Darkness Visible

Philip Gourevitch’s account of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and its aftermath is the most important book I have read in many years. In fact, I am tempted to say it is the only important--or, to be more precise, necessary--book I have read in many years. Gourevitch’s book poses the preeminent question of our time, beside which all others must, of necessity, pale: What--if anything--does it mean to be a human being at the end of the 20th century? The author cannot, of course, definitively answer this question, but he examines it with humility, anger, grief, and a remarkable level of both political and moral intelligence.

Rwanda is a tiny, densely populated, overwhelmingly Christian country in Central Africa that the World Bank has anointed the poorest nation on Earth. In April 1994, Rwanda’s ruling Hutus set out to eliminate the minority Tutsis, and in this they were largely, although not entirely, successful: Within 100 days, an estimated 800,000 Tutsis, out of approximately 1.2 million, were butchered. Gourevitch writes, “Hutus young and old rose to the task. Neighbors hacked neighbors to death in their homes, and colleagues hacked colleagues to death in their workplaces. Doctors killed their patients, and schoolteachers killed their pupils. . . . Radio announcers reminded listeners not to take pity on women and children.” And they didn’t.

Killing is strenuous work, especially when, as in Rwanda, one has access mainly to low-tech weapons like machetes. “The killers killed all day,” Gourevitch writes. “At night they cut the Achilles tendons of survivors. . . . And, in the morning . . . the killers . . . went back and killed again. Day after day, minute to minute, Tutsi by Tutsi.” He adds, “[A]fter nearly three years of looking around Rwanda and listening to Rwandans, I can tell you how [the genocide occurred], and I will. But the horror of it--the idiocy, the waste, the sheer wrongness--remains uncircumscribable.”

Gourevitch, who is now a staff writer for the New Yorker, doesn’t directly tell us a whole lot about himself, or even precisely what led him to Rwanda. Having read reports of the killings, he first visited the country in May of 1995, approximately 10 months after the genocide had been completed, and after the government that supported it had been overthrown. He made several trips back over the next three years, traveling throughout the “tiny trashed country” and talking to a range of people who shared with him their often radically differing “stories.” (Many Rwandans, Gourevitch reports, deny that a genocide ever took place.) Gourevitch tells us that “what fascinates me most in existence” is “the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.” Thankfully, this is not true: “We Wish To Inform You” shows that what fascinates Gourevitch most is listening to others, conducting historical research, discerning truths and constructing a narrative that is both clear and complex. (Prior to Rwanda, Gourevitch had already evinced an interest in mass murder, writing controversial pieces that criticized the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the film “Schindler’s List.”)

“We Wish To Inform You” is not about ancient tribal hatreds. It is not about genocide as an expression of anarchistic frenzy. It is not about the inevitability of historical events. It is not about the oft-stated belief that, under conditions of terror, resistance is impossible or, alternately, that in times of war, “anybody will do anything.”

In his frighteningly lucid, understated prose, Gourevitch demolishes each of these widely held illusions. Tutsis and Hutus, for instance, are not separate “races” or even “tribes.” Gourevitch reports that they had intermarried for years; that until 1959, when a Hutu revolution swept the country, there had been no recorded instances of systematic violence between the two groups; and that they coexisted peacefully in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. Far from being an expression of uncontrolled blood lust, the genocide was dependent on forethought and discipline. It was strategically planned--beginning literally one hour after Rwanda’s Hutu dictator, President Juvenal Habyarimana, was assassinated on April 6, 1994--and precisely carried out. It was not an expression of wild emotions, but of a carefully constructed, albeit insane political ideology called Hutu Power, which posited the benefits of a Tutsi-free Rwanda.

Thus, Gourevitch observes, “In 1994, Rwanda was regarded in much of the rest of the world as the exemplary instance of the chaos and anarchy associated with collapsed states. In fact, the genocide was the product of order, authoritarianism, decades of modern political theorizing and indoctrination, and one of the most meticulously administered states in history.” And although the genocide had been preceded by periodic outbreaks of violence since 1959, Gourevitch insists that “[t]here was nothing inevitable about the horror” of 1994. Indeed, “it required a dogged uphill effort for Habyarimana’s extremist entourage to prevent Rwanda from slipping toward moderation.”

