust. Gourevitch painstakingly catalogs the events and trends
that led up to the bloodbath, which decimated the ethnic Tutsi population
of Rwanda in the name of the Hutu majority.
"We wish to inform you..." does three important things, and it does
them brilliantly, using clear language spoken from a powerfully moral viewpoint.
Firstly, it breaks down the origins of the genocide in clear and understandable
terms, incorporating colonial history, internal African politics, and the
psychology of hatred and mob violence that lead directly to the murders of
800,000 human beings. Secondly, it examines the moral stain left upon the
western powers (particularly France and the United States) by the genocide,
and, finally, it puts a human face on both the killers and their victims,
who were swept away by the savage violence.
Readers will likely be both shocked and appalled at the actions of their governments,
including a U.N. force that fed, clothed and cared for thousands of former
members of the genocidal regime in refugee camps, the United States actively
dodging responsibility of any sort, preferring to refuse to even utter the
word "genocide" in connection with the massive slaughter taking
place, and the French government's behavior, which can only be described as
both immoral and criminal.
A powerful, cleanly written and intensely moving book, "We wish to inform
you" is strongly recommended as a testament to mankind's amazing ability
to kill itself, and to the power of individual men, women and children to
survive and rebuild their lives.
-James Norton
