From the Archives: A New Book About the Aftermath of the Rwandan Genocide.

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: MARCH 12, 1999
Time: 12:00
Tran: 031201np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Philip Gourevitch
Sect: News; International
Time: 12:06

TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

This week, journalist Philip Gourevitch won a National Book Critics Circle Award for his book about the genocide in Rwanda called, "We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families." It also won a George Polk Book Award.

On this archive edition, we have an interview with Gourevitch about writing the book. Gourevitch is a staff writer for "The New Yorker." He made his first of several trips to Rwanda one year after the Genocide. He says he wanted to know how Rwandans understood what had happened in their country and how they were getting on in the aftermath.

The genocide began when the Hutu-led government of Rwanda called on the Hutu majority to murder everyone in the Tutsi minority. I asked Gourevitch to give us a sense of the genocide's proportions.

PHILIP GOUREVITCH, JOURNALIST; AUTHOR, "WE WISH TO INFORM YOU THAT TOMORROW WE WILL BE KILLED WITH OUR FAMILIES: STORIES FROM RWANDA": The best estimates are that at least 800,000 Rwandans, one-tenth of the population, were killed in a period of about 100 days. If you boil that down, that actually comes to the extraordinary statistic of five and one-half people a minute, murdered every minute, over a period of 24 hours a day, seven days a week, week after week, for 10 weeks, at least 100 days. It's a kind of staggering speed of just simple slaughter.

GROSS: When you got to Rwanda one of the places you went to was a church that has become almost a genocide memorial. Would you describe what you saw there?

GOUREVITCH: Well, this is a church in Eastern Rwanda and it sits on a little hilltop, as so many Rwandan hilltops have churches on top of them, and it looks essentially, it looked at the time, from a distance very much like any church anywhere on a hilltop; a kind of nice brick Italianate cathedral. And as one came up to it, the only thing that was striking is that it seemed a little bit overgrown around it.

Then entering some of the out-buildings the floor was simply covered in corpses. Mostly somewhat decomposed corpses, and this had been a place where hundreds, perhaps thousands of people had sought refuge from the surrounding community when the massacres began in April of 1994.

And this was something that happened nationwide. People who were endangered, targeted, slated for death, that is to say, all Tutsis and any number of Hutus who might have been intermarried with Tutsis, or who felt that there political opposition to the ruling party that was ordaining these massacres made them, also, targets for death.

They fled seeking sanctuary in places like churches, public places like schools, government offices, sometimes stadia And they hoped that in concentration like this they would find sanctuary. In this church, in the church we are speaking about, is called Narobyu. The mayor of that area had instructed the local Tutsi population: well, maybe you'll be safer if you go to the church. And several days later he had led the militia bands of Hutu-power militia to slaughter the Tutsis's who had sought refuge there.

The government, later, when it discovered this church that the new government of Rwanda, the people who were now governing after the genocide had decided to leave it as they had found it with the bodies strewn about as a commemorative site. It was quite a graphic way to recognize just the scope of what it means to have a 100, 1000, 2000 people killed. And then you think about numbers like 800,000 because when you're in a place like that it really does seem like there are dead people everywhere.

GROSS: You make the point in your book that the genocide wasn't about chaos, it wasn't about anarchy, the genocide was very well-orchestrated. It was the product of order, the product of authoritarianism. Can you explain how the word was gotten out?

GOUREVITCH: The word to do the killing?

GROSS: Yeah.

GOUREVITCH: The idea that it was time to kill the Tutsis', the orders as it were, were gotten out through many levels. One of the main levels was the radio. There was a long history in Rwanda by 1994, of state sponsored hostility and animosity towards the Tutsis population, including periodic massacres.

The idea that a Tutsi life was quite deeply devalued by the time of the genocide began. At that point, the local administrators were receiving encouragement, shall we say, from their higher-ups -- and there's a very hierarchical political and social structure in Rwanda. Really at all levels it was disseminating outwards to the smaller and smaller, localer and localer units that this was -- it was now a time of killing.

A message that had sort of been a rather conventional "us or them" attitude of ethnic division became a "kill or be killed" message.

There had been long structuring and training of the militia bands throughout the country. Now, simultaneously, you had the radio encouraging the struggle, encouraging what was called "cleaning the bush", "do your work". These were the sorts of euphemisms that were used for describing the extermination of the Tutsis population.

At the same time as you had that you had local leaders encouraging people. You had state figures from the government, you had the prime minister, you had all of the various ministers in the cabinet, and the president himself, the acting president at the time -- traveling around the country leading rallies congratulating people in places where massacres had taken place for work well-done, and encouraging those in places where the massacres had yet to be completed to do their work.

