Here are some excerpts from Philip Gourevitch's book on Rwanda. I just completed reading this yesterday, after reading Machete Season earlier this summer.
***"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." (16) WITNESS
***"Like Leonytius, the young Athenian in Plato, I presume trhat you are reading this because you desire a closer look, and that you, too, are properly disturbed by your curiosity. Perhaps...you hope for some undertsanding, some insight, some flicker of self-knowledge -- a moral, or a lesson, or a clue about how to behave in this world: some such information. I don't discount the possibility, but when it comes to genocide, you already know right from wrong. The best reason I have come up with 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 horror, interests me only insofar as a precise memory of the offense is necessary to understand its legacy." (19)
***"...so in Rwanda during the months of extermination the kettles of buzzards kites, and crows that boiled over massacre sites marked a national map against the sky, flagging the 'no-go' zones for people like Samuel and Manase, who took to the bush to survive." (30)
***"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 the story is written in their blood." (48-49)
***"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." (71)
***"Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building. A vigorous totalitarian order requires that thye 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 compressed." (95)
***"On December 11, 1946, the General Assembly of the United Natiuons declared genocide a crime under international law. On December 9, 1948, the General Assembly went further, adopting Resolution 260A(III), the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which obliged 'Contracting Parties' to 'undertake to prevent and to punish...acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.'" (149)
***"The world that had 'stood around with its hands in its pockets,' as General Kagame put it, during the extermination of Tutsis, responded to the mass flight of Hutus into Zaire with passionate intensity.... In the sloppy version [of this story], you heard, or read, that there had been a genocide, and that you heard and saw, or read, that a million refugees had wound up in this nearly perfect scene of hell on earth, and you thought genocide plus refugees equals refugees from genocide, and your heart was wrenched. Or else you got your story straight -- these were people whp had killed or who had been terrified into following the killers into exile -- and you heard, or read, or could not but infer, that this nearly perfect scene of hell on earth was some sort of divine retribution, that the cholera was like a biblical plague, that the horror had been equalized, and it was all much more than you could stand, never mind comprehend, and your heart was wrenched." (163-4)
***"The fact that most states are born of violent upheaval does not, of course, mean that disorder leads to order." (188)
***What distinguishes genocide from murder, and even from acts of political murder that as many victims, is the intent. The crime is wanting to make people extinct. The idea is the crime. No wonder it's so difficult to picture. To do so you must accept the principle of the exterminator, and not people but a people." (202)
***"The so-called survival instinct is often described as an animal urge to preserve oneself. But once the threat of bodily annihilation is relieved, the soul still requires preservation, and a wounded soul becomes the source of its own affliction; it cannot nurse itself directly. So survival can seem a curse, for one of the dominant needs of the needy soul is to be needed." (228)
***"...we are all [Cain's] children." (241)
***From a Swiss delegate to the International Committee of the Red Cross: "'When humanitarian aid becomes a smoke screen to cover the political effects it actually creates, and states hide behind it, using it as a vehicle for policymaking, then we can be regarded as agents in the conflict.'" (269)
***"Back in Rwanda, thousands stood for hours along the roads watching the influx [of Hutus returning] with the same of wordless intensity. Never before in modern memory had a people who had slaughtered another people, or in whose name the slaughter was carried out, been expected to live with the remainder of the people that was slaughtered, completely intermingled, in the same tiny communities, as one cohesive national society." (302)
***"If Rwanda's experience could be said to carry any lessons for the world, it was that endangered peoples who depend on the international community for physical protection stand defenseless." (351)
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