Rwanda Interview and Questions

-Summarize Gourevitch’s response to each of the questions/prompts below. Two complete sentences for each question. Do not copy sentences word for word.

-Responses must be handwritten on a sheet of paper. Use two bullet formatting for each one.

Interview with Peter Gourevitch, from interview on PBS.

He is the author of We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, an in-depth account of the Rwanda genocide. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker and a contributing editor to the Forward. In the aftermath of the genocide he spent over nine months in Rwanda trying to understand how this extraordinary crime had come to pass, how it was organized, how the Western powers had stood by and watched it happen, and how Rwandans are living with its legacy.

1. What is the most significant thing to understand about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda?

In Rwanda, in the course of 100 days in the spring and early summer of 1994, 800,000 people were put to death in the most unambiguous case of state-sponsored genocide in an attempt to exterminate a category of humanity, a people, since the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews of Europe.

What distinguishes Rwanda is a clear, programmatic effort to eliminate everybody in the Tutsi minority group because they were Tutsis. The logic was to kill everybody. Not to allow anybody to get away. Not to allow anybody to continue. And the logic, as Rwandans call it, the genocidal logic, was very much akin to that of an ideology very similar to that of the Nazism vis-à-vis the Jews in Europe, which is all of them must be gotten rid of to purify in a sense the people. There's a utopian element in genocide that's perplexing. But it is an effort to create community in the most strict sense of "us versus them," by literally eliminating them and bonding all of us in complicity, in the course of that elimination. The idea was that all Hutus should participate in killing of Tutsis. And there have been cases of mass political murder, there have been cases of massacres and genocidal massacres, but never a country and a society so completely and totally convulsed by an effort at pure, unambiguous genocide since the end of World War II, since the passage of the Genocide Convention by the United Nations in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

2. Who are Hutus and Tutsis? ... Can you summarize the background to this genocide--the civil war, the cease-fire and the arrival of U.N. peacekeepers?

Rwanda's population essentially consists of two groups, the Hutu majority (roughly 85%), the Tutsi minority (roughly 15%). There's a tiny minority of Pygmies as well. Until the late 19th century, which is to say, until European colonization, Tutsis (the minority) represented the aristocratic upper classes; Hutus were the peasant masses. The Europeans brought with them an idea of race science, by which they took this traditional structure and made it even more extreme and more polarized into an almost apartheid-like system. And ethnic identity cards were issued, and Tutsis were privileged for all things, and Hutus were really made into a very oppressed mass.

In the late '50s, early '60s, at the time that the rumblings towards independence were taking place across Africa, what happened in Rwanda for independence was a Hutu revolution, in the name of majority rule, that reversed the system. It remained an apartheid, polarized ethnic state, except the Hutu majority now was in charge. And you had a Hutu dictatorship running through the '60s, the '70s, the '80s, and into the mid-'90s. Throughout that period, there was systematic political violence used against Tutsi to maintain this Hutu power.

That violence generated a huge outflow since the late '60s of refugees into neighboring states, so that there were hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Tutsis living in exile, in one state or another, on the border of Rwanda, not naturalized in any other country, and wishing to come home. The government of Rwanda refused to re-admit those who'd fled.

And in 1990, a rebel army appeared, somewhat unexpectedly on the scene, took the Rwandan government by surprise, launching an incursion from the north, from Uganda. And a civil war broke out that was waged sporadically on and off through '90, '91, '92, and into '93. In the areas that it was waged, it was essentially a border war with a large chunk of border involved, but it didn't engulf the entire country.

In '93, a cease-fire was arranged: ethnic power sharing, political power sharing, multi-party state, integration of the armies, and the return of the refugees. And the key to all of this, to see that these two antagonistic parties would do what they pledged to do, was that the United Nations peacekeeping force would be brought in--in the fall of 1993 ...

... It was agreed by both sides that it would be deployed to the country and would preside over the peace implementation and transfer of power to this new sharing government. To the Hutu extremists who formed the entourage around the Hutu dictatorship, President Habyarimana, the threat of peace was even greater than the threat of war, because it amounted to a defeat. It meant that they couldn't have a total victory. They faced suddenly the threat of sharing power, which was the one thing on earth that they couldn't stand sharing. It was against that backdrop that the U.N. peacekeeping force began to arrive, and to attempt to preside over the implementation of a peace which the president's men had no intention of allowing him to implement.

