Read Online We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families by Philip Gourevitch - Free Book Online

finds me will slay me,” God says, “Not so! If anyone slays Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.” Quite literally, Cain gets away with murder; he even receives special protection, but as the legend indicates, the blood-revenge model of justice imposed after his crime was not viable. People soon became so craven that “the earth was filled with violence,” and God regretted his creation so much that he erased it with a flood. In the new age that followed, the law would eventually emerge as the principle of social order. But that was many fratricidal struggles later.

5
    “MY STORY FROM birth?” Odette Nyiramilimo said. “Do you really have time for that?”
    I said I had time.
    She said, “I was born in Kinunu, Gisenyi, in 1956. So I was three when this history of the genocide began. 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 ran into the bush with our cows and stayed there for two months. So there was milk, but nothing else. Our house was burned to nothing.”
    Odette sat straight, perched forward on a white plastic lawn chair with her hands folded on the bare white plastic table between us. Her husband was playing tennis; some of her children were paddling around in the pool. It was Sunday at the Cercle Sportif in Kigali—the smell of chicken on the grill, the sounds of swimmers splashing and the pock of tennis balls, the gaudy brilliance of bougainvilleas spilling down the garden wall. We sat in the shade of a tall tree. Odette wore jeans and a white blouse, and a thin gold chain with a pendant charm at her throat. She spoke quickly and directly for several hours.
    “I don’t remember when we rebuilt the house,” she said, “but in ‘sixty-three, when I was in the second year of primary school, I remember seeing my father, well dressed, as if for a festival, in a white cloth wrap. He was out on the road, and I was with the other children, and he said, ‘Goodbye, my children, I’m going to die.’ We cried out, ‘No, no.’ He said, ‘Didn’t you see a jeep go by on the road? It had all your maternal uncles on board, and I won’t wait for them to hunt me down. I’ll wait here to die with them.’ We cried and cried and convinced him not to die then, but the others were all killed.”
    This is how Rwandan Tutsis count the years of their lives: in a hopscotch fashion—’fifty—nine, ’sixty, ’sixty-one, ’sixty-three, and so on, through ’ninety-four—sometimes skipping several years, when they knew no terror, sometimes slowing down to name the months and the days.
    President Kayibanda was, at best, a dull leader, and by his habit of reclusiveness he suggested that he knew it. Stirring up the Hutu masses to kill Tutsis was the only way he seemed able to keep the spirit of the revolution alive. The pretext for this popular violence was found in the fact that from time to time armed bands of monarchist Tutsis who had fled into exile would stage raids on Rwanda. These guerrillas were the first to be called “cockroaches,” and they used the word themselves to describe their stealth and their belief that they were uncrushable. Their attacks were fitful and feeble, but Hutu retaliation against civilian Tutsis was invariably swift and extensive. It was a rare season in the early years of the republic when Tutsis were not displaced from their homes by arson and murder.
    The most dramatic “cockroach” invasion occurred a few days before Christmas in 1963. A band of several hundred Tutsi guerrillas swept into southern Rwanda from a base in Burundi, and advanced to within twelve miles of Kigali before being wiped out by Rwandan forces under Belgian command. Not content with this victory, the government declared a national state of emergency to combat “counterrevolutionaries,” and designated a minister to organize Hutu “self-defense” units, tasked with the “work” of “clearing