Heart of Darkness.

• Author: Hammer, Joshua
• Position: Review

WE WISH TO INFORM YOU THAT TOMORROW WE WILL BE KILLED WITH OUR FAMILIES:

Stories from Rwanda

by Philip Gourevitch

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux $25

Great crimes produce great devils, but the Rwandan genocide was a singular exception. There was no Pol Pot, Radovan Karadzic or Idi Amin--only a faceless cabal of men with long, unpronounceable names hatching a plot in obscurity. Who has ever heard of Theodore Sindikubwabo? Jean Paul Akayesu? Four years after the fact, the Rwandan cataclysm is still perceived by many in the West as a spasm of tribal warfare, not a calculated campaign of extermination.

But a campaign it was, carried out with diabolical efficiency and brutality. Now Philip Gourevitch, a New Yorker staff writer and son of Holocaust survivors, has written a terrifying account of the genocide and its aftermath entitled We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed with our Families: Stories from Rwanda. Gourevitch's exhaustively reported book provides the most lucid account yet of the plot concocted by radical Hutu ideologues to wipe out the country's minority Tutsi tribe--and the international community's paralysis as the slaughter spread.

There had never been anything like it. Over one hundred days between April and July 1994, one million people were butchered at roadblocks, in churches, in their homes--killed by neighbors and friends, torn apart by grenades, bullets, and machetes. I covered the genocide for Newsweek, and the enormity of the slaughter often left me groping for words to describe it. (Full disclosure: I have worked with Gourevitch in Rwanda and am quoted in his book.) But Gourevitch, who didn't arrive in the country until May 1995, convincingly captures the look and feel of the genocide: the lush beauty of the landscape juxtaposed against the stench of death, the repose of skeletons in churches, the eerie stillness in village after village, the chorus of denial issued by the murderers. He humanizes the slaughter, attaching names and faces to both victims and perpetrators. And as he wanders through the charnel house, he repeatedly asks one question: why?

There is no simple answer, but Gourevitch debunks the notion that the genocide was the inevitable result of "ancient" tribal enmities. The hatred was of a more recent vintage. For centuries Tutsis and Hutus were porous constructs--based on class as well as racial distinctions--until Rwanda's Belgian colonizers rigidly divided society along tribal lines. The...