The extent of this -- although it's hard to find, for instance, a tape recording of somebody saying, "kill all the Tutsis now." You would have these euphemisms like "do your work" or "eliminate the enemies of the people," and so forth.

These were completely and clearly understood and had a long legacy. So the message was really disseminated very intensively at very many different levels, both by example and by word of mouth.

GROSS: This was a kind of general population massacre where everybody was encouraged to do the killing. Most of these people were unarmed, it wasn't a professional army with armed soldiers. What were the methods used for the genocide? I know machetes were very often used. What else was done?

GOUREVITCH: Machetes, clubs, hoes, garden tools. Virtually everybody in Rwanda has a machete, and they don't have it for chopping up their neighbors as people might imagine here from the sort of press coverage. It's the all-purpose tool.

People use it -- it's an agrarian culture. It's basically a peasant culture. You see people walking everywhere with machetes. They cut their firewood with it, they cut their grass with it, they cut -- they dig holes with it, they build their houses with it, they use it for just about everything.

So it's a ubiquitous tool. Nevertheless, in the months preceding the massacres, there have been documented -- sort of large orders were made by the government on behalf of the militia to stockpile machetes. They were ordering them from China. They were ordering them from their own factories that were manufacturing machetes locally. So that there was a clear effort to make sure that the population was armed even in this rudimentary fashion.

Then a few people with guns, or a few people with hand grenades could easily sort of create the militarized context that was needed to spur on the population.

GROSS: You wrote that most of the dogs were shot during the genocide. Why?

GOUREVITCH: This was a peculiar side effect. They were really shot after the genocide. I had noticed when I was in Rwanda that there were very very very few dogs. It was very quiet at night and that's not very typical of outdoor countries, shall we say. Places where a lot of the life is taking place in a temperate climate outdoors.

The Rwandan dogs were eating the Rwandan dead. And as the rebel army -- the Rwandese Patriotic Front that liberated Rwanda from the genocide -- moved across the country taking territory, they began to shoot the dogs that they saw eating the dead. Essentially in disgust and fury.

These dogs were -- nobody wanted such a dog around anymore and so they were killed. It really tells you of kind of -- there's something about this image which I found particularly lurid and sad, in the sense that it -- the dogs were made masterless by the killing. Masterless, they ran loose and ate their masters.

It tells you how deeply a society is torn apart when even the dogs can't be left to survive.

GROSS: Some of the priests in Rwanda joined in the genocide and you spoke to one of the reverends who was alleged to have participated in it. In fact he was indicted by the war crimes tribunal. I'm thinking of Reverend Entaky Rudimano (ph). Tell us what he told you. Did he admit to any of the charges?

GOUREVITCH: No. Pastor Entaky Rudimano was the president of the Adventist Church in the Western Rwandan province of Kabyu (ph), which is a beautiful mountainous area along the edge of Lake Kivu, which forms the border with what was then Zaire and is now the Congo.

He was the president of the Adventist Church for the entire province. He lived in a town called Moganero (ph), and I had traveled out to Kabyu when I was in Rwanda in the summer of '96. I visited Moganero and there I spoke with a number of survivors who describe how, as in the church massacre site that I described earlier Narobyu, people from the area fearing death -- Tutsis had fled seeking refuge at the church center. As they amassed there they began to fear that they themselves would be massacred, and began to hear rumors that they were being directed there to be massacred not to be saved.

Amongst their number were seven Tutsis pastors who are members of the Adventist church -- church authorities -- and when they learned that on a particular Saturday morning they were to be killed they wrote a letter to Pastor Enaky Rudimano, the Hutu church president, asking that he intercede on their behalf. It's from that letter, actually, that I take the title of my book: "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families."

They were asking him in that strange, formal, polite, deferential language to intercede on their behalf and save their lives.

The story I heard in Moganero was that in fact he had said something to the effect of, "well no, you must die. God no longer wants you." Which I thought were particularly chilling words. And then I learned that he was living in Laredo, Texas of all places.

He had a son who some years ago had become a doctor in the United States and was living in Laredo, Texas. Pastor Entaky Rudimano had fled after the genocide into Zaire, and then into Zambia, and from Zambia he had emigrated with a green card to the United States.

So I went down to Laredo and I tracked him down, and I tracked down the son and through him was able to meet the father who wanted to speak to me, or -- me, I represented a reporter at that point. Because he claimed he wanted to clear his good name.

He claimed that far from having helped or orchestrated the massacre, at that point he was under indictment from the war crimes tribunal, I knew it, he didn't. It was a secret indictment that I had learned about.

