Best Quotes from We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, Stories From Rwanda by Philipgourevitch with Page Numbers

The dead at Nyarubuye were, I’m afraid, beautiful.

They had been killed there, and they were dead there.

The horror of it—the idiocy, the waste, the sheer wrongness—remains uncircumscribable.

One hopes not to die cruelly, but one expects to die anyway.

I detest this fear.

These victims of genocide had been psychologically prepared to expect death just for being Tutsi.

Conformity is very deep, very developed here.

In Rwandan history, everyone obeys authority.

Rwandan culture is a culture of fear.

Ignoring them makes me even more uncomfortable about existence and my place in it.

"We watched young people going out every night, and people spoke of it on the radio."

"When there were problems, people always went to the church."

"One trusted that nothing would happen at their place."

"You didn’t know exactly what was happening, just that there was something coming."

"I was very disappointed," Manase said. "I expected to die, and we started looking for anything to defend ourselves with... But they were useless."

"Only women and children were killed, because the men were fighting."

"Looking at how many people there were in Bisesero, we were convinced we could not die."

"To be a Tutsi in Rwanda meant death."

"Fighting and running gave Manase spirit, a sense of belonging to a purpose greater than his own existence."

"By day, I was alone... the bodies fell down in the stream, and I used those bodies as a bridge to cross the water..."

“Is he in league with the criminals? Is he a coward? And what would he expect when he cries? This is simple. This is normal. This is community.”

“If you cry out, where you live, can you expect to be heard? If you hear a cry of alarm, do you add your voice and come running?”

“It struck me as an enviable arrangement.”

“What if this system of communal obligation is turned on its head, so that murder and rape become the rule?”

“Hatred is the result of sin, and when Jesus Christ comes, he’s the only one who’s going to take it away.”

“Everything was chaos.”

“They say you organized it,” I reminded him. He said, “Never, never, never, never.”

“I could not do such things.”

“Here’s a father with three sons who are doctors and two other children who work in international finance.”

“How are you! We wish you to be strong in all these problems we are facing.”

Rwandan history is dangerous. Like all of history, it is a record of successive struggles for power.

Power consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality.

The names Hutu and Tutsi had meaning... the source of the distinction is undisputed: Hutus were cultivators and Tutsis were herdsmen.

Those ideas were largely framed as opposing negatives: a Hutu was what a Tutsi was not, and vice versa.

No white man had ever been to Rwanda at the time of the Berlin conference.

The colonial state had made that almost inconceivable, and although the Belgians switched ethnic sides, the new order they prepared was merely the old order stood on its head.

It will not be a democracy if it is not equally successful in respecting the rights of minorities.

When God asks what happened, Cain offers his notoriously barbed lie: 'I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?'

Nobody in Rwanda in the late 1950s had offered an alternative to a tribal construction of politics.

A country in which justice loses this fundamental quality prepares the worst disorders and its own collapse.

"Goodbye, my children, I’m going to die."

"Let’s stay here and die here."

"I can’t remember it exactly, but I did see a group of men on the facing hill descending with machetes, and I can still see houses burning."

"We like you, and we don’t want you to die, so we’ll make you a Hutu."

"My name was read and my sister’s wasn’t—because I was less brilliant, less of a threat."

"In Rwanda, the story of a girl who is sent away as a cockroach and comes back as a medicine woman must be, at least in part, a political story."

"We really danced in the streets when Habyarimana took power. At last, a President who said not to kill Tutsis."

"Those were the good years."

"‘I don’t give shelter to cockroaches.’ That’s what he said."

"You think I believe in demons?"

In a world where death is always the work of enemies, distrust and subterfuge become tools of survival.

Power is terribly complex; if powerful people believe in demons it may be best not to laugh at them.

The omnipotent President and his cronies had grown very rich, while the great majority of Rwandans remained in circumstances of extreme poverty.

All Tutsis were considered to be RPF 'accomplices,' and Hutus who failed to subscribe to this view were counted as Tutsi-loving traitors.

Rwandans often describe themselves as an uncommonly suspicious people, and with some reason.

Habyarimana’s embrace of reform was conspicuously halfhearted—a capitulation to foreign coercion.

