Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1411 in Books
• Published on: 1999-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Amazon.com
"Hutus kill Tutsis, then Tutsis kill Hutus--if that's really all there is to it, then no wonder we can't be bothered with it," Philip Gourevitch writes, imagining the response of somebody in a country far from the ethnic strife and mass killings of Rwanda. But the situation is not so simple, and in this complex and wrenching book, he explains why the Rwandan genocide should not be written off as just another tribal dispute.

The "stories" in this book's subtitle are both the author's, as he repeatedly visits this tiny country in an attempt to make sense of what has happened, and those of the people he interviews. These include a Tutsi doctor who has seen much of her family killed over decades of Tutsi oppression, a Schindleresque hotel manager who hid hundreds of refugees from certain death, and a Rwandan bishop who has been accused of supporting the slaughter of Tutsi schoolchildren, and can only answer these charges by saying, "What could I do?" Gourevitch, a staff writer for the New Yorker, describes Rwanda's history with remarkable clarity and documents the experience of tragedy with a sober grace. The reader will ask along with the author: Why does this happen? And why don't we bother to stop it? --Maria Dolan

From Publishers Weekly
What courage must it have required to research and write this book? And who will read such a ghastly chronicle? Gourevitch, who reported from Rwanda for the New Yorker, faces these questions up front: "The best reason I have come up with for looking more closely into Rwanda's stories is that ignoring them makes me even more uncomfortable about existence and my place in it." The stories are unrelentingly horrifying and filled with "the idiocy, the waste, the sheer wrongness" of one group of Rwandans (Hutus) methodically exterminating another (Tutsis). With 800,000 people killed in 100 days, Gourevitch found many numbed Rwandans who had lost whole families to the machete. He discovered a few admirable characters, including hotelier Paul Rusesabagina, who, "armed with nothing but a liquor cabinet, a phone line, an internationally famous address, and his spirit of resistance," managed to save refugees in his Hotel des Milles Collines in Kigali. General Paul Kagame, one of Gourevitch's main sources in the new government, offers another bleak and consistent voice of truth. But failure is everywhere. Gourevitch excoriates the French for supporting the Hutus for essentially racist reasons; the international relief agencies, which he characterizes as largely devoid of moral courage; and the surrounding countries that preyed on the millions of refugees?many fleeing the consequences of their part in the killings. As the Rwandans try to rebuild their lives while awaiting the slow-moving justice system, the careful yet passionate advocacy of reporters like Gourevitch serves to remind both Rwandans and others that genocide occurred in this decade while the world looked on.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
In 1994, the world was informed of the inexplicable mass killings in Rwanda, in which over 800,000 were killed in 100 days. Gourevitch, a staff writer for The New Yorker, spent over three years putting together an oral history of the mass killing that occurred in this small country. He interviewed the survivors, who told him their horror stories of violence. Most of the killings were done with a machete. Friends killed friends, teachers killed students, and professional workers killed co-workers. The United Nations was slow in reacting to this crisis and refused to classify the incident as genocide. The title of this book comes from a Tutsi pastor's letter to his church president, a Hutu. While this is a powerful book, it sometimes bogs down in the details of Rwandan politics. It is doubtful the average reader will want to pick it up, but the history of this genocide must be told. This book should find itself on the shelves of academic libraries where African history collections are strong.
-?Michael Sawyer, Northwestern Regional Lib., Elkin, NC
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

"The Idea is the Crime"
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda
A Preventable Tragedy
"
Philip Gourevich's award-winning retrospective of the Rwanda Genocide in 1994 takes a rational look at the unfathomable and irrational. Gourevich spent many months in the war-ravaged country and talked with dozens of survivors. The facts aren't in dispute...over 800,000 Tutsis were hacked to death by machete-wielding Hutus...but the causes are. Among his conclusions: the "ancient animosity" between Hutus and Tutsi's is largely a creation of the West; the colonial powers Germany and Belgium inflamed ethnic divisions where they did exist; and the Church (Protestant and Catholic) remained silent as the killing continued.
There is enough blame to go around in the story: the International Relief Community, the UN, the media and the major powers. International tribunals have found fault with everyone. Gourevich takes some time exploring the whole concept of genocide:
"Nobody knows how many people were killed at Nyarubuye. Some say a thousand, and some say many more: fifteen hundred, two thousand, three thousand. Big difference. But body counts aren't the point in a genocide, a crime for which, at the time of my first visit to Rwanda, nobody on earth had ever been brought to trial, much less convicted. What distinguishes genocide from murder, and even from acts of political murder that claim as many lives, is the intent. The crime is wanting to make a people extinct.
The idea is the crime."
As a double-dose of genocide studies, I am also currently reading "Pol Pot:Anatomy of a Nightmare."

Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare

One of the best books I have read in a long time
Philip Gourevitch, in We Wish to Inform You, has accomplished an incredible feat: a moral and reasoned history of an insane situation. He manages to cut through all of the misinformation that we so often hear about the Rwandan Genocide and write something truly informative.

Other reviews on Amazon have complained about his focus on the political/violent situation in the entire region, but I strongly disagree. How are we to understand the genocide without its context and without the context that it created in nearby countries? I also found myself very interested in Rwanda's (and the region's) possibilities for a decent future.

This book is also damning towards the "international community," as well as international journalism of our times. The "international community" failed to intervene in the genocide - indeed, France even armed the genocidaires - and even fed and housed the genocidaires after they fled Rwanda. And Western Journalists consistently wrote the type of stories that were no more informative than "people are killing each other." Well, in this book, Philip Gourevitch has completely negated any previous excuse about the complexity of the situation or how little information was available, because he managed to quite clearly get to the heart of the situation and explain it quite easily, but in all its complexity, to us non-experts and non-historians.

The best, most educational and most gripping account of the genocide
I've lived in Africa near Rwanda for several years and have studied the Rwanda genocide extensively in graduate school. There is no better book about the genocide than "We Wish to Inform You.." It's extremely sad, frustrating, and fascinating at the same time. Gourevitch tells the stories so well that this doesn't read like non-fiction. My favorite part about this work is how he goes into detail about the refugee situation after the genocide, a time not as well documented as the actual genocide. It was fascinating how the international aid machine facilitated more murders by the interahamwe. The story he unravels is engaging and suspenseful and you can't wait to turn the page to find out what nugget of knowledge he turns up next. Pitching curveball after curveball, you are bound to learn a lot about many issues surrounding the genocide by reading this book.