A Country Full of Dead People

In an interview with PBS’s Frontline, Philip Gourevitch, author of We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda, says that what is
“so astonishing when one comes to this now…is...how thoroughly [the genocide of Rwandan Tutsis by Hutus] was scripted, how thoroughly it was announced, how thoroughly it was a genocide foretold, how thoroughly the signs were on the surface. They were on the radio. They were in the newspapers. You could buy them at any street corner. You could hear them at any rally. You didn't have to go looking. This was not a top secret program that was coming forward. It was something that was really quite conspicuously announced.”[1]

The Rwandans knew the plan was in the air. The west was warned months ahead. Therefore, in hindsight, any mindful student of the global community, such as author Philip Gourevitch, can only ask in earnest, “How could the massacre of 800,000 people in 100 days occur” when their killings were forewarned and broadcast not only in Rwanda, but in other parts of the world as well? On average, 8,000 people were literally slaughtered per day from April until June 1994. As BBC correspondent Fergal Keane notes during his interview with Frontline, those numbers essentially meant nothing to those of us who heard them on the radio on the way to work or read them in our newspapers over coffee. They are too big to comprehend. He admits that before he visited a church in Nyarubuye in eastern Rwanda, he didn’t really understand the meaning of massacre. Like most of us, all he knew about massacre was what he read in books.

Gourevitch begins his book with his 1995 visit to that church in Nyarubaye. There he stepped into a classroom where at least 50 “mostly decomposed cadavers covered the floor, wadded in clothing, their belongings strewn about and smashed. Macheted skulls had rolled here and there.” Keane, who visited the same place the year before said of the massacre, “Books don’t smell. Books don’t rot. Books don’t lie in stagnant pools. Books don’t leach into the earth the way those bodies did.”[2]

Through this shocking scene at Nyarubaye, Gourevitch begins his recording and explanation of the historical events that led to and culminated with (if one believes in timelines) the 100-plus days of inexplicable carnage, which includes a history of civil segregation that dates back to tribal rivalries exploited by European colonization. Indeed, western arrogance and domination, whether accepted in the collective consciousness in the twenty-first century or not, should extol a high price for its contribution to this event. Diplomats have apologized and expressed regret for their inactivity and all-but-apparent apathy during Rwanda’s hell on Earth, and have promised to never allow humanity to permit without action another loss as such. These sentiments have been expressed in modern history after the Holocaust, Bosnia, Somalia, and soon-to-be final words for Darfur and, perhaps, Kenya - yet one can hear the unanswered silent appeal during the scene in Hotel Rwanda when Don Cheadle, as Paul Ruseabagina, and his loath and defiant hotel employee, Gregoire, played by Tony Kgoroge, drive into Kigali proper for supplies, and return to the Hotel Mille Collines along the unexpectedly rugged road of slaughtered human bodies, strewn as far as the eye can see.

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The title of Gourevitch’s book serves to explain the circular reasoning of the events in Rwanda in the spring and summer of 1994. We wish to inform you reveals the facts that were presented to worldwide powers. In hindsight, it’s easy to see that certain communiqués, as revealed by Gourevitch, might have given bureaucrats the fuel they needed to plea and insist upon a humanitarian effort to prevent the widespread death of Tutsis by Hutus in this small, central African nation. At the same time, the letter that begins with “We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families” displays the reserved plea, the silent scream that journalist Keane describes after the authors of this letter were actually murdered at the “safe haven” church in Nyarubaye. Keane has found that during the immediate aftermath “Rwanda was a country in pain, but wasn’t screaming. Silence, that’s what I remember most. Silence, just this endless screaming silence.”[3]

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The confusion of the those in the world that piqued their ears about this event is carried on in this statement: "It is impossible to show what really happened," according to Kenyatta Nkusi-Kabera, who lost family members in 1994. "Nobody could watch what really happened. Their eyes would be closed."[4] Philip Gourevitch, through his book and his interviews, wants to open the eyes of the world. He wants an understanding of the past – of the separation between Hutu and Tutsi and of their present existence together as Rwandans – which brings their history to the here and now so much so that their past must be excused but at the same time “written in their blood.”[5]

[1] Frontline: The Triumph of Evil, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/evil
[2] Frontline, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/evil
[3] Frontline: , http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/evil
[4] Lacey, Marc, At real “Hotel Rwanda” invisible scars linger, February 28, 2005, http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/27/news/hotel.php
[5] Gourevitch, Philip, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, p. 48-49.