They were put to hard use after Habyarimana revived the despised colonial regime of mandatory communal work details.

In Rwanda—the most Christianized country in Africa—messages announcing woe would resonate strongly.

The atmosphere in Rwanda was tranquil—but underneath, the volcanoes were active with discontent.

Rumors of poisoning and sorcery pervade all levels of society, reflecting a deep-seated fear of enemies.

Kanguka means "Wake Up," and the paper, edited by a Hutu from the south and backed by a prominent Tutsi businessman, was critical of the Habyarimana establishment.

In one of the most repressed societies on earth, he presented the liberating example of a man who seemed to know no taboos.

It would be foolish to dispute his brilliance as a salesman of fear.

The interahamwe, and the various copycat groups that were eventually subsumed into it, promoted genocide as a carnival romp.

Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building.

The mass of participants in the practice massacres of the early 1990s may have taken little pleasure in obediently murdering their neighbors.

If everybody is implicated, then implication becomes meaningless.

We the people are obliged to take responsibility ourselves and wipe out this scum.

The RPF had never really expected to win its war on the battlefield; its objective had been to force a political settlement.

It was UNAMIR that tricked us into staying.

"Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Let’s go."

"They hoped to provoke the RPF … and provoke a civil war."

"He suspects it is for their extermination."

"I realized then that these people would never protect us."

"You should assume that he (Habyarimana) is not aware of these activities, but insist that he must immediately look into the situation."

"We were sensing something bad, the whole country."

"But you could feel it was wrong."

"Probably I told myself it’s not going to be serious. Yah—but obviously I knew it was going to be serious."

"Nothing happens that we did not predict."

"I felt we’re all going to die this week."

"I refused to be afraid."

"If we’re going to die, we should die together."

"I was using drinks to corrupt people... feeding them liquor so they wouldn’t kill the refugees under my roof."

"I don’t agree with what you’re doing—a man’s got to stand up for something."

"Sometimes I felt myself dead."

"Whoever survives will regret that we stayed for the rest of his life."

"What security do you guarantee? Where are they going?"

"That the person who cut off my sister’s head should have his sentence reduced? No!"

"I kept telling them, ‘I don’t agree with what you’re doing.’"

"I was telling them, ‘Listen, killing won’t gain you anything.'"

We could ring the King of Belgium... I could get through to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of France immediately.

I refused so many things.

…the only place in Rwanda where… as many as a thousand people who were supposed to be killed gathered and, as Paul said very quietly, "Nobody was killed. Nobody was taken away. Nobody was beaten."

I thought so many people did as I did, because I know that if they’d wanted they could have done so.

It was more than a surprise. It was a disappointment.

I could trust… But now I tend not to do so.

I wasn’t really strong... But maybe I used different means that other people didn’t want to use.

If someone comes and shoots you now, do you think that with a pistol you won’t die?

That night... a single bullet crashed through a window of the Mille Collines, as if to say that the hand of death was only temporarily stayed.

But had the RPF not been pounding Hutu Power from across the valley, there would have been no convoy—and probably no survivors.

"The world had ‘stood around with its hands in its pockets’, as General Kagame put it, during the extermination of Tutsis."

"How many people really still remember the genocide in Rwanda?"

"We made all that information available daily and the international community kept watching."

"The utopian premise of the Genocide Convention had been that a moral imperative to prevent efforts to exterminate whole peoples should be the overriding interest animating the action of an international community of autonomous states."

"The mere rhetoric of moral utopia cannot dull the reality of human suffering."

"To fear justice one must first believe that one has done wrong."

"It is a disgrace for a general to be in a situation where people are being killed, defenseless, and he is equipped—he has soldiers, he has arms—and he cannot protect them."

"Genocide is a cheese sandwich."

"It is unpleasant to hear those leaders say that the refugees would never return except as they had come, en masse, and that when they went back they would finish the job they had started with the Tutsis."

"Crimes against humanity. Where’s humanity?"

"I come as one who, willynilly, shares in the shame, in the disgrace, in the failures of Africa".

"Life. You knew, by the statistics, that most of the people you saw were Hutu, but you had no idea who was who."

