The dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust. Rwandans often speak of a million deaths, and they may be right. Although the killing was low-tech-performed largely by machete-it was carried out at a dazzling speed: of an original population of about seven and a half million, at least eight hundred thousand people were killed in just a hundred days. Just as a state’s police swear to prevent and punish murder, so the signers of the Genocide Convention swore to police a brave new world order.ĭecimation means the killing of every tenth person in a population, and in the spring and early summer of 1994 a program of massacres decimated the Republic of Rwanda. On December 9, 1948, the General Assembly went further, adopting Resolution 260A(III), the Convention on the Preservation and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which obliged “Contracting Parties” to “undertake to prevent and to punish … acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethical, racial, or religious group.” On December 11, 1946, the General Assembly of the United Nations declared genocide a crime under international law. Reviewed by: Earl Killian Excerps of the Book “We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda” Whatever happened to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide? Whatever happened to “Never Again”? That the genocide happened is enough to make us sick that it happened and we did nothing is inexcusable that we did nothing and stood in the way of those who would do something and then protected the génocidaires is utterly shameful. Any other way of telling this story would likely be too antiseptic. It is all of those things, but it is also a simple story of discovery told in the first person through his conversations with the survivors, the génocidaires, and the rebel commanders that liberated the country. It is more than a tale of the individuals that have tried and are trying to do the right thing in the face of overwhelming odds.
It is more than a tale of international complicity and cover-up. This is a book that really makes you wonder about yourself. We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda Review of the Book “We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda”
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