We wish to inform you that tomorrow...

...we will be killed with our families.

This is the title of a book by Philip Gourevitch that is both depressing, horrifying, and enlightenging. The distressing name comes from a letter from an Adventist pastor to the president of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Rwanda. He was, indeed, killed soon after he wrote it. The president, Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, responded that “You must be eliminated. God no longer wants you.” This haunts him as Gourevitch tracks him down in the United States.

The book covers the Rwandan Genocide of 1994 and its survivors... and those who didn't survive. The frank discussions and extremely detailed visual descriptions of the dead and the murders are absolutely stunning, both in good and bad ways. It must have taken Gourevitch much courage and resolve to look at the things he did, such as the long-dead bodies at the Nyarubuye memorial.

A particularly striking passage involves talks with Laurent Nkongoli, who survived the genocide. He became vice president of the National Assembly after the genocide. He says he had accepted death, and that "one hopes not to die cruelly, but one expects to die anyway. Not by death by machete, one hopes, but with a bullet. If you were willing to pay for it, you could often ask for a bullet." How awful an end - the choice to be hacked to death or pay your killer to murder you quickly.

Gourevitch discusses a philosophy of power and government that I agree with completely and have often espoused. He says that "in principle, narrowly based power is easier to abuse, while more broadly based power requires a truer story at its core and s more likely to protect more of its subjects from abuse." I've long been an advocate for decentralized power, and it would go a long way to preventing both government and citizen-based extremism.

The end of the book, where we hear the apologies of western leaders such as Madeline Albright and Bill Clinton, is interesting. It's obvious that they feel some responsibility, or at least that they want to seem that they feel some responsibility.

I don't know if this is something that would necessarily need to change, because there does seem to be some disagreement, but Hotel Rwanda mentions the supposed differences between the Hutu and Tutsi that the Belgians used to separate them into these false categories. However, Gourevitch discusses that many researchers can't tell a difference at all. Some believe that The Tutsi moved in and set up a feudal system over the Hutu, and others say that the only difference was lifestyle and the physical characteristics that the Belgians used to separate them.