He said, "well, you know, it was a time of chaos, it was a time of anarchy. I never did anything that I have been accused of." In fact, his alibi which was a rather extraordinary alibi -- he said, "I went, when the killing in my town began, I went to the next town over." And the quote was, "where they had killed everybody, and so there was peace."

It's a strange way of defining peace, I thought, for a man of God, who was also accused of massacring his own congregation. It was odd -- I had heard about this letter and I asked him about it. And he told me the story that, yes indeed, he had received such a letter but there was nothing he could do.

Then I said, what exactly did the letter say, because up until then I had really been told about it only by survivors in Rwanda. He told me, well, here -- and he handed me a copy of the letter. He had kept the letter for all this time.

What I have never been able to understand is did he think it exonerated him? Because in many ways it seems to leave -- raise more doubts about his role than it answers. He was arrested the day after I met him, at that point, in Laredo, Texas by the FBI on this indictment from the UN tribunal.

But it's -- it gives a sense also of how widespread this was. It was something that infiltrated the deepest levels of church hierarchies, and it also fans out then quickly into the entire world.

GROSS: My guest is Philip Gourevitch, author of a book about the Rwandan genocide. More after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

BREAK

GROSS: Let's get back to our interview with Philip Gourevitch about his book about the Rwandan genocide, which just won a National Book Critics Circle Award.

Most of the people who carried out the genocide in Rwanda were just regular people, they weren't part of a trained fighting force. You can't say they were indoctrinated while they were in the military to become fighting machines or killing machines. Because they weren't, most of them, in the military.

I know you've tried to answer the question how can regular people participate in a genocide? What kind of answers or conclusions have you been able to come up with?

GOUREVITCH: I can explain and describe and account for any number of factors which contribute to what appear to be a pattern of behavior of what I saw in Rwanda. But in the end I have to say I'm left somewhat mystified and dissatisfied, and I really -- I decided that there are some things were one has to respect the mystery. Even the mystery of this kind of an atrocity.

But there's an example that I think is very interesting. I once was stuck on a road late at night, and in the darkness in Rwanda our car broke down and I was stuck out there. When suddenly there was a woman screaming in the valley down below. And this screaming got picked up by everybody around. I couldn't see anything it was in the darkness down below, and one heard this tremendous hub-bub in a little village.

After about an hour, some soldiers came up on the road leading a prisoner, and it turned out that this man had broken into the woman who had screamed -- he had broken into her house and assaulted her and apparently had tried to rape her.

And I was told that in Rwanda in village by village in the small communities and larger; when you are offended, when somebody attacks you, when you call for help, everybody else is supposed to pick up this call and also come running to your assistance. And if you don't help out in this way you yourself are considered a bit of an accomplice.

It was explained to me as totally normal. "Well, of course, isn't this how it is where you live? I mean, this is community." And what happened in Rwanda is that idea of community was turned on its head. If you didn't run to help in the killing you were an accomplice. If you didn't participate in slaughtering then you were the one who had to explain yourself. And so this very tight community system was used to purge the Tutsi population.

GROSS: I think it's fair to say that most Americans can't keep straight the Hutus from the Tutsis. What separates them in Rwanda?

GOUREVITCH: Relatively little except a legacy of distorted identity politics I think it's fair to say. Nobody knows exactly how these terms originated, where they came from -- before recorded history.

But at the time of colonization by European explorers, which was really only about a 100 years ago -- in the 1890s, there were these groups called Hutu and some caught Tutsi within Rwandan society. And it really seems to have been more of caste or a class division representing economic and social status. The tiny Tutsi minority being an elite.

The Europeans manipulated this around ideas that they brought with them of race-science, which is to say pseudoscience of racial categorization, and created, really ultimately, an almost apartheid-like system in Rwanda in which the Tutsi elite were considered a superior master race.

There were certain physical stereotypes which made Tutsis tall, skinny and more European in their features; and therefore, of course, that contributed also to the idea that they were superior in the eyes of Europeans. And the Hutu as a kind of slave or inferior race.

The fact of the matter is it's very difficult physically or otherwise to distinguish them. Modern historians and ethnographers simply reject the idea that there are two distinct groups; they speak the same language, they worship the same Gods, and they live together, inter-mingled.

GROSS: And when Belgium colonized Rwanda they gave the Tutsis more authority, more power. And then when Rwanda got its independence the Hutus ousted the Tutsi leaders. So I guess there is a bit of a history of back and forth there between the Hutus and the Tutsis about who was controlling who and who was ousting who?

GOUREVITCH: Well, yeah. I mean, essentially, you had a small elite group, the Tutsi, who enjoyed all the privileges under the colonial state. And then in the name of majority rule and independence the Hutu made a bid for power.

