Gourevitch

Gourevitch

Page 19 the best reason I have for looking closely into Rwanda's stories is that ignoring them makes me even more uncomfortable about existence and my place in it the horror as for interests me only insofar as a precise memory of the offense is necessary to understand it's Legacy

 He writes that evidence of the genocide is in visible world yet even the occasional exposed bones the conspicuous number of amputees and people with deformities scars and the super abundance of packed orphanages could not be taken as evidence that what had happened you Roandaa was an attempt to a lemonade people the only way we know what happened was because of the peoples stories. 21

The stories in this book our testimony the author Gourevitch  uses his stories as testimony the survivors bear witness and Gurevich is the listener also bearing witness; However it is not just one story but many stories that he we've together trying to fill the caps as more questions are exposed into move closer to the truth for example when he's talking to Samuel about being locked in the church and the priest sends word for an intervention from Dr. Gerard or the pastor one Memory is that the church president said "your problem has already found a solution you must die" but one of Semuels colleagues remembers the phrase differently "you must be eliminated got no longer want you" 28

A story conveyed about community is great important here in another reason why genocide is an appropriate topic for the English classroom Carlanda convoy explains while Baltar was stranded one night they heard cries it was a woman... He explained that the Springwheat heard was a conventional distress signal and then acaridan obligation in 20 years descry you do to move and then you must come running you have no choice you must and if you ignore this crying he would have to answer to it this is how Rwandans live in the hills; people live separately together; there is responsibility and if you don't help you must answer: are you with the criminals, a coward, what do you expect when you cry? This is community he says...34

Yes this is moral compasses the moral of teaching but this is the moral I think this is the logic of ethics that we must introduce in the dialectic of freedom freedom in relation freedom that's informed as green would say

Can this be used against community...accusing accomplices?

Tutsi refugees in Laredo where the priest who lead the genocide lived organized a march outside his residence at the same time Serbs had daily news coverage 1994--it was not covered in the press


In 1996 there was an indictment and our author went to Laredo to find Pastor  and first met his son or Dr. Ntaki. when he found him, he met his wife , mixed, and of course they have their own story. They say witnesses are the new government tools saying what the gov. wants.

"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" (52). Gourevitch goes on to discuss the colonial history of Rwanda as evidence saying, "The Belgians could hardly have pretended they were needed to bring order to Rwanda. Instead, they sought out those features of the existing civilization that fit their own ideas of mastery and subjugation and bent them to fit their purposes....The scientists brought their measuring tapes and calipers, and they went about weighing Rwandans, measuring Rwandan cranial capacities, and conducting comparative analyses of the relative protuberance of Rwandan noses.  Sure enough, the scientists found what they believed all along. Tutsis had "nobler," more 'naturally," aristrocratic dimensions than the "coarse" and "bestial" Hutus" (55=56). Belgian went about regimenting (Scott) Rwandan society along ethnic lines shifting the internal and structural power to Tutsis able to levy taxes against their Hutu neighbors in the early 1930s. In 1933, Belgian issued ethnic identity cards making it impossible for Hutus to become Tutsis. It was no longer a class issue - -no social mobility was possible; it was not an employment issue, not an economic issue, and not even a blood issue. It was the state categorizing citizens, marking them and thus constructing the stage for genocide.

Hutu was roughly 85%, and the Tutusis were about 14% (Twa were the remaining percentage).  In 1957, a group of Hutu intellectuals argued for a Hutu state on the basis of majority rules, actually using the identification mechanism for their argument.  Such was the logic of democracy of the time -- ethnicity. The construction of the ethnic binary and desire for an ethnic state was the beginning of political violence between Hutu and Tutsis in Rwanda.  Gourevitch calls this the "social revolution" of Hutus organizing a violent campaign against Tutsis using the rhetoric of democracy or Westernization (as Mignolo would say) in the logic of colonialism. Colonel Logiest, a Hutu revolutionary, said: "It will not be a democracy if it is not equally successful in respecting the rights of minorities...A country in which justice loses this fundamental quality prepares the worst disorders and its own collapse" (quoted 61). Clearly, the social revolution was not considering "rights" as a central issue.  In 1962, Rwanda was granted independence, but not before the UN warned "that some day we will witness violent reactions on the part of the Tutsis" (61).  Gourevitch puts this story of fratricide in conversation with the story of Cain and Abel and the failure of the "blood-revenge model of justice."

