Philip Gourevitch - We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families

The next day, Paul and his family joined a UNAMIR convoy to the RPF zone. He had done what he could. But had the RPF not been pounding Hutu Power from across the valley, there would have been no convoy—and probably no survivors.

…and it might well happen to most of us dainty people that we were in the thick of the battle of Armageddon without being aware of anything more than the annoyance of a little explosive smoke and struggle on the ground immediately about us.

THE NIGHTS WERE eerily quiet in Rwanda. After the birds fell silent, there were hardly even any animal sounds. I couldn’t understand it. Then I noticed the absence of dogs. What kind of country has no dogs? I started to keep watch in the markets, in the streets, in the countryside, in churchyards, schoolyards, farmyards, graveyards, junkyards, and the flowering yards of fine villas. Once, far out in the hills, I thought I spotted a boy leading a dog on a tether down a dirt lane. But it was a goat at the end of the rope. Village life without dogs? Children without dogs? Poverty without dogs? There were plenty of cats—the first pets to disappear in a famine, but famine was not Rwanda’s problem—and I began to wonder whether, in Rwanda, cats had won their eternal war with dog-kind.

During my first three months in the country, between May and August of 1995, I kept a list of the dogs I saw: A Belgian lady at the Hotel des Mille Collines had a pair of toy poodles that trotted beside her on her morning strolls through the garden around the swimming pool; the French landlady of a Dutch aid worker I knew had a fat golden retriever; a team of American and Belgian sappers had some German shepherds who assisted them in land-mine removal; and once I saw a scrawny bitch gnawing a fish skeleton behind a restaurant in the northwestern town of Gisenyi, but that dog might have just slipped over the border from Zaire a few hundred yards away, and after a moment a cook spotted her and chased her away with loud cries and a whack of a long wooden spoon. Studying this list, you might conclude that dog ownership corresponded to skin color: white people had dogs and Africans did not. But Africans are generally as fond of dogs as the rest of humanity, so the impressive doglessness of Rwanda perplexed me.

I made inquiries, and I learned that right through the genocide dogs had been plentiful in Rwanda. The words people used to describe the dog population back then were “many” and “normal.” But as the RPF fighters had advanced through the country, moving down from the northeast, they had shot all the dogs.

What did the RPF have against dogs? Everyone I asked gave the same answer: the dogs were eating the dead. “It’s on film,” someone told me, and I have since seen more Rwandan dogs on video monitors than I ever saw in Rwanda—crouched in the distinctive red dirt of the country, over the distinctive body piles of that time, in the distinctive feeding position of their kind.

I was told about an Englishwoman from a medical relief organization who got very upset when she saw RPF men shooting the dogs that were feeding off a hallful of corpses at the great cathedral center and bishopric of Kabgayi, which had served as a death camp in central Rwanda. “You can’t shoot dogs,” the Englishwoman told the soldiers. She was wrong. Even the blue-helmeted soldiers of UNAMIR were shooting dogs on sight in the late summer of 1994. After months, during which Rwandans had been left to wonder whether the UN troops knew how to shoot, because they never used their excellent weapons to stop the extermination of civilians, it turned out that the peacekeepers were very good shots.

The genocide had been tolerated by the so-called international community, but I was told that the UN regarded the corpse-eating dogs as a health problem.

ON DECEMBER 11, 1946, the General Assembly of the United Nations declared genocide a crime under international law. On December 9, 1948, the General Assembly went further, adopting Resolution 260A(III), the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which obliged “Contracting Parties” to “undertake to prevent and to punish… acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

Just as a state’s police swear to prevent and punish murder, so the signers of the Genocide Convention swore to police a brave new world order. The rhetoric of moral utopia is a peculiar response to genocide. But those were heady days, just after the trials at Nuremberg, when the full scale of the Nazi extermination of Jews all over Europe had been recognized as a fact of which nobody could any longer claim ignorance. The authors and signers of the Genocide Convention knew perfectly well that they had not fought World War II to stop the Holocaust but rather—and often, as in the case of the United States, reluctantly—to contain fascist aggression. What made those victorious powers, which dominated the UN then even more than they do now, imagine that they would act differently in the future?

Rwanda is landlocked and dirt-poor, a bit larger than Vermont and a bit less populous than Chicago, a place so dwarfed by neighboring Congo, Uganda, and Tanzania that for the sake of legibility its name has to be printed on most maps outside the lines of its frontiers. As far as the political, military, and economic interests of the world’s powers go, it might as well be Mars. In fact, Mars is probably of greater strategic concern. But Rwanda, unlike Mars, is populated by human beings, and when Rwanda had a genocide, the world’s powers left Rwanda to it.

On April 14, 1994, one week after the murder of the ten Belgian blue-helmets, Belgium withdrew from UNAMIR—precisely as Hutu Power had intended it to do. Belgian soldiers, aggrieved by the cowardice and waste of their mission, shredded their UN berets on the tarmac at Kigali airport. A week later, on April 21, 1994, the UNAMIR commander, Major General Dallaire, declared that with just five thousand well-equipped soldiers and a free hand to fight Hutu Power, he could bring the genocide to a rapid halt. No military analyst whom I’ve heard of has ever questioned his judgment, and a great many have confirmed it. The radio transmitter of RTLM would have been an obvious, and easy, first target. Yet, on the same day, the UN Security Council passed a resolution that slashed the UNAMIR force by ninety percent, ordering the retreat of all but two hundred seventy troops and leaving them with a mandate that allowed them to do little more than hunker down behind their sandbags and watch.

The desertion of Rwanda by the UN force was Hutu Power’s greatest diplomatic victory to date, and it can be credited almost single-handedly to the United States. With the memory of the Somalia debacle still very fresh, the White House had just finished drafting a document called Presidential Decision Directive 25, which amounted to a checklist of reasons to avoid American involvement in UN peacekeeping missions. It hardly mattered that Dallaire’s call for an expanded force and mandate would not have required American troops, or that the mission was not properly peacekeeping, but genocide prevention. PDD 25 also contained what Washington policymakers call “language” urging that the United States should persuade others not to undertake the missions that it wished to avoid. In fact, the Clinton administration’s ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, opposed leaving even the skeleton crew of two hundred seventy in Rwanda. Albright went on to become Secretary of State, largely because of her reputation as a “daughter of Munich,” a Czech refugee from Nazism with no tolerance for appeasement and with a taste for projecting U.S. force abroad to bring rogue dictators and criminal states to heel. Her name is rarely associated with Rwanda, but ducking and pressuring others to duck, as the death toll leapt from thousands to tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, was the absolute low point in her career as a stateswoman.