"What can you really say about a million murdered people whom you didn’t know?"

"The Rwanda I visited in the years after the genocide was a world in limbo."

"Consider all the factors: the precolonial inequalities...the indifference of the outside world."

"Power largely consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality."

"To take an example from American history, President Lincoln’s power was more absolute than President Nixon’s, yet Nixon was surely the more fundamentally corrupt of the two."

"And are its subjects merely subjects or are they also citizens?"

"This rule was famously articulated by the British historian Lord Acton in his formula 'Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.'"

"In the case of Rwanda, to embrace the idea that the civil war was a free-for-all is to ally oneself with Hutu Power’s ideology of genocide as self-defense."

An atrocity is an atrocity and is by definition unjustifiable, isn’t it?

The horror becomes absurd.

It is important to understand that the inability of the relief organizations to coordinate a successful operation set the stage for the tragedy that followed.

The fact that most states are born of violent upheaval does not, of course, mean that disorder leads to order.

The irreversible consequence of genocide is the extinguishing of a people.

Every nation has its own ghosts, and the more bodies left behind, the heavier the burden.

Hope does not always present itself in triumphant displays of light; sometimes, it lies within the lingering will to survive.

When a man kills four people, he isn’t charged with one count of killing four, but with four counts of killing one.

You might imagine a genocide as the end of a people, when in truth it also represents a challenge to the very idea of humanity.

In times of horror, all humanity must wrestle with the lingering question: who are we to judge the lives lost or spared?

‘In exile, we saw each other as Rwandans.’

‘People are not inherently bad. But they can be made bad. And they can be taught to be good.’

‘If you are equipped to use force, you must use it rationally.’

‘Your objective is to protect society.’

‘We want people back because it is their right and it is our responsibility to have them back, whether they support us or not.’

‘The problem isn’t the equipment. The problem is always the man behind it.’

‘I have wanted to be original about my own thinking, especially in regard to my own situation here.’

‘The soul was at stake.’

‘Bringing people together and making the country whole became more difficult.’

‘Let’s distinguish. If we take everything to be the same, then we are making a mistake.’

To keep busy is very, very important.

It’s good to be home.

We feel it’s a moral obligation.

This life after a genocide is really a terrible life.

The trauma comes back much more as time passes.

Is my presence here really of any significance?

What does this make us in this world?

Imagine talking to Jews of reconciliation in 1946. Maybe in a long time, but it’s a private matter.

Let him live in fear.

I want him to explain to me what this thing was, how he could do this thing.

"When we see how Koloni was killed, we’d rather be in here than out there."

"There are mechanisms within society—education, a form of participation. Something can be achieved."

"Sometimes one person could kill six people, and sometimes three people could kill one person."

"I’d rather address the problem of putting them in prison, because that is the best way to do it for the process of justice."

"If a million people died here, who killed them?"

"But that was the way to deal with the situation. If we had lost these people through revenge, that would have been an even bigger problem for us."

"It’s materially impossible to judge all those who participated in the massacres, and politically it’s no good, even though it’s just."

"Rwanda’s new leaders were trying to see their way around this problem by describing the genocide as a crime committed by masterminds and slave bodies."

"A cattle keeper or cultivator who loses his whole family has lost his whole economic support system."

"It can happen tomorrow. Things have happened, and they can happen again."

"In your country, I think you have many comedians."

"People who feel up against it sometimes develop a canny take on how the world works— the rawness of it, the absurdities—and sometimes, if they’re funny, they make fun of it."

"Those black guys are funny."

"But the jokes are funny."

"It’s going to take us a long time to overcome the old mentalities."

"Honesty was among their favorite words, and their basic proposition was that greater truth should be the basis of greater power."

"The struggle between proponents of a 'new order' and adherents of the 'old mentalities' is a clash between fundamentally opposed representations of Rwandan reality."

"Rwandans often spoke two languages—not just Kinyarwanda and French or English, but one language among themselves and an entirely different language with outsiders."

"It’s not safe for them to go home. They could get arrested. But what if they deserved to be arrested?"

"Sometimes, you tell the truth because that is the best way out."

