Quotes from Philip Gourevitch

I couldn't help thinking how well Cain had prospered after killing his brother: he founded the first city--and, although we don't like to talk about it all that much, we are all his children.

My own parents and grandparents came to the United States as refugees from Nazism. They came with stories similar to Odette's ...

The people are living separately together," he said. "So there is responsibility. I cry, you cry. You cry, I cry. We all come running, and the one that stays quiet, the one that stays home, must explain. 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.

great and sustained destruction requires great ambition. It must be conceived as the means toward achieving a new order, and although the idea behind that new order may be criminal and objectively very stupid, it must also be compellingly simple and at the same time absolute. The ideology of genocide is all of those things.

This is what fascinates me most: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.

Cycling is an excruciating sport - a rider's power is only as great as his capacity to endure pain - and it is often remarked that the best cyclists experience their physical agonies as a relief from private torments. The bike gives suffering a purpose.

created an assortment of new political front organizations, whose operatives were not known to have distinguished themselves in the genocide and could be presented to the world as 'clean

I often found it helpful to think of central Africa in the mid-1990s as comparable to late medieval Europe - plagued by serial wars of tribe and religion, corrupt despots, predatory elites and a superstitious peasantry, festering with disease, stagnating in poverty, and laden with promise.

The West's post-Holocaust pledge that genocide would never again be tolerated proved to be hollow

The Press and many members of Congress [in America] were sufficiently revolted by the administration's shameless evasions on Rwanda ... Meanwhile, the armored personnel carriers for an all-African intervention force sat on a runway in Germany

Sitting with Sindikubwabo [former President of Rwanda in exile in Zaire] as he offered what sounded like a rehearsal of the defense-by-obfuscation he was preparing for the tribunal, I had the impression that he almost yearned to be indicted, even apprehended, in order to have a final hour in the spotlight.

By the time that the League of Nations turned Rwanda over to Belgium as a spoil of World War I, the terms Hutu and Tutsi had become clearly defined as opposing "ethnic" identities, and the Belgians made this polarization the cornerstone of their colonial policy.

If, in the face of genocide, governments fear placing their soldiers at risk, he said, then don't send soldiers, send Boy Scouts - which is basically what the world did in the refugee camps [in Zaire].

As far as the political, military, and economic interests of the world's powers go, (Rwanda) might as well be Mars. In fact, Mars is probably of greater strategic concern. But Rwanda, unlike Mars, is populated by human beings, and when Rwanda had a genocide, the world's powers left Rwanda to it.

But the next time you hear a story like the one that ran on the front page of The New York Times in October of 1997, reporting on "the ageold animosity between the Tutsi and Hutu ethnic groups," remember that until Mbonyumutwa's beating lit the spark in 1959 there had never been systematic political violence recorded between Hutus and Tutsis—anywhere.

significant concentrations of Hutu Power military and militia members among the IDPs [International Displaced Persons] made the camps themselves a major threat ... As in the border camps, interahamwe agents didn't hesitate to threaten and attack those who wished to leave Kibeho, fearing that a mass desertion of the civilian population would leave them isolated and exposed.

I saw a group of museum staffers arriving for work. On their maroon blazers, several wore the lapel buttons that sold for a dollar each in the museum shop, inscribed with the slogans Remember and Never Again ... the victims of future exterminations could now die knowing that a shrine already existed in Washington where their suffering might be commemorated

Hutu power had presided over one of the most outrageous crimes in a century of seemingly relentless mass political murder, and the only way to get away with it was to continue to play the victim.

So Rwandan history is dangerous. Like all of history, it is a record of successive struggles for power, and to a very large extent power consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality - even, as is so often the case, when that story is written in their blood.