It was actually strikingly only at that very moment in 1959 that one has the first instance of organized political violence between the two groups, where Hutu and Tutsi were sort of violently clashing, although one often hears of this as some kind of ancient tribal warfare, there was never before any recorded instance of this kind.

And it's essentially a very modern phenomenon. It's one in which political leadership, seeking to create its base seeking to manipulate its constituency, thrives on a creating the bogey of the other group as a sort of mortal enemy and a constant peril.

In this case, in Rwanda although its happened differently elsewhere, Hutus had power since 1959 -- 1960 -- and cultivated very strongly the idea of this tiny Tutsi minority as a mortal enemy within.

GROSS: You really don't like the kind of reporting that says, well, this is a story in which there's problems on both sides. It's just one of those historical intractable messes that's, you know, pretty incomprehensible.

GOUREVITCH: No. I think the nicest thing that can be said about such reporting is that it's lazy, and sort of more damaging both to our understanding and to the people there in the places. It's wrong.

It doesn't seek to really recognize the political forces that are at play, that are defining these massive events. It doesn't seek to understand the events in the terms that they themselves are taking place.

GROSS: Philip Gourevitch, recorded last year after the publication of his book, "We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families." This week it won a National Book Critic Circle Award. We'll more of the interview in the second half of the show.

I'm Terry Gross and this is FRESH AIR.

BREAK

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR, I'm Terry Gross.

Back with more of our interview with journalist Philip Gourevitch. He's a staff writer for "The New Yorker," and the author of a book about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and its aftermath called, "We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families."

I asked him about the political events that led to the genocide.

GOUREVITCH: Two things can be said to be -- to sort of form the immediate background to the Rwandan genocide. The first, that between 1990 and 1994 Rwanda was in a state of on-again-off-again but continuous civil war in which predominately Tutsi, but not exclusively Tutsi, rebel group was opposing the entrenched power which was known as Hutu power of the president and his extremist entourage. And then a background within that of sort of very complex political turmoil with many many Hutu opposition groups.

And then most specifically the interesting thing is that while the background was this war, and it was during this war that the Hutu power extremists who would lead the genocide built up their militia basis, built -- held practice massacres, cultivated the logic, the rhetoric, the propaganda and the organizational structures that would preside over the genocide.

It was only when a peace agreement was struck, a power-sharing arrangement, in August of '93 that the Hutu power leaders ratcheted up for what they themselves called the "final solution." It was only when they actually had to share power that they said there is no solution, but to completely eliminate those with who we are being asked to share.

GROSS: Tens of thousands of people have been arrested for participating in the genocide. Did you visit one of the prisons on any of your trips there?

GOUREVITCH: I'm afraid I visited at least a half a dozen of them. I say afraid because they're really pretty depressing spectacles. You walk in and the first thing that sort of strikes you is that these are prisons built quite often maybe for 800 people, 1,000 people -- they are large brick fortress-looking areas. And you're looking at 10,000, 11,000 people -- 6,000 here, 8,000 there -- packed into the spaces.

They're packed so tightly that they can barely move. They can't all lie down at the same time, they have to sleep in shifts. They sleep sitting up. They're -- many of them are living outdoors perpetually with just a little bit of plastic sheeting as a roof.

So the first thing that strikes one is that these are appalling conditions. On the other hand, they are being fed and given medical care and so forth primarily by international relief groups.

And the other thing that strikes one is my goodness, a great number of these people are accused for a reason. They may not have been properly arrested by the sort of due process that we would hope for in our fairly well-established justice system.

But this is the scale of the crime that was committed here, is that these sort of numbers certainly do correspond to those who are guilty. It doesn't mean that the people who are in prison until they have been tried can be said to be guilty. But that's one of the things that strikes you, and you see them there and the other thing that's striking is how very passive much of the prison population is.

It was something that was hard to explain, except that there was the feeling that a terrible terrible crime had been committed. It wasn't extraordinary at all to Rwandans that so many people should be in jail.

GROSS: You write that you think true genocide and true justice are incompatible. Why?

GOUREVITCH: It is impossible to hold anybody to -- if one looks at American courts, they couldn't try 100,000 murder trials much less 800,000 murder trials with perfect due process and the sort of carrying it out to the degree and the letter of the law that we would require within the lifetimes of the perpetrators. We have the most lawyer-heavy, law-driven society in the world.

In Rwanda, it's even more impossible. It's simply impossible to account for a crime of that magnitude. And that's part of its attraction, I suspect, to its perpetrators is if everybody's implicated, nobody's implicated. How can you ever hold anybody to account? How can punishment ever suit the crime? It is a crime that in some very very disturbing way one has the sense is being gotten away with.

