We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families Quotes
"Those dead Rwandans will be with me forever, I expect. That was why I had felt compelled to come to Nyarubuye: to be stuck with them—not with their experience, but with the experience of looking at them."
"The pygmy in Gikongoro said that humanity is part of nature and that we must go against nature to get along and have peace."
"The ideology of genocide is all of those things, and in Rwanda it went by the bald name of Hutu Power."
"The genocide had been brought to a halt by the Rwandese Patriotic Front, a rebel army led by Tutsi refugees from past persecutions."
"Every Rwandan I spoke with seemed to have a favorite, unanswerable question."
"Rwanda, in the beginning, was settled by cave-dwelling pygmies whose descendants today are called the Twa people, a marginalized and disenfranchised group that counts for less than one percent of the population."
"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."
"By the time Rwabugiri came along, the Rwandan state, having expanded gradually from a single hilltop chieftaincy, administered much of what is now southern and central Rwanda through a rigorous, multilayered hierarchy."
"The Mwami himself was revered as a divinity, absolute and infallible."
"Apparently, Hutu and Tutsi identities took definition only in relationship to state power; as they did, the two groups inevitably developed their own distinctive cultures."
"One need only lightly edit the foregoing passages—the crude caricatures, the question of human inferiority, to produce the sort of profile of misbegotten Africa that remains standard to this day."
"Rwandans believed that God might visit other countries by day, but every night he returned to rest in Rwanda."
"Colonization is violence, and there are many ways to carry out that violence."
"Rwanda was tranquil—or, like the volcanoes in the northwest, dormant; it had nice roads, high church attendance, low crime rates, and steadily improving standards of public health and education."
"Genesis identifies the first murder as a fratricide."
"We are, each of us, functions of how we imagine ourselves and of how others imagine us."
"If powerful people believe in demons it may be best not to laugh at them."
"Visions of the crying Virgin, visions of people killing with machetes, of hills covered with corpses."
"Wherever you go in Rwanda—to a private home, a bar, a government office, or a refugee camp—drinks are served with the bottle caps on, and opened only before the eyes of the drinker."
"When death is always the work of enemies, and the power of the state considers itself in concert with the occult, distrust and subterfuge become tools of survival, and politics itself becomes a poison."
"If everybody is implicated, then implication becomes meaningless."
"A vigorous totalitarian order requires that the people be invested in the leaders’ scheme, and while genocide may be the most perverse and ambitious means to this end, it is also the most comprehensive."
"If Hutu Power had sacrificed him, who was safe?"
"This man liked his whiskey. He was handicapped, and he'd come over to show off his new television and video player, because my husband is very generous and he had given this guy money to buy it."
"Whoever survives will regret that we stayed for the rest of his life."
"If they’re dead they won’t be suffering, and if you try to come you might die on the way."
"You cockroaches must know you are made of flesh. We won’t let you kill. We will kill you."
"When men become like devils, and you don’t have an army, what can you do?"
"He told me, 'Paul, I bring you my cockroach.' Do you understand? He was talking about his mother."
"I wasn’t interested in what made Wenceslas weak; I wanted to know what had made Paul strong—and he couldn’t tell me."
"Paul believed in free will. He understood his actions during the genocide in the same way that he understood those of others, as choices."
"But what he feared even more than a violent end was living or dying as what he called a 'fool.'"
"The riddle to Paul was that so many of his countrymen had chosen to embrace inhumanity."
"So Paul had a rare conscience, and knew the loneliness that came with it."
"The world’s post-Holocaust pledge that genocide would never again be tolerated proved to be hollow."
"Denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good."
"If you stopped to buy a cold drink and a brochette of grilled goat, or to ask directions, a small crowd gathered to stare and offer commentary, reminding you of your exoticism."
"The intensity with which every patch of available land was worked offered visual evidence of Rwanda’s population density and the attendant competition for resources."
"And afterward the world was a different place for anyone who chose to think about it."
"Power largely consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality, even if you have to kill a lot of them to make that happen."
"What varies is primarily the quality of the reality it seeks to create: is it based more in truth than in falsehood, which is to say, is it more or less abusive of its subjects?"
"Yet we seem to have a hard time taking seriously the notion that places where mass violence and suffering is so widespread that it is casually called 'meaningless' might also be places where people engage in meaningful politics."
"For those who had endured, stories and questions tended to operate in a kind of call-and-response fashion—stories calling up questions, calling up more stories, calling up more questions—and nobody of any depth seemed to expect precise answers."
"Even now, as I write, in the early months of 1998, Rwanda’s war against the genocide continues."
"The generic massacre story speaks of 'endemic' or 'epidemic' violence and of places where people kill 'each other,' and the ubiquity of the blight seems to cancel out any appeal to think about the single instance."
"So the refugees understood themselves to be as their neighbors imagined them, and they recognized in this identity not only an oppression or humiliation to be escaped but also a value to be transformed into a cause."
"Naturalization is rarely an option in Africa; only a few Rwandan refugees ever acquired foreign citizenship, and those who did often obtained it through bribery or forgery."
