WE WISH TO INFORM YOU THAT TOMORROW WE WILL BE KILLED WITH OUR FAMILIES by Philip Gourevithc
BOOK REVIEW & SOCIAL COMMENTARY PAPER Gourevitch, Philip. We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed with our Families. My presentation today is over Philip Gourevitch book "We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed with our Families"First I will shortly say a little bit what the book is about, then I am going to tell how it's got it's title, after that I will tell about Rwanda in general, and finally I will talk about the Hutus and Tutsis. In the book "We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families", Mr. Gourevitch explains why the Rwandan genocide should not be written off as just another tribal dispute. The stories in this book are both the author's and the people he interview's, as he repeatedly visits Rwanda in an attempt to make sense of what happened. Some of the people he interviewed include: a Tutsi doctor who has seen much of her family killed over decades of Tutsi oppression, a hotel manager who hid hundreds of refugees from certain death, and a Rwandan bishop who has been accused of supporting the slaughter of Tutsi schoolchildren. The title, "We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families," comes from a letter that was
And what happened was that not only had the church president failed to intercede on their behalf but that he was widely held to have actually helped organize the massacre. When independent, this reversed itself and the Hutu majority came to lord over the Tutsi minority, and essentially with violence. They'd taken refuge in the church headquarters--this was an Adventist church in western Rwanda. There's a lot of talk about the failure of the world in Rwanda, the failure to act. Why would the government want that? This was a Hutu dictatorship. The size of Rwanda can be compared to the size of West Virginia, and the average median income is $80 a year. The Rwandan government rigged the census numbers when it came to Tutsis because they wanted to have certain percentages. If they shrunk the number of Tutsis, they shrank the number of Tutsis who had access to school, education, civil service jobs and various kinds of advancement. It was a success at not acting, and it was the United States that wanted not to act. ' The author met some of the survivors of that church, of whom there are very, very few, although there were thousands of people. In the so called genocide period of 1994, which started on April 6th,1994 and lasted for 100 days, somewhere between 800. The difference is that for the entire colonial period, a very strict concept of Tutsis as a superior race and Hutus as an inferior race, this elite minority of Tutsis who lorded it over them and who essentially harnessed their labor and exploited them as monarchist class, they became privileged and an almost apartheid like system was imposed - identity cards defining their ethnicity- and this is how this social- ethnical categories was created. ' And the letter went on in, really, only about two or three more sentences to say, `And we hope that you will intercede on our behalf and try to help us at this time, as a man of influence, as the president of the church, to go and talk to the mayor, to try and help stay the authorities who are planning to kill us. This system was created by the Belgians who Rwanda was colonized with until their independence in 1962.
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