1994 Rwandan Genocide Critique of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (1998) by Phillip Gourevitch

The chilling title of Phillip Gourevitch's book, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families (1998), is a reference to a group letter from members of the Tutsi clergy to an Adventist church leader, Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, pleading for his protection from the Hutu majority in Rwanda. Gourevitch's book concerns the genocide that took place in Rwanda in 1994 wherein Hutu majority systematically massacred the minority Tutsi population. As a result of this effort at ethnic cleansing, an estimated 800,000 Tutsi were killed over the course of a 100-day period from April to July 1994. In fact, during the height of the massacre, Gourevitch reports that members of the Tutsi tribe were being massacred three times as fast as the Jews had been during the Nazi Holocaust. To better understand the events that contributed to this horrific slaughter in modern times, this paper provides a critical review of Gourevitch's book, including a discussion of how the religious, national, racial and ethnic groupings in Rwanda were used as tools for the genocide. A discussion of how European colonialism, Rwandan politics and the role of different aid organizations also contributed to the genocide is followed by a summary of the research in the conclusion.

Review and Analysis

Contribution of Religious, National, Racial and Ethnic Groupings to the Rwandan Genocide....

For an event of this magnitude, it would seem that little is actually known in the West; however, the estimates of the massacres of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda range from 500,000 to 1 million during the period April 6, 1994, when the genocide began, and the following July, when the Rwandese Patriotic Front's defeat of the Hutus ended the killing (Gourevitch 1998). According to Gourevitch, the Hutu militants composed lists just like the Nazis and reports that Hutu genocidaires had killed 800,000 people in just a hundred days, or 333 an hour, five and a half lives every minute, at a rate that was "nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust" (45). The strong ties that bind the Hutu and Tutsi peoples together made the taking of sides virtually inevitable; when authority figures emerge in these tribal settings, it is traditional that the people follow their lead. This deeply ingrained cultural mind-set helped to establish the setting in which such atrocities could then take place; according to the author, the Rwandan genocide was the reflection of "communal obligation turned on its head" (Gourevitch 34). Further exacerbating the situation for the minority Tutsis was the institutionalized and systematic method by which national agencies, the various denominations of Rwandan churches and the historic ethnic groupings of the Hutus and Tutsi that allowed the genocide to endure for so long. Everyone took sides, but no side was safe in this setting.
Furthermore, the author points out that there is a cultural acceptance of such…