GROSS: The International War Crimes Tribunal has handed in two convictions so far, one of a former small town mayor and the other of a former prime minister -- the man who was prime minister during the genocide. The former prime minister got life in prison. He was the first person in history to plead guilty to genocide in a war crimes tribunal. What kind of precedence do you think this war crimes tribunal is setting?

GOUREVITCH: Well, he was the first person to plead guilty to genocide in a war crimes tribunal but by then Rwanda, in its own courts, had convicted hundreds of people of genocide. So I make the point simply to say Rwanda has been trying people for genocide in the past year and a half. Some of those trials don't meet the sort of standards that we would like them to. Overall, there are remarkably varied sentences coming out of them. That's one way to judge the independence of such a court.

The International Tribunal is setting an odd set of precedents. It's hard to know that the prime minister who was convicted confessed. And he confessed in a deal where he was trying to guarantee -- he basically said, "I will confess in exchange for the protection of my family in exile." And he's been complaining about whether or not they are protected at the level of well-being that he would like them to be.

He made a deal and it was very important both for Rwanda and for this court to have his conviction. I don't think it sets -- it's not a court that is capable of bringing justice for the Rwandan genocide. It is a court that is capable of doing some pioneering work in international law at a very slow pace that has very little or very delayed bearing on Rwanda's recovery, if one can speak of recovery, from the genocide.

GROSS: In the meantime, I think about one million Hutu people have returned to Rwanda. So this means that the Tutsi and the Hutu who tried to kill them are living together again. I wonder what kind of interactions you observed?

GOUREVITCH: That's one of the great and bewildering things about Rwanda. One of the things that I found that made the story so fascinating, and actually makes it a story that is so far from being over, and that is never before has a society that was so divided, that literally one part of the population was called upon to eliminate the other part -- and many members of it did participate in so doing and many people were killed.

That both groups are being asked to live together as neighbors again, and to form a society as Rwandans, first of all, and to create some idea of a Rwandan national identity.

It's an enormous challenge. What's striking is a lot of people are giving it a go. These categories, Tutsi and Hutu, are more laden with meaning in the aftermath of the bloodletting than ever before. It's only prudent to be suspicious. It's only prudent to be fearful. It's a huge burden of vengeful feelings that people carrying with them. At the same time, one sees a great deal of interacting. I mean, I know many intermarried couples who remained intermarried.

What matters ultimately to people is how individuals behave. It's -- the great problem is it's hard to know. It's hard to know unless you very well do know. In other words, it's hard know outside your small community. And I think if anything it makes people wary of one another -- very deeply.

GROSS: You say that your book is in part about how people imagine themselves and one another. And that the book is about how we imagine our world. I'm wondering how reporting on the story and spending time in Rwanda has changed your view of your world.

GOUREVITCH: There's a certain level in which I think it makes me feel that we're all somewhat less safe than we would like to imagine. Not because I think that we're all in immediate danger of being hacked up by our neighbors, but because I think for the 50 years since the genocide convention was passed and certainly in the way that the Holocaust -- which is sort of the defining genocide in modern consciousness -- has been remembered there's an increasing tendency to except the principles "never again" and "the world must oppose such things" on a somewhat facile level. Which is to say we all stand opposed to genocide after its happened.

But what Rwanda showed us is that the idea that we would act out of a sense of common humanity to defend people before such a slaughter simply doesn't hold up. The world doesn't care to act in these situations. It holds back and that it means -- in some deep way I think what I saw in Rwanda is to think of these things as humanitarian situations, and to think of them facilely, I think, as sort of we are opposed to them and therefore we behave well. That denouncing evil and acting against evil are not the same.

And that these are very complex political things that are taking place, and that if one doesn't look at them as such and seek to unravel them one is at greater risk I think of falling prey to them.

GROSS: Philip Gourevitch, I want to thank you very much for talking with us.

GOUREVITCH: Thanks so much for having me.

GROSS: Philip Gourevitch, recorded last year after the publication of his book "We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda." This week it won a National Book Critic Circle Award.

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Dateline: Terry Gross, Washington, DC
Guest: Philip Gourevitch
High: Journalist Philip Gourevitch is a staff writer for "The New Yorker" and is author of the 1998 book We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda." This month his book was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for best non-fiction. It chronicles the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and its aftermath. That spring and summer at least 800,000 people were killed in just 100 days when the Hutu led government implemented a policy of murder against the minority Tutsis.
Spec: Africa; Rwanda; Lifestyle; Culture; War; Violence; Murders; Death; Philip Gourevitch

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End-Story: Philip Gourevitch
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