"I said to them that if they thought my death could solve the problem and I would die alone, I would be content to die."

"Everybody in the village was an accomplice, by silence or by looting, and it is impossible to divide the responsibility."

"It’s really a genocide going on again, but supported by Zaire against its own citizens."

"If anybody thinks Mobutu can continue to fool people, I don’t think it’s going to take very long to show people that we’re not fools."

"We want to go home," he meant Rwanda. "We have no nationality here."

"In the end we’ll all pay for it."

"Everything is lies here... But save lives? No, they can’t."

"It’s not an automatic, but it kills."

"The all-powerful warrior who, by his endurance and will to win, goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake."

"Let Zaire give them with their land."

"We can achieve a lot by ourselves for ourselves, and we’ve got to keep struggling to do that."

"If people can help, that’s all well and good. If they can’t, we should not just disappear from the surface of this earth."

"I think we’ve learned a lot about the hypocrisy and double standards on the part of the people who claim they want to make this world a better place."

"You hold us to a standard that has never existed on this earth."

"You want us to wake up one morning and have everything right—people walking hand in hand with one another, forgetting about the genocide, things moving smoothly. It sounds nice to talk about it."

"When the people receiving humanitarian assistance in those camps come and kill us, what will the international community do—send more humanitarian assistance?"

"Sometimes, I couldn’t help feeling that 'this international community is looking at us like we’re from a different generation of human evolution.'"

"We said, ‘You need peace, we need peace, let’s work together, but if you do not work with us—well.’"

"To you we were just dots in the mass."

"They had always sworn, in the camps, that they would go home as they had left—en masse, as one."

"Behold, I am risen from the dead."

"It was a human hell."

"If he can bring back my children whom he killed and rebuild my house, maybe."

"We’re just like birds. Flying around, blown around."

"I wait only for justice."

"We were just pawns in this. We were just tools."

"If this vengeance can end in this country and wrongdoers can be punished, that would be best."

"There has got to be some serious thinking on the question of being rational."

"Imagine what is going on in the mind of that person."

"To tell the truth is normal and good."

"The memory of the genocide, combined with Mobutu’s sponsorship of its full-scale renewal, had 'global repercussions, wider than Rwanda.'"

"Just as Mobutu was what Museveni called an 'agent' of his Western puppeteers, so the Rwandan génocidaires owed their sustenance to the mindless dispensation of Western charity."

"Time and again in central Africa, false promises of international protection were followed by the swift abandonment of hundreds of thousands of civilians in the face of extreme violence."

"The very vacuum of responsible international engagement... created an unprecedented need and opportunity for Africans to fix their own problems."

"Museveni urged his compatriots to pursue similarly market-oriented research. He thought banana juice might make a hit in the soft-drink industry."

"The form should be according to situations... Yes, there are some essentials which should be common... but not the exact form."

"He said that until corruption was brought under control... political parties were bound to devolve into tribal factions or financial rackets."

"Museveni argued that a middle class with strong political and economic interests developed, based on 'movement politics' rather than tribalism."

"By the sheer force of Africa we shall be independent of all foreign manipulation."

"These are not genuine refugees; they're simply fugitives, people running away from justice after killing people in Rwanda—after killing."

"With my countrymen—Rwandans—you never know what they will become tomorrow."

"You will all perish," and, "Good-bye! Your days are numbered."

"It is important that the world know that these killings were not spontaneous or accidental … they were most certainly not the result of ancient tribal struggles … . These events grew from a policy aimed at the systematic destruction of a people."

"Never again must we be shy in the face of the evidence" of genocide.

"But, Philip," my friend said, "let’s not be idiots. Where there are handcuffs, there’s a key."

"This isn’t going away in one year or two years or five years or ten years—this horror that we saw. It’s intrinsic."

"I have thought a lot lately about Jack the Ripper, because the Tutsis now say, ‘Jack is in.’ They don’t say it, but that’s the thought since this return from Zaire."

"We have no exit strategy."

"It’s just the only acceptable political truth. Even here in this tiny country with one language, we aren’t one people, but we must pretend until we become one."

"I’ve seen how Rwandans understood what had happened in their country, and how they were getting on in the aftermath."