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

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eISBN 9780374706487

First eBook Edition: March 2011

Because Rwanda and Burundi were administered as a joint colonial territory, Ruanda-Urundi; because their languages are remarkably similar; because both are populated, in equal proportions, by Hutus and Tutsis; and because their ordeals as postcolonial states have been defined by violence between those groups, they are often considered to be the two halves of a single political and historical experience or “problem.” In fact, although events in each country invariably influence events in the other, Rwanda and Burundi have existed since precolonial times as entirely distinct, self-contained nations. The differences in their histories are often more telling than the similarities, and comparison tends to lead to confusion unless each country is first considered on its own terms.

Decimation means the killing of every tenth person in a population, and in the spring and early summer of 1994 a program of massacres decimated the Republic of Rwanda. Although the killing was lowtech—performed largely by machete—it was carried out at dazzling speed: of an original population of about seven and a half million, at least eight hundred thousand people were killed in just a hundred days. Rwandans often speak of a million deaths, and they may be right. The dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust. It was the most efficient mass killing since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.