Book Review: We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families

At a refugee camp in Zaire (now DRC), Gourevitch watches a refugee, perhaps one of the killers, butchering a cow. “It took many hacks – two, three, four, five hard hacks – to chop through the cow’s leg. How many hacks to dismember a person?”This book is a narration of a story where a foreigner, came to Rwanda in 1995 seeking answers for the story that was on everyone’s mind at that time, how one could kill another in such a cold blooded manner. The other question that begs to mind as you read the book is the quietness of foreign nations. Was it complicity or plain ignorance?The title of Gourevitch’s book, in fact, is a reference to two thousand refugees in a large church in Mugonero who sent a letter to their pastor asking to be saved from the slaughter:“Our dear leader, Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana,…We wish to inform you that we have heard that tomorrow we will be killed with our families. We therefore request you to intervene on our behalf and talk with the Mayor. We believe that, with the help of God who entrusted you the leadership of this flock, which is going to be destroyed, your intervention will be highly appreciated, the same way as the Jews were saved by Esther (42).”Instead, most of those holed up in the church met the fate of many of the Jews of Auschwitz 50 years earlier, except that in this case machetes were used instead of gas chambers. Those interviewed by Gourevitch recall Pastor Ntakirutimana instructing Tutsi to gather at the church and later accompanying militiamen and members of the Presidential Guard (27).That Gourevitch has his opinions is very apparent, he is very disapproving of the carelessness and naivety of aid workers; of the apathy of the Americans; and above all of the nigh complicity of the French from digging in their heels to providing weapons to Hutu Power members. His quote of President Mitterrand is abhorrent, if scarcely believable:In 1994, at the height of the extermination campaign in Rwanda, as Paris airlifted arms to Mobutu’s intermediaries in eastern Zaire for direct transfer across the border to the génocidaires, France’s President Francois Mitterrand said—as the newspaper Le Figaro later reported it—”In such countries, genocide is not too important.” (324-325).Gourevitch also provides one of the clearest explanations available of how Rwanda’s pain affected the whole region. When the Rwandese Patriotic Front, a rebel army launched the liberation campaign and later ended the genocide, thousands of people fled from Rwanda. Humanitarian organisations fed and sheltered the refugees, many of whom were actually génocidaires, and allowed them to militarise the camps. The result was that the conflict spilled over into Rwanda’s neighbouring countries in a way that Gourevitch says, had it happened in Europe, would have been termed a world war. The book is one of those that helps one to try and understand what happened in Rwanda in 1994.