April 25, 2004

Book review

Philip Gourevitch's We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families about the Rwanda genocide is horrific. It's also an indictment of the UN, the US, the French, and "Western Civilization" in general, not excluding the media and its insistence on "even-handedness." Gourevitch quotes an NYT article (obviously no hyperlinks in a book) describing

a Hutu refugee maimed in an attack by Tutsi soldiers, and a Tutsi refugee maimed by Hutu Power militias, as "victims in an epic struggle between two rival ethnic groups" in which "no one's hands are clean." The impression created by such reports is that because victims on either side of the conflict suffer equally, both sides are equally insupportable.

Gourevitch reports that that is by no means true. The Hutu government exhorted its Hutu followers to murder Tutsis wherever they were found, and they did so, to the tune of roughly 800,000 dead in 100 days. Then, when the Rwandese Patriotic Front began to push back, the murderers themselves fled into neighboring countries where refugee camps were set up, and passed themselves off as victims rather than killers. The governments and NGOs didn't quite understand this, so the killers were not recognized and called to justice. When repatriation finally occurred, these men were still armed; they remained so when they went back to Rwanda. They remain outside the law, and small-scale conflict is still going on.

It's an extraordinary book; I recommend it.

Posted by Linkmeister at April 25, 2004 04:39 PM
Comments

I wholeheartedly agree. Though disturbing, that was one of the most important books I've read in the last year.

Posted by: C.J. at April 29, 2004 07:43 PM