This is an extraordinarily difficult book to read; there were times when I approached it with dread and disgust. There are two reasons in particular. The first is sadism. It is one thing to read about murder; it is another to read about the deliberate cruelty with which it is carried out. Gourevitch actually underplays this theme (and, unaccountably, virtually ignores the “stories” of the mass rapes of Tutsi women, except in passing). But it is clear that the Hutus wanted not only to eliminate the Tutsis--whom they referred to as “cockroaches”--but to make them die slow, excruciating, degraded deaths. Much of the killing occurred in churches; here is Gourevitch’s description of one corpse: “Inside the nave, . . . [h]e appeared to be crawling toward the confession booth. His feet had been chopped off, and his hands had been chopped off. This was a favorite torture for Tutsis during the genocide; the idea was to cut the tall people ‘down to size,’ and crowds would gather to taunt, laugh, and cheer as the victim writhed to death.”

The other, far touchier, question is that of Tutsi passivity. How desperately we want Gourevitch to tell us stories of a massive Tutsi resistance--just as we would like to hear that there were thousands of Warsaw Ghetto uprisings, and thousands of Nat Turners. Alas, in this case--as in those--it is not to be.

Some Tutsis did resist. For the most part, though, Gourevitch depicts a cowed, defeated, passive populace, seemingly reconciled to its own extermination. (In some cases, Tutsis paid their Hutu killers for the bullets that would put them to death or bargained over whether they would die in the street or at home.) Explains Laurent Nkongoli, a surviving Tutsi, “Rwandan culture is a culture of fear. . . . When you’re that resigned and oppressed you’re already dead. . . . I detest this fear.” (Indeed, the very title of Gourevitch’s book is taken from a terribly polite, and entirely ineffectual, letter that seven Tutsi pastors sent to a Hutu colleague requesting his intervention.)

Again and again, Gourevitch describes Rwanda as a country defined by blind obedience, rote thinking, cowardice, duplicity, intimidation and, above all, conformity--”one of the most repressed societies on Earth.” Ironically--or, rather, tragically--Hutus and Tutsis seemed to have absorbed these modes of being, which Gourevitch identifies as “the engine of the genocide,” in roughly equal measures. Thus an odd and terrible symbiosis emerged: Most Hutus unquestioningly followed the order that they become murderers; most Tutsis unquestioningly followed the order that they become obsolete. This does not imply, even for a moment, that there is any moral equivalence between the two sides. But it does begin to explain--if anything can--how Rwanda’s churches became crematoriums, and Kigali a necropolis.

Yet it did not have to be so. There were some people, both Tutsi and Hutu, who refused the madness, and they survived to tell their tales. Take, for instance, Thomas Kamilindi, a radio announcer who “had been trained as a Boy Scout ‘to look at danger, and study it, but not to be afraid.’ . . . The killers were accustomed to encountering fear, and Thomas had always acted as if there must be some misunderstanding.” (Partially through cunning, partially through bravery, partially through luck, Kamilindi dodged death several times.) Or mild-mannered Paul Rusesabagina, a middle-class hotel manager (and a Hutu) who shielded scores of Tutsis for more than a month, refusing repeated demands that he turn over his guests to the killer militias. “I’m a man who’s used to saying no when I have to,” Rusesabagina explains simply. “That’s all I did--what I felt like doing.” He and all his wards survived.

Rather than taking pride in his resistance, Rusesabagina is genuinely puzzled that others did not act likewise. Their collaboration, he says, is “a mystery. Everybody could have done” as he did. In fact, during the siege of his hotel, Rusesabagina quite naturally assumed that people on the outside were doing as he did--were, that is, resisting--and he describes his discovery of the truth as “more than a surprise. It was a disappointment.”

Puzzlement, surprise, disappointment: What could be more mundane, or lovelier? Like those steadfast, gentle French farmers who resisted the Nazi occupation in Marcel Ophuls’ documentary “The Sorrow and the Pity,” Rusesabagina’s moral beauty consists precisely in his insistence that he is ordinary. Rusesabagina embodies not the banality, but the essentially prosaic, quality of goodness--and who among us does not need to live in a world where goodness is routine, conventional, even (we hope) unnoteworthy? Unhappy, indeed, is the land that needs heroes.

But Rwanda is such a land, and against overwhelming odds, Rusesabagina refused the categorical imperative of the genocide, which is only to say that Rusesabagina remained recognizably human. Explains Gourevitch: “Paul believed in free will. He understood his actions . . . as choices. He didn’t seem to think that he could be called righteous, except when measured against the criminality of others, and he rejected that scale. . . . [W]hat he feared even more than a violent end was living or dying as what he called a ‘fool.’ . . . So Paul had a rare conscience, and knew the loneliness that came with it.”

