In criminal syndicates like the Mafia, a person who has become invested in the logic of the gang is said to be owned by it. After his prayers, Edmond’s brother-in-law told the militiamen that he didn’t want his family dismembered, so they invited him to throw his children down the latrine wells alive, and he did. We know what we think about that.

He shot me a look of comic astonishment—eyebrows high, forehead furrowed, a quirky smile working his mouth—to say that his survival was far more mysterious than his peril had been. In the new age that followed, law would eventually emerge as the principle of social order. “But, if we could put our hands on the leaders, even an amnesty would be very well received.”.

Decimation means the killing of every tenth person in a population, and in the spring and early summer of 1994 a program of massacres decimated the Republic of Rwanda. “This becomes a bit of comedy that will be sorted out before the tribunal. “I got tired in the genocide. Then someone kicked him in the stomach, and he sat down on the street. Still, the names Hutu and Tutsi stuck. “I had eighteen people killed in my house,” Étienne Niyonzima, a former businessman who is now a deputy in the National Assembly, told me. (While Rwanda’s military and political élite spent the night of the assassination cranking up the genocidal engines, in Burundi, whose President had also been killed, the military and the United Nations worked for calm, and this time Burundi did not explode.). Neither party can be regarded as innocent, but if the crime is political, and if justice is to serve the political good, then the punishment has to draw a line that would sever the criminal minds from the criminal bodies.

Two black Rwandan-government Mercedes sedans stood in the drive when I stopped by, on a May morning, and a man at the gate introduced himself as Sindikubwabo’s chief of protocol. I said I didn’t know that Sindikubwabo had been charged with any crimes in any courts of law, and he told me that all Rwandan refugees were waiting for the judgment of the international tribunal. Me? The stratification was accelerated after 1860, when the Mwami Kigeri Rwabugiri, a Tutsi king, launched a series of military and political campaigns to centralize his authority and extend it over most of the country. Within hours of Habyarimana’s death, roadblocks set up by the military and youth militias that were known as interahamwe—those who attack together—had appeared throughout Kigali, and assassins from the Presidential Guard were dispatched with lists of opposition leaders to kill, including the Hutu Prime Minister. Select a purchase I have not felt that about Rwanda myself. “No matter what you do, do not let them get away.” Invoking the Hamitic hypothesis that Tutsis came from Ethiopia, Mugesera advised that they should be sent back there, by way of the Nyabarongo River, which ultimately feeds into the Nile. If everybody is implicated, then implication becomes meaningless. The word “genocide” and the images of the nameless and numberless dead left too much to the imagination.

The R.P.F. Philip Gourevitchs' Travels To Rwanda Summary This is a summary of Philip Gourevitchs' travels, a reporter for the New Yorker, to Rwanda shortly after the atrocity of the genocide between the Hutus and Tutsi stopped. “It’s offensive. had installed a new government, in mid-July of 1994, however, seventy-five per cent of Rwanda’s Tutsis were dead. “But don’t ask me to sort them out,” he told me. Between visits to prisons, I stopped by to see General Kagame, at the Vice-President’s office in the Ministry of Defense. Rwanda offers no such tidy arrangement.