We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda

“[T]he refugees at the hospital watched Dr. Gerard and his father, Pastor Ntakirutimana, driving around with militiamen and members of the Presidential Guard. The refugees wondered whether these men had forgotten their God.” 

Gourevitch highlights the hypocrisy of religious figures during the genocide. Instead of embracing their Tutsi brothers and sisters as Christians, Pastor Ntakirutimana and his son succumbed to the ideology of Hutu Power. While the author provides examples of clergy helping Tutsis, the majority did not.

“I asked him whether he remembered the precise language of the letter addressed to him by the seven Tutsi pastors who were killed at Mugonero.” 

In a post-genocide interview with Pastor Ntakirutimana in Texas, Gourevitch inquired about the former’s colleagues’ letter pleading for aid. The pastor gives the letter to Gourevitch, and it is one of its phrases that makes up the title of the book. Tutsi pastors knew they and their families faced death. But like the pleas of many others, the letter, too, was disregarded—which was especially painful given the common bond of religious leadership.

“By the time the League of Nations turned Rwanda over to Belgium as a spoil of World War I, the terms Hutu and Tutsi had become clearly defined as opposing ‘ethnic’ identities, and the Belgians made this polarization the cornerstone of their colonial policy.” 

Prior to colonial rule, which began in the late 19th century, there was mobility between Hutu and Tutsi categories (which referred more to one’s occupation than ethnic grouping). Gourevitch highlights the poisonous impact of colonization and European racism. Because the wealthier Tutsis had lighter skin, Europeans considered them a distinct tribal group and labeled Hutus indigenous and inferior. Tutsis became the face of Belgian exploitation to Hutus, who grew to hate them.

“In Rwanda, the story of a girl who is sent away as a cockroach and comes back as a medicine woman must be, at least in part, a political story.” 

Recounting the story of Odette Nyiramilimo, Gourevitch informs the reader of the discrimination faced by Tutsis well before the genocide. Expelled from school in 1973 in retaliation for Tutsi massacres of Hutus in neighboring Burundi, Odette completed her schooling down the line with the help of a sympathetic Belgian headmistress and became a physician. Politics ultimately shaped her career.

“When death is always the work of enemies, and the power of the state considers itself in concert with the occult, distrust and subterfuge become tools of survival, and politics itself becomes a poison.” 

In Rwandan folklore, sorcery and invisible poisonings are common tropes. President Habyarimana’s powerful wife, Madame Agathe, believed in such demons and had no qualms using the state to fight her enemies. This tendency allowed for the creation of a scapegoat in the Tutsis.

“A host of new periodicals had appeared in Rwanda in 1990. All but Kangura served as voices of relative moderation, and all but Kangura are now largely forgotten.” 

Kangura was the hateful publication produced by Hutu supremacist Hassan Ngeze. President Habyarimana’s wife not only selected Ngeze for this task but was behind the publication’s very inception. With this quote, Gourevitch emphasizes the media’s role in instilling hatred of Tutsis.

“Distrust of UNAMIR was the one thing which Hutu Power and those it wanted dead shared as deeply as their distrust of one another. And with good reason.” 

UN peace-keeping missions in Bosnia and Somalia failed to protect innocents. Similarly, UNAMIR had a mandate which prohibited the use of violence except in self-defense; it did nothing to protect Tutsis. With this quote, Gourevitch validates Rwanda’s distrust of the international community.

“After that, the wholesale extermination of Tutsis got underway, and the UN troops offered little resistance to the killers. Foreign governments rushed to shut down their embassies and evacuate their nationals. Rwandans who pleaded for rescue were abandoned...”

Despite the Genocide Convention that pledges nations to intervene in the face of genocide, the international community left Rwandans on their own. UN members saved their own people but ignored the plight of the Tutsis. Had the international community acted differently, the genocide might have been prevented.

“The ‘authors’ of the genocide, as Rwandans call them, understood that in order to move a huge number of weak people to do wrong, it is necessary to appeal to their desire for strength—and the gray force that really drives people is power.” 

With so many Hutus impoverished and powerless in Rwanda, government elites supplied them with a scapegoat over which they had the power of life and death. Even when a Hutu chose to spare a Tutsi, the Hutu was in command. Regardless of circumstances, Hutu Power’s adherents saw it as a positive force.

“Armed with nothing but a liquor cabinet, a phone line, an internationally famous address, and his spirit of resistance, he had merely been able to work for their protection until the time came when they were saved by someone else.”

Gourevitch highlights Paul Rusesabagina’s lack of resources in sheltering oppositionist Hutus and Tutsis at his upscale hotel. Yet, they were enough to save his guests as they were used to bribe officials and garner international attention—the lurking question being why others did not take similar action.

“She meant that if it was genocide, the Convention of 1948 required the contracting parties to act. Washington didn’t want to act. So Washington pretended that it wasn’t a genocide.”

Gourevitch dissects US State Department spokeswoman Christine Shelley’s words, drawing attention to the unwillingness of international actors to intervene. Using semantics to create a distinction between genocide and acts of genocide, the US failed to abide by the Genocide Convention, to which it was a signatory.

“[T]he imponderable sprawl of febrile humanity at Goma blotted out the memory of the graveyard at its back, and an epidemic that came out of bad water and killed tens of thousands eclipsed a genocide that had come out of a hundred years of insane identity politics and resulted in nearly a million murders.”

