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

the bush.” That meant murdering Tutsis and destroying their homes. Writing in Le Monde, a schoolteacher named Vuillemin, employed by the United Nations in Butare, described the massacres in December of 1963 and January of 1964 as “a veritable genocide,” and he accused European aid workers and church leaders in the country of an indifference that amounted to complicity in the state-sponsored slaughter. Between December 24 and 28, 1963, Vuillemin reported, well-organized massacres left as many as fourteen thousand Tutsis dead in the southern province of Gikongoro alone. Although educated Tutsi men were the primary victims, he wrote, “In most cases, women and children were also felled by masu blows or spearing. The victims were most often thrown in the river after being stripped of their clothes.” Many of the Tutsis who survived followed the earlier swarms of refugees into exile; by mid-1964 as many as a quarter million Tutsis had fled the country. The British philosopher Sir Bertrand Russell described the scene in Rwanda that year as “the most horrible and systematic massacre we have had occasion to witness since the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis.”
    After Odette’s uncles were carted off to their deaths, her father hired a truck to take the family to the Congo. But it was a large family—Odette’s father had two wives; she was the seventeenth of his eighteen children; with her grandparents, in-laws, aunts, cousins, nephews, and nieces, the extended family numbered thirty-three people—and the truck was too small. One of her grandmothers just wouldn’t fit. So her father said, “Let’s stay here and die here,” and they stayed.
    Odette’s family made up pretty much the entire remaining Tutsi population of Kinunu. They lived in poverty in the mountains with their cows, and they feared for their lives. Protection came to them in the form of a village councillor, who approached Odette’s father and said, “We like you, and we don’t want you to die, so we’ll make you a Hutu.” Odette didn’t recall just how this had worked. “My parents never spoke of it for the rest of their lives,” she told me. “It was a bit humiliating. But my father took the identity card, and for two years he was a Hutu. Then he was called in for having a fraudulent identity card.”
    By 1966 the “cockroaches” in exile disbanded their hapless army, weary of seeing Tutsis slaughtered every time they attacked. Kayibanda, confident of his status as the Hutu Mwami, realized that the old colonial model of official discrimination, thwarting the disempowered tribe’s access to education, public employment, and the military, might be a sufficient method of pest control to keep Tutsis in their place. To bolster the proportional power of the majority, census figures were edited so that Tutsis counted for just nine percent of the population, and their opportunities were restricted accordingly. Despite the Hutu monopoly on power, the Hamitic myth remained the basis of the state ideology. So a deep, almost mystical sense of inferiority persisted among Rwanda’s new Hutu elite, and to give extra teeth to the quota system a reverse meritocracy was imposed on Tutsis competing for the few positions available: those with the lowest scores were favored over those who performed best. “I had a sister who was always first in our class and I was more like tenth,” Odette recalled. “But when they read off the names of those who were accepted to secondary school, my name was read and my sister’s wasn’t—because I was less brilliant, less of a threat.”
     
     
    “THEN IT WAS ’seventy-three,” Odette said. “I had left home, for a teachers college in Cyangugu”—in the southwest—“and one morning, while we were eating before going to mass, they closed the windows and the gates. Then some boys from another school came in the dining hall and circled the tables. I was trembling. I remember I had a piece of bread in my