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

I SAID EARLIER that power largely consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality, even if you have to kill a lot of them to make that happen. In this raw sense, power has always been very much the same everywhere; what varies is primarily the quality of the reality it seeks to create: is it based more in truth than in falsehood, which is to say, is it more or less abusive of its subjects? The answer is often a function of how broadly or narrowly the power is based: is it centered in one person, or is it spread out among many different centers that exercise checks on one another? And are its subjects merely subjects or are they also citizens? In principle, narrowly based power is easier to abuse, while more broadly based power requires a truer story at its core and is more likely to protect more of its subjects from abuse. This rule was famously articulated by the British historian Lord Acton in his formula “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

But like most truisms, Acton’s adage is not quite true: to take an example from American history, President Lincoln’s power was more absolute than President Nixon’s, yet Nixon was surely the more fundamentally corrupt of the two. So, when we judge political power, we need to ask not only what its base is but also how the power is exercised, under what circumstances, toward what ends, at what price, and with what success. These are tough judgments to make, generally open to dispute, and for those of us who live in the astonishing overall security provided by the great Western democracies of the late twentieth century, they are the very stuff of public life. Yet we seem to have a hard time taking seriously the notion that places where mass violence and suffering is so widespread that it is casually called “meaningless” might also be places where people engage in meaningful politics.

When I first went to Rwanda, I was reading a book called Civil War, which had been receiving great critical acclaim. Writing from an immediate post-Cold War perspective, the author, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, a German, observed, “The most obvious sign of the end of the bipolar world order are the thirty or forty civil wars being waged openly around the globe,” and he set out to inquire what they were all about. This seemed promising until I realized that Enzensberger wasn’t interested in the details of those wars. He treated them all as a single phenomenon and, after a few pages, announced: “What gives today’s civil wars a new and terrifying slant is the fact that they are waged without stakes on either side, that they are wars about nothing at all.”

In the old days, according to Enzensberger—in Spain in the 1930s or the United States in the 1860s—people used to kill and die for ideas, but now “violence has separated itself from ideology,” and people who wage civil wars just kill and die in an anarchic scramble for power. In these wars, he asserted, there is no notion of the future; nihilism rules; “all political thought, from Aristotle and Machiavelli to Marx and Weber, is turned upside down,” and “all that remains is the Hobbesian ur-myth of the war of everyone against everyone else.” That such a view of distant civil wars offers a convenient reason to ignore them may explain its enormous popularity in our times. It would be nice, we may say, if the natives out there settled down, but if they’re just fighting for the hell of it, it’s not my problem.

But it is our problem. By denying the particularity of the peoples who are making history, and the possibility that they might have politics, Enzensberger mistakes his failure to recognize what is at stake in events for the nature of those events. So he sees chaos—what is given off, not what’s giving it off—and his analysis begs the question: when, in fact, there are ideological differences between two warring parties, how are we to judge them? In the case of Rwanda, to embrace the idea that the civil war was a free-for-all—in which everyone is at once equally legitimate and equally illegitimate—is to ally oneself with Hutu Power’s ideology of genocide as self-defense.

Politics, after all, mostly operates in the in-between realm of bad—or, if you’re an optimist, better—versus worse. On any given day in postgenocide Rwanda, you could collect stories of fresh ugliness, and you could also collect stories of remarkable social and political improvement. The more stories I collected, the more I began to realize that life during the genocide, by virtue of its absoluteness, had evoked a simpler range of responses than the challenge of living with its memory. For those who had endured, stories and questions tended to operate in a kind of call-and-response fashion—stories calling up questions, calling up more stories, calling up more questions—and nobody of any depth seemed to expect precise answers. At best they hoped for understandings, ways of thinking about the defiant human condition at the end of this century of unforeseen extremity. Quite often, I felt that these stories were offered to me the way that shipwrecked people, neither drowned nor saved, send messages in bottles: in the hope that, even if the legends they carry can do the teller no good, they may at some other time be of use to somebody, somewhere else.

Even now, as I write, in the early months of 1998, Rwanda’s war against the genocide continues. Perhaps by the time you read this the outcome will be clearer. Rwanda may again have endured incalculable nationwide bloodshed, and Hutu Power may again have prevailed over much, if not all, of the country. There’s also a chance that Rwanda will be a place of steady, grinding struggle, with periods and regions of great terror, and periods and regions of edgy stability, which is more or less how it has been since the genocide. Of course, if you’re some kind of archaeologist who digs this book up in the distant future, five or fifty or five hundred years from now, there’s a chance that Rwanda will be a peaceful land of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; you may be planning your next holiday there, and the stories you find in these pages will offer but a memorial backdrop, the way we now read stories of the genocide of American Indians or of slavery days, or accounts of all the horrible crimes against humanity that marked Europe’s progress, and think, as Conrad’s Marlow said of England, “We live in the flicker—may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.”

IN THE NINE months I spent in Rwanda in the course of six trips, the only freshly killed person I saw was a young man who had died in a car wreck. Three minutes earlier he had been riding along through his life, then his driver swerved to avoid hitting an old woman crossing the road, and now he lay on his side in high grass, locked in a fetal curl, with his head open. If I had a picture of him and reproduced it here with the caption “Tutsi genocide victim,” or “Hutu victim of the RPF,” you would have no way to perceive the deception. In either case, the appeal to your sympathies and your sense of outrage would be the same.

That is how the story of Rwanda has generally been reported, as the war between the génocidaires and the RPF-installed government drags on. In a typical dispatch, headed “Searching in Vain for Rwanda’s Moral High Ground,” my local paper, The New York Times , described a Hutu refugee maimed in an attack by Tutsi soldiers, and a Tutsi refugee maimed by Hutu Power militias, as “victims in an epic struggle between two rival ethnic groups” in which “no one’s hands are clean.” The impression created by such reports is that because victims on either side of the conflict suffer equally, both sides are equally insupportable. To drive the point home, the Times got a sound bite from Filip Reyntjens, a Belgian who is considered one of Europe’s leading authorities on Rwanda. “It’s not a story of good guys and bad guys,” Reyntjens told the newspaper. “It’s a story of bad guys. Period.”