Gourevitch’s book is a furious indictment of the developed world’s moral obtuseness and political irresolution in the face of the genocide. The shameful actions--or, more often, inactions--of the United Nations, the French and, most of all, the United States are all-too-convincingly documented. Gourevitch reports that the slaughter could, early on, have been brought to a “rapid halt” with a deployment of 5,000 U.N. troops (provided they were allowed to actually fight the genodicaires); that solution was effectively blocked by President Clinton and his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright. “The desertion of Rwanda,” Gourevitch states, “can be credited almost single-handedly to the United States.” In light of this, Gourevitch acidly reinterprets Clinton’s stirring condemnation of genocide at the opening of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1993: “Apparently, all he meant was that the victims of future exterminations could now die knowing that a shrine already existed in Washington where their suffering might be commemorated.”

Most astounding was the First World’s outpouring of passionate, almost inflamed concern for the estimated one million Hutus who almost immediately established refugee camps in Zaire (since renamed Democratic Republic of the Congo) once the genocide had been completed in the summer of 1994, and the Hutu Power government ousted by the Rwandese Patriotic Front. Being a refugee is a sorry state, but the problem with the Hutu refugees is that many of them were mass murderers--not refugees, exactly, so much as criminal fugitives. Nevertheless, the international humanitarian organizations whipped themselves into action, providing millions of dollars in aid and sustenance.

“Rwanda had presented the world with the most unambiguous case of genocide since Hitler’s war against the Jews, and the world sent blankets, beans, and bandages to camps controlled by the killers, apparently hoping that everybody would behave nicely in the future,” Gourevitch writes. As in Bosnia--whose catastrophe bears more than a passing resemblance to Rwanda’s--the West was initially paralyzed when confronted with genocide and, subsequently, insisted on misdiagnosing a political crisis as a humanitarian one, and on the happy fiction that the crisis could be peacefully solved. In this way, and in both cases, the developed world became complicit in, rather than fighters against, genocide.

Is there any hope for forgiveness, for reconciliation, in Rwanda? This is a question that only Rwandans can answer. But it is clearly the Old Testament god of justice, not the New Testament god of mercy, that informs Gourevitch’s book. Odette Nyiramilimo, a Tutsi doctor whose husband and children survived the genocide but whose extended family was murdered, scoffs at forgiveness: “People will say I’m an extremist because I can’t accept or tolerate the people who killed my family. So if they’re afraid once in their lives--I was afraid since I was three years old--let them know how it feels.”

Even the man who saved her children--but, alas, murdered others--should, Nyiramilimo unequivocally proclaims, “be hanged in a public place, and I will go there.” Gourevitch explains, “Many people who participated in the killing . . . also protected some Tutsis. . . . To their minds, . . . their acts of decency exonerated the guilt of their crimes. But to survivors, the fact that a killer sometimes spared lives only proved that he could not possibly be judged innocent, since it demonstrated plainly that he knew murder was wrong.” Nevertheless, Paul Kagame, a leader of the Rwandese Patriotic Front and, now, the country’s most powerful government official, holds out hope of reconciliation--hope, that is, of creating “a new national narrative that could simultaneously confront the genocide and offer a way to move on from it.”

Kagame emerges in Gourevitch’s pages as a remarkable cockroach indeed, “a man of action with an acute human and political intelligence,” a fighter who reveres reason but who knows, too, that “reason can be ruthless.” He is “convinced that with reason he could bend all that was twisted in Rwanda straighter, that the country and its people truly could be changed--made saner, and so better--and he meant to prove it.” Kagame believes in justice--including the death penalty--for the guilty. (Currently, more than 125,000 people are awaiting trial on charges of genocide in Rwanda.) But he also believes that Rwandans must find a modern, postcolonial, humane way of being Rwandan. He insists: “People are not inherently bad. But they can be made bad. And they can be taught to be good.”

Genocide may be the best and most terrible example of the creepy, intimate relationship between Eros and Thanatos, a relationship that Thanatos so often dominates. In a recent issue of Granta magazine, the journalist Michael Ignatieff observed that genocide “is actually a kind of longing for utopia. . . . What could be more like paradise on earth than to live in a community without enemies? To create a world . . . freed from fear in the night and war by day? . . . We all long for harmony, for an end to the seemingly interminable discord of human relations. What could be more seductive than to kill in order to put an end to all killing? . . . [G]enocide is such a radical cleansing, such a violation of the normal order of things, that it must enlist the highest of motives, the biggest of dreams.” Yet how easily beautiful dreams become nightmares.

Gourevitch’s great achievement is to never lose sight of the historical, political, man-made reasons for Rwanda’s particular nightmare, while also illuminating--or at least beginning to illuminate--what Simone Weil called “the effects of misfortune on the soul.” Yet “We Wish To Inform You” is only a start; we still need to figure out how to use this astonishing book. As Gourevitch writes, “[F]or all the fine sentiments inspired by the memory of Auschwitz, the problem remains that denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good.”