Confronting Evil

At Barnes and Noble, I browsed the tables looking for books that had nothing to do with parenting or middle-class suburban life. I chose We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, by Philip Gourevitch. I knew the subject—the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and its aftermath—would be difficult on many levels, but I wanted to try to grapple with it.

Genocide is murder on a scale difficult to comprehend, involving not one or two people committing crimes, but hundreds of thousands. In 1994 in Rwanda (a tiny African nation the size of Vermont), the Hutu majority rose up against the Tutsi minority and killed almost a million people in a matter of months. Most of the killing was done with machetes. The author writes,

I presume that you are reading this because you desire a closer look, and that you, too, are properly disturbed by your curiosity. Perhaps, in examining this extremity with me, you hope for some understanding, some insight, some flicker of self-knowledge—a moral, or a lesson, or a clue about how to behave in this world: some such information. I don’t discount the possibility, but when it comes to genocide, you already know right from wrong. The best reason I have come up with for looking closely into Rwanda’s stories is that ignoring them makes me even more uncomfortable about existence and my place in it.

Although the Hutu militias were the ones weilding machetes, the world community was also complicit. Gourevitch describes how the Belgian colonizers created sharp divisions between Hutus and Tutsis that laid the ground for future conflict. Even after the genocide started, the French continued to supply arms to the Hutus. The UN was repeatedly informed of the situation, but chose not to act. In one nauseating passage, a spokesperson for the Clinton administration refuses to call the events in Rwanda “genocide” because to do so would obligate the U.S. to intervene. Humanitarian agencies acted out of a limited understanding of the situation, and sometimes made things worse.

One story that offers some hope is that of Paul Rusesabagina, a Hutu hotel manager who helped save the lives of over 1,000 Tutsis. He negotiated with fighters in the Hutu militias, argued with them, and bribed them with alcohol in order to keep the refugees in his hotel safe. Using the one working hotel phone line, he made international phone calls to ask for help from his contacts, and he encouraged the refugees to do the same. Rusesabagina didn’t know he was unusual until after the genocide; he says, “During the genocide, I didn’t know. I thought so many people did as I did, because I know that if they’d wanted they could have done so.” The author shows us a decent man, someone who acts the way we hope we would if we were in the situation. But the rareness of his actions casts doubt about how many of us would find the courage to resist evil.

Immediately following this story in the book, a priest explains that he had been unable to protect Tutsi children that were slaughtered at his school when he left them under the watch of the Hutu police. He asks, “What could I do by myself? Nothing. That’s elementary logic.” One particularly chilling aspect of this book is the number of religious leaders who were complicit in the killings or did nothing to protect the Tutsis in their care.

To confront genocide is to confront our own capacity for systematic evil. Genocide shows us a dark, deliberately cruel aspect of humanity. In the end, Gourevitch does not explicitly provide us with “a moral, or a lesson, or a clue about how to behave in this world.” Readers must grapple for themselves with what it means to have this capacity for great evil, what is a proper response from the world community, and what it is possible for one person to do.

Coming tomorrow: the movie Hotel Rwanda.