Killing fields in Africa

IN a few months in mid-1994, approximately 800,000 people were killed in the tiny central African republic of Rwanda. The massacre in Rwanda vividly brought to life the meaning of the word "decimation", which the dictionary defines as the killing of every tenth person of the population. The original population of Rwanda before the killings was roughly seven and a half million and in a hundred days nearly a million people were dead.

This was the first time the word genocide was used by the United Nations since it was formed to describe mass killings; so horrifying was the slaughter in Rwanda. These are just two of the disturbing bits of information you will find in the most compelling non-fiction book I have read all year, possibly even this decade - Philip Gourevitch's We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

This is a book that must be ranked with Michael Herr's Dispatches and Ryszard Kapuscinski's The Emperor in its intensity and raw unflinching coverage of death and murder, and I found it unsurprising that Robert Stone in his blurb had indeed compared this book to the two I have just mentioned. It is also unsurprising that its author has won a bunch of awards including the Guardian Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for it is rare to read a book that is so disquieting and moving. Philip Gourevitch went to Africa to bear witness to the most flagrant example of man's inhumanity to man that the modern world has ever seen, and his report from the killing fields of Africa is not for the squeamish.

The extraordinary thing was that while the genocide took place, the rest of the world watched. The small United Nations peace keeping force was instructed not to use force except in self- defence and even for that it was poorly equipped.

To begin at the beginning. The killings were perpetrated by the Hutu majority against the minority Tutsis and the effort was to completely eliminate the minority community - over a million people - an extraordinary undertaking of death and destruction. The Hutus had always been mistrustful of the Tutsis who traced their line back to the first ruler - Mwami Kigeri Rwabugiri - to unify much of present day Rwanda under his rule in the late 19th Century. In time Rwanda came under German, and then Belgian colonial rule.

By this time various European "ethnographers" and "explorers" had begun propounding half-baked dangerous theories about race and origins and they designated the Tutsis, a master race, aristocrats who were distinct from the Hutus whom they declared were of peasant stock. It was another matter altogether that centuries of inter-marriage, the mixing of bloodlines and the intricacies of African social and linguistic organisation had rendered those theories nonsensical, the colonial stereotyping persisted and permitted opportunists to take advantage of them. But, until 1959, there was no systematic violence between the Hutus and the Tutsis. Then, as the Rwandans geared up for independence, under Belgian supervision, the first major unrest began and the Belgian in charge who was sympathetic to Hutus, openly sided with them and replaced all existing Tutsi authority figures with Hutus. Rwanda became independent in 1962 and Gregorie Kayibanda was installed as President. He openly spoke of Rwanda as "two nations in one state" and the seeds of genocide were sown.

Through the Fifties, Sixties, Seventies and Eighties there were periodic killings of the Tutsis, aggravated in part by rebel Tutsi armies staging small skirmishes on the border. But these attacks ceased very early on when the rebels saw the destruction that was wreaked upon their community in Rwanda. Despite this, the killings continued. Further, stacking the deck against the hapless Rwandan Tutsis was the wholesale slaughter of Hutus in neighbouring Burundi where a Tutsi regime held power in the Seventies.

In 1913, President George Habyarimana a Hutu leader who had been ruling the country for two decades, signed a peace accrued with the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi rebel army based in Uganda. It was a meaningless peace, and there were already signals that an "extermination" was being planned.

Then Habyarimana was assassinated, and his extremist colleagues began blaming the RPF and the U.N. for his death. The nation's terrified Tutsis had already heard that lists of Tutsis had been drawn up by Hutu death squads and those who could began making preparations to flee. But it was too late. With mindless ferocity, the government exhorted Hutus to exterminate Tutsis and Hutus who sympathised with them.

The killers included priests and doctors, teachers and peasants and, of course, the military and the police. The killings were largely done with machetes and other country weapons, but it was methodical and remorseless. At the end of a few months, as said, 800,000 Tutsis lay dead while the world - the U.N., powerful nations like the United States and the major Western European powers - either averted their eyes or made polite noises of concern. The only thing that saved the remaining Tutsis was the well disciplined Tutsi rebel army lead by General Kagame and the RPF. They fended off the killers, restored the peace and slowly began rebuilding the shattered country.

Rwanda will always remain on the world's conscience for this was a clear-cut case of its turning its back on a catastrophe, one far worse than Bosnia or any of the other trouble-spots in the world today.

I wondered about whether Gourevitch's book was the best way to end the year. And then it occurred to me that there could be no better way to remind ourselves that if we are to face the future with hope, then we must never forget what we are capable of; and in so remembering we must do everything in our power to ensure it never happens again. As Primo Levi wrote in The Drowned And The Saved, which is one of the epigraphs to the book, "It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere".

DAVID DAVIDAR

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