3. What's the distinction to you between civil war and genocide?

In a civil war, you have essentially two combatant forces. Sometimes they are fighting against one another. Sometimes civilians get involved as militia men or so. In a genocide, there is no political objective ... the idea is to eliminate what is perceived as a blood line. It means anybody who carries that blood must be eliminated. So it doesn't matter if you're a baby. In a civil war, a baby is not a serious enemy element. Here, it is, because 60 years from now, that baby could be an adult. Grandmothers on their last legs are considered to be eliminated. Pregnant women. "You must be careful," the Rwandans who were committing the genocide said, "to disembowel them and make sure the fetus in their womb was dead." That's what genocide is about.

There's no question that after Habyarimana's plane was shot down and the genocidal massacres began in Rwanda, the civil war was also renewed. It was an act of war against the people of Rwanda by the now acting government of Rwanda, the genocidal government. Immediately, the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) returned to the field of battle and started its war again. And it was clear that that would happen.

So, of course, you had two things happening at once. You had a civil war and you had a genocide--much, I should say, as in World War II. You had World War II and you had the Holocaust, two separate events. And as we know, the two efforts often are odds with one another. So that trains that might supply the Eastern front during World War II were used instead to carry Jews to their deaths in Auschwitz. And troops who might have been fighting the RPF to win a civil war were instead diverted to oversee the slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda.

4. Who were the interahamwe?

The interahamwe was a militia group recruited in the name of civil self defense, the idea being that the population should be prepared to defend itself against the enemy. This was a way of popularizing the war, making the war an affair of you and me. Every Hutu must consider himself attacked by every Tutsi, rather than thinking that the state was being attacked by a rebel army. So the interahamwe was recruited. Primarily there was a lot of unemployment in Rwanda in the early '90s. These were sort of village youth who [had] gone to the cities looking for work, couldn't find work, were recruited to this kind of youth culture of militia movements. And the interahamwe literally means "those who attack together." And it was through the interahamwe that a large part of the younger Rwandan Hutu males were recruited into the genocidal logic, the genocidal propaganda and into the movement of killing.

5. What happened to the president's plane, and what did that spark?

Throughout the so-called peace implementation period, President Habyarimana was under tremendous pressure from the extremists not to implement the peace process. He dragged his feet. He resisted. He did everything within his power to avoid it. On early April of 1994, he was called by regional presidents to various meetings. "Come on, you've got to get with the program and implement this peace deal. It's causing problems." He was flying back on April 6, 1994, from these meetings. He flies into Kigali, and as his plane descends towards the airport, it's hit by one or two surface-to-air missiles, bursts into flames, and crashes (almost mythically) into his own backyard of his palace.

Now, immediately the Hutu power extremist radio, starts blaming the rebels (the Rwandese Patriotic Front) for this. There has since been endless speculation about who did what. What's most clear is that the circumstantial evidence points to the fact that it was actually the extremists in the president's own entourage, who had often predicted that if he didn't comply with them and complied instead with the peace deal, he would be meeting his maker. They staged a coup within half an hour. Essentially, the government now became a government of unabashed Hutu extremists. It became a military coup, which installed a new sort of puppet government. And within the course of that night (the night of April 6th), the program of massacres that had been planned began to get implemented, first killing political oppositionists rather than singling out Tutsis by ethnicity. It was really focusing on those people who might cause the most political trouble. And members of the presidential guard were recruited and sent forth with lists as assassins. Massacres began to take place. And essentially what you saw is, the propaganda that went forth was, "They, the Tutsis, the rebels, have killed our president." So he was sacrificed, almost. It was the rhetoric of "Our beloved president was killed by them," when in fact everything indicates that they either killed him or certainly exploited his death within moments.

