We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: stories from Rwanda, By Philip Gourevitch Picador 356pp, £16.99p
Philip Gourevitch begins this magnificent, terrifying book with a few stark facts. In Rwanda in 1994, he tells us, "at least 800,000 people were killed in just 100 days." He calculates that Rwandans killed Rwandans at a rate three times faster than the Nazis exterminated the Jews, and that the Rwandan genocide was "the most efficient mass killing since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."
We have learned to be wary of such comparisons; and it is clear from the thoughtfulness of his reportage that Gourevitch, a staff writer with the New Yorker, is not interested in anything so banal as Rwanda's ranking in the pantheon of human horror. But we live in a world where this week's atrocity in Kosovo deflects our attention from last week's in Sierra Leone. How many of us remember what happened in Rwanda in 1994? How many of us were reminded of it only by disproportionate media coverage of the recent killings in Uganda of western tourists by Rwandan Hutu rebels?
So Gourevitch begins with raw figures, by way of getting our attention. For all the talk of post-Cold War mayhem, no other human event in the past 10 years can compare with what happened in Rwanda: the state-organised murder of close to a million people, mostly minority Tutsis. Nobody seriously contests the facts now; but when the Tutsis of Rwanda were in need, the world studiously avoided the word "genocide". At that time, Gourevitch writes, "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 theorising and indoctrination, and one of the most meticulously administered states in history."
One of the stories Gourevitch has to tell, therefore, is the story of this state, one which contradicts the tale the West has told itself about "age-old animosity". Through the centuries of pre-colonial Tutsi dominance and the decades of Tutsi collaboration with German and Belgian colonial rulers, "there had never been systematic political violence between Hutus and Tutsis" - never, that is, until 1959, when the departing Belgians handed power to the Hutus and sponsored anti-Tutsi pogroms.
The Hutu regime organised pogroms again in 1964, and in 1973. Tutsis were sacked from their jobs, burned out of their homes, murdered. Meanwhile the international development workers who walked through President Habyarimana's looking-glass paid little attention to the genocidal rumblings, so dazzled were they by the orderliness of the place.
The immediate origins of the genocide lay in the 1993 peace accord between the Rwandan government and the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF), a guerrilla army led by Tutsis exiled in Uganda. "Hutu Power" - a genocidal movement represented at the highest levels of the state - viewed the agreement as a sell-out and stoked fears of a return to Tutsi oppression. On April 6th 1994, Habyarimana's plane was shot down - it is generally believed Hutu Power sacrificed him - and within 24 hours the killing was under way.
No foreign nation came to the aid of the Tutsis. The UN, having ignored warnings that genocide was imminent, promptly removed 90 per cent of its peacekeepers the day after the killing began. In those hundred days the regime managed, in its genocidal zeal, to lose much of Rwanda to the RPF, whose soldiers advanced steadily across the corpse-littered country. Facing comprehensive military defeat, Hutu Power pulled its master stroke, mobilising a massive exodus of Hutus from Rwanda, on the manifestly false pretence that they were unsafe there. In response to this manufactured crisis the UN obediently organised the most massive "humanitarian" operation in history, providing a safe haven for the genocidal militias and the peasants in their thrall. Gourevitch's account of all this, based on a series of vists to Rwanda between 1995-97, is factual, unemotional - and utterly gut-wrenching. After reading it, it is difficult to take seriously those fine words - "humanitarian", "human rights", "international community" - with which the rich world dresses its policies towards the rest of the world.
Of course, the world's failure to assist the Tutsis of Rwanda, and its subsequent willingness to feed and house a genocidal regime, is only the secondary story. The disaster originated in Rwanda itself. How could it have happened? It is difficult to do justice to Gourevitch's analysis of the intimate human dimension of the genocide, an analysis that seems to rise, as if unbidden, from his renderings of the stories of Rwandans, ordinary peasants and political leaders alike: his title incidentally comes from a letter written by a Tutsi pastor to his church president, a Hutu, appealing for intervention. That intervention never came.
Like Orwell, Arendt and Didion, Gourevitch has a sharp ear for the abuse of language in public life. This serves him well here, for the history of the Rwandan genocide - like those of most state-organised atrocities - is, inter alia, a history of systematic lying through mass media, of the strategic deployment of a dehumanising epithet here (Tutsis were "cockroaches") and a sinister euphemism there (killing Tutsis was "work").
Gourevitch recognises that the basic problem facing any inquirer into such a catastrophe is the incapacity of the human mind adequately to imagine such horror. "This", Gourevitch writes, "is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real." The great achievement of this book is that it allows us to imagine this unimaginable crime - to imagine the mentality of its perpetrators and of its victims - and of those who stood by, human beings all.