25 must read books - XXI

We Wish to Inform you that Tomorrow we will be Killed with our Families

1994. The ethnic conflict between the Hutu and the Tutsi tribes in Rwanda peaked and a genocide against the Tutsis took place. In about 100 days of massacre, the 800,000 people were killed. 70% of the entire Tutsi population was wiped out. It was the biggest massacre of human life after the Holocaust. What were the reasons behind the genocide? Was the age old rivalry between Hutus and Tutsis the primary reason?

The title of the book is an excerpt from a letter written by Tutsi missionaries to their Hutu counterparts who had turned their back on the Tutsis. 

The author, Philip Gourevitch, gives full form to the small cadre of people who directed the killing, their use of radios, their reliance on poorly armed villagers, and the role France played in backing the genocidal regime. Gourevitch’s book provides one of the concrete ways the west might have stopped the 

genocide. If France had backed off, and if the US hadn’t; if the UN had agreed to the proposal of its commander, General Dallaire, for such simple acts as shutting down the radio station, or seizing weapons caches; if the US and the UK had deployed troops to protect displaced people, and if the international politics had not sustained the genocidal regime, its army and militias in the refugee camps of Zaire, hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved, and at relatively little risk or cost to the west.

Philip Gourevitch, at the time of writing this book, was a staff writer for The New Yorker and contributing editor for Forward. 





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Prabir