"Between December 24 and 28 1963, Vuillemin [a schoolteacher] reported, well-organized massacres left as many as fourteen thousand Tutsis dead in the southern province of Ginkongoro alone...by mid 1964 as many as a quarter million Tutsis had fled the country...Sir Bertrand Russell described the scene in Rwanda that year as 'the most horrible systematic massacre we hae had occasion to witness since the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis'" (65).


The strength of Gourevitch's book is not just rendering the stories but entering the conversation with the voices;  he tells when he reflects on how the testimony went how he was listening is the most valuable part in his narrative

I'm page 71 he says we are each of us functions of how we imagine ourselves and of how others imagine us and looking back there are these discrete tracks of memory the times when our lives are most sharply defined in relation to others ideas of us and the more private times when we are Freer to imagine ourselves

His reason is discovered as a listener when he listens to Odette it accursed him that if others have so often made your life their business and perhaps you want to guard the memory of those times when you were freer to imagine yourself as the only times that are truly and  inviolability your own

He says remembering has its economy like experience itself and when Odette mentioned the hand of the professor of internal medicine on her bottom and I grand I saw that she had forgotten that economy and wandered in your memories and I felt that we were both glad of it

Page 95 and strange as it may sound the ideology or what Rwandans call the logic of genocide was promoted as a way not to create suffering but to alleviate it to the specter of an absolute menace that requires absolute eradication  binds  leader and people in a hermetic utopian embrace , and the individual always an annoyance to totality-- ceases to exist

killing brings people together

Studying several different examples of genocide important we discover in this text issue of the United Nations and how because of the history of the UN in Bosnia and Somalia the Rwandans to not trust the viewing so in addition to learning about resilience of the people or Hegemony, The text into conversation the mechanisms that fail; Students can understand some historical context for the current global issues for example the retired United Nations Sec. Kofi Annan  on his written a new book criticizing the in  and calling for reformation

Odette's story continues but Gourevitch adds Paul Rusesabogina's story who was in a position to complicate the binary of perpetrator and victim as he tells of negotiating for people's lives

The author is a witness as he listens to stories he's listening to testimony he is bearing witness he is listening and bearing witness she writes on page 122 I had the impression with him more than with others that as he told it she was seen the events he described a fax that as he stared into the past the outcome was not get obvious and that when he looked at me With his clear eyes a touch Hayzee he was still seeing the scenes she described perhaps even hoping to understand them for the story made no sense the major who had spared his life may have recognized Thomas but to Thomas the major was a stranger and this is an example of the testimony that Feldman  talks about...  The testimony is the history only in looking back are you creating history and the moment it's not history it's the present

Page 128 the authors of the genocide understood that in order to move a huge number of weak people to do wrong it is necessary to appeal to their desire for strength and the gray force that really drives people's power hatred and power are both in their different ways passion the difference is that hatred is truly negative while power is essentially positive you surrender to Hatred but you a spire to power

Gourevitch complicates the story between Paul and Odette; he adds the priest story when Wenceslas who is a priest later charged in France with providing  with lists of Tutsi refugees at his church,  publishing refugees out of hiding to be killed, attending massacres without interfering, sabotaging United Nation efforts to evacuate refugees from the church and calling teenage girls to have sex with him. Wenceslas says, " I didn't have a choice; it was necessary to appear pro- militia. If I had had a different attitude, we all have disappeared"(136).