We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families

Philip Gourevitch

4 ideas

1. The Mugonero pastors' letter to Ntakirutimana

   On 15 April 1994, seven Tutsi Adventist pastors sheltering with refugees at the Mugonero church-hospital complex in Kibuye wrote to their church president, Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana: 'We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families,' and asked him to intercede. According to survivors, he answered that God no longer wanted them, and the next day he drove attackers to the compound, where hundreds or thousands were massacred. His case shows that a trusted moral authority, appealed to directly, can become an organizer of the killing.

2. Genocide as organized civic labor

   The Rwandan genocide was not a spontaneous eruption of ancient tribal hatred. It was a centrally planned political project run through the state's existing administrative chain of prefects, burgomasters, and militia, and it was framed as communal 'work.' Killing was euphemized as 'clearing the bush,' and radio broadcasts and local officials mobilized ordinary people the way they mobilized communal labor. That framing turned participation into civic duty and refusal into disobedience.

3. Ethnicity manufactured by colonial paperwork

   The Hutu/Tutsi distinction had been a fluid, largely socioeconomic one. Belgian colonizers hardened it into a fixed racial caste, drawing on the pseudo-scientific 'Hamitic hypothesis' and from 1933 on ethnic identity cards. The printed card later became the instrument that let killers at roadblocks sort who would die. Seen this way, bureaucratic categories that look merely descriptive can create the very identities that later violence depends on.

4. Humanitarian aid sustaining the perpetrators

   International agencies then fed, sheltered, and legitimized those camps without separating the génocidaires from civilians. The aid let the killers keep political control over the refugees, tax aid flows, rearm, and launch cross-border raids. Neutral humanitarianism applied without political judgment can underwrite the regrouping of the people who committed the crime.

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