The international press devoted more attention to the plight of Hutu refugees, many of whom fled fearing punishment for their crimes, than actual genocide victims and survivors. Such coverage created the false impression that both groups committed crimes and suffered to the same degree. This framing contributed to the UN’s coddling of Hutu Power extremists in refugee camps.

“What distinguishes genocide from murder, and even from acts of political murder that claim as many victims, is the intent. The crime is wanting to make a people extinct.”

Gourevitch distinguishes genocide from other mass killings and political murders. It is not about the number of people killed but the intent to destroy a people—their culture and contributions eviscerated. There was clear evidence that this was the goal of Hutu Power.

“In his view, determined and well-disciplined fighters, motivated by coherent ideas of political improvement, can always best the soldiers of a corrupt regime that stands for nothing but its own power.”

Paul Kagame, the RPF’s field commander in 1994, encouraged his soldiers to think and instructed them in politics. He also instilled discipline in his forces, punishing soldiers who looted and executing those who engaged in murder or sexual assault. At times, the RPF killed Hutus in revenge, but it behaved with professionalism and restraint for the most part.

“What possessed these people, a great many of whom had never before set foot in Rwanda, to abandon relatively established and secure lives in order to settle in a graveyard?”

Even after the RPF defeated Hutu Power, there were corpses scattered throughout Rwanda. Yet Tutsis, who were absent for years, came home. Gourevitch speculates that they wanted to demonstrate the genocide’s failure (in addition to economic incentives and the natural desire to return home). Yet the psychological impact of having one’s own people be targets of genocide goes well beyond Rwandan borders.

“In other words, a true genocide and true justice are incompatible. Rwanda’s new leaders were trying to see their way around this problem by describing the genocide as a crime committed by masterminds and slave bodies.” 

It would be impossible to put the hundreds of thousands of people who committed crimes during the genocide on trial. The new leaders wanted to focus on trying and punishing the organizers of the genocide—yet, most of these people were in exile. The notion of mindless killers allows individuals to escape accountability for their actions. Kagame at least wanted low-level figures to provide compensation, but Gourevitch struggles with the small price paid by so many who killed.

“[T]he war about the genocide was truly a postmodern war: a battle between those who believed that because the realities we inhabit are constructs of our imaginations, they are all equally true or false, valid or invalid, just or unjust, and those who believed that constructs of reality can—in fact, must—be judged as right or wrong, good or bad.”

Hutu Power rejected the notions of truth and objectivity. Those in power defined reality. In contrast, anti-Hutu Power forces insisted on transparency and objective facts. Creating its own historically inaccurate narrative, Hutu Power cast itself as the victims and denied the existence of genocide. Gourevitch explains the challenges, the dangers, that this type of thinking poses to the norms of civilization.

“Yet what made the camps almost unbearable to visit was the spectacle of hundreds of international humanitarians being openly exploited as caterers to what was probably the single largest society of fugitive criminals against humanity ever assembled.”

Gourevitch criticizes the international community for its failure to segregate the organizers of the genocide from refugees. Hutu Power controlled the camps and benefitted enormously from the food and supplies provided. Hutu Power groups also attacked local Tutsis from their base in the camps.

“The Rwandan officials I spoke with believed that Mobutu, by tolerating and even encouraging the creation of a highly militarized Hutuland in Zaire, was seeking to ensure that this gift would keep giving.”

Gourevitch explains that Mobutu, a ruthless dictator in Zaire, was in political descent before the genocide. But with the refugee camps, he regained international favor and personally benefitted from the genocide. As a result, he was more than willing to keep Hutu Power alive and encourage its attacks on the Tutsi population.

“But it became clear that their organizations’ first commitment was not to protecting people but to protecting their mandates.”

International organizations failed to protect Tutsis during and after the genocide (i.e., protecting Hutu Power forces in camps). One international organization refused to evacuate Tutsis stranded in Kitchanga as mandates did not allow it to take displaced persons across international borders. Such organizations refused to abide by common sense. It was ultimately left to businessmen to organize an evacuation.

“Never before in modern memory had a people who slaughtered another people, or in whose name the slaughter was carried out, been expected to live with the remainder of the people that was slaughtered, completely intermingled, in the same tiny communities, as one cohesive national society.”

In discussing the return of Hutu refugees, Gourevitch invites the reader to imagine living among a people who massacred one’s family and friends. It was incredibly difficult for Tutsis to live without fear or refrain from revenge. Before leaders could be put on trial and people had a chance to recover from the stress of survival, Tutsis had to face Hutus on a daily basis.

“It was true; while the international community had spent more than a billion dollars in the camps, devastated Rwanda had gone begging for a few hundred million, and the tens of thousands of survivors, squatting in the ruins, had been systematically ignored.”

Gourevitch stresses the irony of the international community doing more to assist perpetuators of genocide than its victims. The community repeatedly came to the aid and defense of Hutu refugees. Rwanda had to use its few resources to help survivors, many of whom were evicted from places they squatted when the Hutus returned.

“Against such reckless impunity, the Congolese rebellion offered Africa the opportunity to unite against its greatest homegrown political evil and to supplant the West as the arbiter of its own political destiny.”

Mobutu, the dictator of Zaire, fanned the flames of genocide for personal gain, allowing Hutu Power to terrorize Tutsis in his country. When African countries came together to support a rebellion led by Laurent-Désiré Kabila, they acted to solve the region’s problems. Since the West failed Rwanda, Africa stepped up to take charge.