We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Familie

We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families By Philip Gourevithc BOOK REVIEW & SOCIAL COMMENTARY PAPER Gourevitch, Philip. We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed with our Families. My presentation today is over Philip Gourevitch book We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed with our Families First I will shortly say a little bit what the book is about, then I am going to tell how it's got it's title, after that I will tell about Rwanda in general, and finally I will talk about the Hutus and Tutsis. In the book We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, Mr. Gourevitch explains why the Rwandan genocide should not be written off as just another tribal dispute. The stories in this book are both the author's and the people he interview's, as he repeatedly visits Rwanda in an attempt to make sense of what happened. Some of the people he interviewed include: a Tutsi doctor who has seen much of her family killed over decades of Tutsi oppression, a hotel manager who hid hundreds of refugees from certain death, and a Rwandan bishop who has been accused of supporting the slaughter of Tutsi schoolchildren. The title, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, comes from a letter that was sent in the midst of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 by seven Tutsi pastors, members of Rwanda's Tutsi minority. They were inside a church where they'd taken refuge, as many Rwandans who were slated for death did, and at that point, everybody in the Tutsi minority was slated for death. They'd taken refuge in the church headquarters--this was an Adventist church in western Rwanda. And they had been told that they were slated to be massacred the next day. So these pastors got together and they wrote a letter to the president of the Adventist Church, who was also a pastor and a Hutu and the president of the church for this entire region. So they wrote, `Dear leader, we hope that you're well in these times that are so trying. We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families.' And the letter went on in, really, only about two or three more sentences to say , `And we hope that you will intercede on our behalf and try to help us at this time, as a man of influence, as the president of the church, to go and talk to the mayor, to try and help stay the authorities who are planning to kill us.' The author met some of the survivors of that church, of whom there are very, very few, although there were thousands of people. And they were killed the next day. All of those pastors were killed the next day. And what happened was that not only had the church president failed to intercede on their behalf but that he was widely held to have actually helped organize the massacre. And, in fact, the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda has issued an indictment against him as an organizer of the massacres. Next I will tell a little bit about Rwanda: Rwanda is located in the center of Africa. In the so called genocide period of 1994, which started on April 6th,1994 and lasted for 100 days, somewhere between 800.000 and one million people were systematically murdered. The original population was about 7.5 million people, so that means that about 10% of the total population was killed. The killings were done with hand-held implements like; hammers, garden tools, sticks, clubs, and also guns and grenades. The size of Rwanda can be compared to the size of West Virginia, and the average median income is $80 a year. Finally I will talk about the Hutus and the Tutsis: 85 % out of a population of seven and a half million or so were Hutus. The Rwandan government rigged the census numbers when it came to Tutsis because they wanted to have certain percentages. In other words, the government claimed that 9 percent of the population were Tutsis. While the real number was15 percent. Why would