I’ve a lot of time telling you about Rwanda already, but not much talking about genocide. It’s remarkable how easy it is to go along here without thinking about it - even forgetting about it - , notwithstanding working for an organization which directly engages the genocide. But it’s there.

Philip Gourevitch’s “We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families” is a powerful and necessary account of genocide and it’s aftermath. It is an obligatory read.

Here is an excerpt that I found important:

In late 1994, just six months after the genocide, Frohardt recaled, “relief workers in Rwanda were often heard making statements such as ‘Yes, the genocide happened, but it’s time to get over it and move on,’ or ‘Enough has been said about the genocide, let’s get on with rebuilding the country.’”

I heard such comments, too, and constantly, Frohardt wasn’t alone among foreign visitors in recognizing that “everything you don in Rwanda ahs to be done in the context of the genocide,” but he represented a small minority. For most, it was as if the memory of the genocide was a nuisance or, worse, a political gimmick created by the new government as an allibi to explain away its imperfections. After a while, I took to asking, “If, God forbid, a close family member or friend of yours were murdered - or just died - how long would you take to get over the immediate sense of loss, so that a few days or even a week could go by in which you didn’t feel its grip? And how about if your entire social universe had been wiped out?” Usually I’d get an answer like “OK, sure, but that doesn’t make the genocide an excuse for today’s problems.”

Sometimes, in Rwanda, I would sit in a hotel dining room watching the news on American satellite television. Among the sotries that commanded special fascination between 1995 and 1997 were the OJ Simpson trial and the coverage of the Okalahoma City bombing. OJ, a football palyer turned advertising personality, was accused of killing his ex-wife and her friend, and millions of people around the world were galvanized by the quest for truth and justice - and the betrayal of that quest - for a couple of years. In Okalahoma City, a hundred and sixty-eight people were blown to their deaths in a federal building by a couple of crackpots who thought the United States government had embedded computerized tracking chips in their bodies, and the families of the victims became TV household familiars. And why not? Their world had been shattered in a single instant of insanity. The Rwandans in the hotel dining room seemed to understand that sympathetically, though sometimes one or another of them would observe, quietly, that these crimes on American televison were comfortingly isolated, and that the “survivors,” as victims’ families are know in the West, had not themselves been endangered.

Everyone in the hotel dining room would watch, and discuss the details of the trauma, or the legal proceedings, and wonder how it would all turn out. It was an activity that brought us together. And yet here was a society whose soul had been shredded, where an attempt had been made to extirpate an entire category of humanity, where hardly a person could be found who was not related to someone who had either killed or been killed, and where the threat of another round remained intensely real; and here were young foreigners, who had been sent in the name of humanitarianism, saying that Rwandans should quit making excuses.