6. At that point, what role did national radio play?

Almost immediately after the peace deal was signed in August of 1993, and the U.N. force was commissioned, many of the people around the president and in the Hutu power leadership established a second radio station. Up until then, Rwanda had had one radio station, Radio Rwanda. Now they established a second major radio station with a powerful signal, called RTLM (Radio-Television Libre Milles Collines). And this became the genocidal radio. It was a radio dedicated entirely to entertainment and genocidal propaganda. And it was highly entertaining. It had pop music. It was very much in keeping with the kind of youth movement spirit of the militia movement. And people loved this radio station. It was very popular. And it mounted this increasingly virulent, exclusionary and exterminatory rhetoric in the period during the so-called peace implementation. Following the president's death, it became almost Genocide Central. It was through there that people were instructed at times, "Go out there and kill. You must do your work. People are needed over in this commune." Sometimes they actually had disc jockeys who would say, "So-and-so has just fled. He is said to be moving down such-and-such street." And they would literally hunt an individual who was targeted in the street. And people would listen to this on the radio. It was apparently quite dramatic. And it was a rallying tool that was used in a tremendous way to mobilize the population.

... To understand how powerful radio was, or how powerful the message was, it's interesting to contrast [to] neighboring Burundi, [which] has the same ethnic mix as Rwanda. The president of Burundi was a passenger on President Habyarimana's plane, and was also killed on the night of April 6th. But in that country, the U.N. leaders there helped organize the political leaders to plead on the radio for calm. So a message of calm was sent out, and people responded to that. Here, a message to lather up the population to kill was sent out, and the people responded to that.

7. Characterize the speed, the brutality and the scope of what was happening.

You can't overstate how rapidly this unfolded. It didn't happen in Rwanda that all at once, everywhere in Rwanda, there was a vast uprising or spontaneous outburst of killing. It was plotted. It was planned. It moved. You can actually see how it radiated out from Kigali through careful manipulation and planning.

And at the same time, it did so very rapidly. We're talking about 800,000 people murdered in the course of 100 days. That's 8,000 murders a day. I find that on average that's five murders a minute. The speed and the graphic brutality, the fact that this was conducted largely with machetes ... people were battered to death, were hacked to death, were stabbed to death, hand to hand, across the country, on this kind of industrial scale. I think that the extraordinary horror of that, and the immensity and speed of this violence, did to some extent short-circuit responses. On the other hand, one might have said that the immense speed and graphic horror would have created a sense of urgency. Instead, it seems to have created a sense of shutdown.

8. What could or should the world do, even without military intervention?

There are two basic choices that confront the world, the international community, or the world powers confronted with such a situation as one had in Rwanda. Either you intervene aggressively, or you don't.

Now, within the category of "you don't," which was the one that was chosen, that doesn't mean that there's nothing else that can be done. For one thing, if you declare very clearly that you aren't going to, in advance, you don't create the false promise of protection that was created in Rwanda. Many Rwandans have told me that they made their plans, as they saw the situation worsening in early 1994, they decided to stay and take their chances in Rwanda because they also saw these blue helmets. So that's the first step is, you don't make false promises of protection if you're not really going to see them through.

The second thing is, once you've decided not to intervene, there's still a lot of pressure that can be exerted. For instance, you can put a lot of diplomatic pressure, economic pressure. You can delegitimize the government that is committing these massacres. You can make it very clear that you see it as what it is, and that you will do everything within your power to decommission these people. Rwanda maintained an embassy in Washington throughout the genocide. We didn't threaten to shut that embassy down until the genocide was shut down. There's a lot of pressure. One says, "No aid. You're no longer a legitimate government. We believe the reports that we are hearing, that you are a government that is criminal." So a lot of effort could be made beyond direct military action, to at least destabilize that government's sense of its surety as a member of the international community. But instead, everything was done to continue to embrace it as a member.

9. Even if the world decided not to intervene militarily, it still has options.

It's pretty clear that nothing short of the use of force would stop the tremendous force that was mobilized to commit the Rwandan genocide. And yet, even after the international community had decided (the Western powers) not to intervene and use that force, that didn't mean that they were without further options for putting pressure on the government: economic pressure, diplomatic pressure, moral pressure, to speak out and to be quite active in a way that wasn't done either. There wasn't a sense of really trying to exclude the government of Rwanda that was responsible for mobilizing this genocide from the community of nations. Instead, it was [continually] included.

10. From the Clinton administration's standpoint and the State Department briefings, what was the dilemma they faced in not calling this a genocide?