"Political leaders often love to tell about their childhoods, those formative years, happy or sad, whose legend can be retroactively finessed to augur greatness."
"I have wanted to be original about my own thinking, especially in regard to my own situation here."
"Because Museveni was under intense domestic pressure in the late 1980s to rid his army and government of Rwandans and to strip Rwandan ranchers of much of their land, he has often been accused of organizing the RPF himself."
"The paradox was not lost on Rwanda’s new leaders that the genocide had brought them greater power and at the same time poisoned their prospects for using it as they had promised."
"We take refuge a bit in our work, but many people become very depressed. I’m afraid it gets worse."
"People come to Rwanda and talk of reconciliation. It’s offensive. Imagine talking to Jews of reconciliation in 1946."
"I’m asking for him to think about it for the rest of his life. It’s a kind of psychological torture."
"Although the tightly packed inmates were all accused of terrible violence, they were generally calm and orderly; fights among them were said to be rare, and killings unheard of."
"Why did they put up with it? Why didn’t they riot? Why were attempted escapes so rare in Rwanda, when the guard system was so weak?"
"It occurred to me that this was the famous mob mentality of blind obedience to authority which was often described in attempts to explain the genocide."
"By the end of 1997, at least a hundred twenty-five thousand Hutus accused of crimes during the genocide were incarcerated in Rwanda."
"If a million people died here, who killed them?"
"Sometimes one person could kill six people, and sometimes three people could kill one person."
"We cheat. We repeat the same little things to you over and over and tell you nothing. Even among ourselves we lie."
"Rwanda demonstrated that the question is a matter of life and death."
"A true genocide and true justice are incompatible."
"This becomes a sort of theater piece"—"une comédie," he said—"that they’re performing right now in Kigali, and it will be sorted out before the tribunal."
"THERE'S NO WAY you can stop the international community from coming, given a situation like a genocide. But they may provide the wrong remedies to our problems."
"Maybe even those who're saying that are not speaking the truth."
"I don't think it's our culture, especially since I don't see a lot of honesty in politics in many other countries."
"Personally, I have no problem with telling the truth, and I'm Rwandan, so why don't people also take me as an example of a Rwandan?"
"Sometimes, you tell the truth because that is the best way out."
"If there is one thing sure in this world, it is certainly this: that it will not happen to us a second time."
"It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere."
"If they thought my death could solve the problem and I would die alone, I would be content to die."
"It's really a genocide going on again, but supported by Zaire against its own citizens."
"If anybody thinks Mobutu can continue to fool people, I don't think it's going to take very long to show people that we're not fools."
"I think we've learned a lot about the hypocrisy and double standards on the part of the people who claim they want to make this world a better place."
"We can achieve a lot by ourselves for ourselves, and we've got to keep struggling to do that."
"We're just like birds. Flying around, blown around."
"It sometimes happens that some people tell lies and others tell the truth. There were a lot of dead here."
"Right now, all is well, but then, at that time, we were called on by the state to kill. You were told you had the duty to do this or you’d be imprisoned or killed. We were just pawns in this. We were just tools."
"When I’d visited Zaire, every Rwandan I spoke with had denied the genocide, and insisted instead that since the end of the war all the Hutus in Rwanda were being systematically killed."
"The Rwandan people were able to live together peacefully for six hundred years and there is no reason why they can’t live together in peace again."
"I was able to save my wife because I was the leader."
"Killing didn’t come from my heart. If it was really my wish to kill, I couldn’t now come back."
"The memory of the genocide, combined with Mobutu’s sponsorship of its full-scale renewal, had 'global repercussions, wider than Rwanda.'"
"I don’t think that America or anybody will dominate Africa anymore. They may cause destabilization, but they cannot reverse the situation if the indigenous forces are organized."
"The big mistake of Mobutu was to involve himself in Rwanda. So it’s really Mobutu who initiated the program of his own removal."
"In such countries, genocide is not too important."
"Imagine what is going on in the mind of that person. I don’t know. He could have gone to a market and shot a hundred people. He could have killed anybody—such a person who does not even fear being killed. It means there’s some level of insanity that has been created."
"Sometimes I think this is contempt for us. I used to quarrel with these Europeans who used to come, giving us sodas, telling us, ‘You should not do this, you should do this, you don’t do this, do this.’ I said, ‘Don’t you have feelings?’"
"It becomes extremely difficult for me to imagine that the whole world is so naive as not to see that this was a real problem."
"To fight off their guilt after the genocide, there is a great amount of guilt."
"When revenge was the motive, such killings should be punished."
"This is why I think there’s this terrible guilt on the part of some people, which they are trying to fight off by always painting a picture of Tutsis being on the wrong side and Hutus being victims."
"We are not really tired of dealing with that at all—it’s they who will get tired, not we."
"But although his voice and his manner were as contained as ever, he was clearly indignant to find his troops accused of destroying what he regarded as an army bent on Rwanda’s annihilation."
"You see, the experience of Rwanda since 1994 has left me with no faith in these international organizations."
"All humanity must unite together in the struggle against nature. This is the only hope. It is the only way for peace and reconciliation—all humanity one against nature."