The Genocide Convention basically stood as the one document, the international law about genocide. And what it said was, if there's a genocide, the people who have agreed to this convention (which is the United States included) have to act to stop genocide when it's happening. In other words, if it's a genocide, you must act. It was a straight equation. The Clinton administration didn't want to act, which meant that it couldn't call it a genocide, because if it acknowledged that it was a genocide, it's clear from its own statements that its reading was: It had to do something. And eventually what happened was, the Clinton administration came up with a new reading of the Genocide Convention, which basically said, "Well, it doesn't oblige us to act. It permits us to act. It creates a framework in which we can act," which is nonsense, of course. Who needs permission to act? You don't need an international law about genocide to say, "It's okay to try to stop this." You have one that says, "No, we pledge to try to stop this." So they came up with this spin that basically spayed the convention, spayed the pledge. That's what it was about.

she saying?

11. How did the genocide end?

The genocide was brought to a halt by Rwandans, by the rebel Rwandese Patriotic Front. The world left Rwanda to its genocide. Rwandans committed it, and other Rwandans stopped it. And when the RPF ultimately swept across Rwanda, took control of Kigali, and established a new government in mid-July, the genocidal regime (its military and its militias) took with it large parts of the population who were following it, and led them over the border into exile. As early as late April, 250,000 went over the border into Tanzania. In July, one saw one million and a half going over the border into the Zaire (now the Congo). These were the most rapid mass exoduses in modern history. And essentially what you saw was the establishment of these massive U.N. camps to accommodate these people just across the borders from Rwanda.

But beneath the U.N. flag, what happened was that you really had a rump Rwandan state run by the genocidal military and political apparatus, that had left intact, gone into exile, taken its troops with it, and continued to maintain its claim on political life in Rwanda.

12. What is the Western response to the bodies flowing down river?

It became harder and harder for the Clinton administration to maintain its position (a) that this wasn't a genocide, and (b) that the right thing to do was nothing, as images began to appear. There were relatively few because it wasn't a very safe place to operate. But then you had the bodies floating down the rivers.

I remember, I was at the Holocaust Museum in early May of 1995. Happened to be in Washington, visiting the museum. And I bought a local paper, and on the cover was a photograph of these bodies swirling in the river and it said they were victims of the genocide in Rwanda. The word was used there. And meanwhile I'm seeing museum workers going to work with these lapel buttons on that say, "Remember, and never again."

Eventually, the embarrassment of the administration was such that they said, "Well, we are doing something about what's going on in Rwanda." And they announced that they were involved in an international health initiative in Uganda, all the way downstream, where the bodies were flowing. They had started a health initiative to clean the bodies up off the beach. That's what we did.

13. What did it all mean in the end?

Shortly after World War II, Primo Levi (the great writer who had been in Auschwitz) wrote his book about being in Auschwitz and described how, while they were there, the people in Auschwitz often said, "At least the one thing we can say is, this will never happen to us again." In the late '80s, he wrote an essay in which he said, "The one thing was certain, is that it can happen again, anywhere." I think Rwanda proved him terribly right. And seeing those two quotes next to each other, from the same man, and being reminded how in a sense the wish never to have to be confronted again by such an atrocity and such a crime, that followed the Holocaust, should in fact come at century's end to bring us to a place where it seems increasingly familiar, increasingly within the realm of possibility, and that the pledges to act against it seem increasingly to have been abandoned, I think it really leaves us in a state of great uncertainty. And it calls into question how true our wishes are about a genuinely binding sense of common humanity.

14. How do you understand it was possible that it happened?

When you go deep into the history of Rwanda, past and present, and you really explore how the society functioned and what was at stake for people, you can begin to understand the mechanisms by which the genocidal state manipulated so much of the population and mobilized it to become murderers. And yet ultimately you can add all those factors up, and it doesn't explain something essential. There's a mystery here that people did this. At the same time, I would go further and I would say: But it happens. We keep seeing that it happens. People will be manipulable in this way. Political power will find ways to harness enough wickedness that we will see these kinds of mass slaughters. We've seen them too often now to pretend that they are anomalous.

How could it have happened? On a certain level, I've always approached the question, how could it have happened, by putting it a little aside and saying: It did. It's the fact from which we begin. It's the fact which makes us look into it. We'll never fully get it unless we ourselves ... accept a genocidal mentality. You can look at its [mechanisms]. You can study it. But why so many people chose to kill their neighbors? It was an utterly gratuitous crime.

(Complete Interview)