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This is KZSU, Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
We're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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When the bears are most active, prowling the land, feeding on salmon, engaging in their
or sign mating games, that's when entitled opinions goes into hibernation to reconnect
with the spirit world.
We'll wake up again sometime around the winter solstice when the bears seek out their
slumber caves.
And this is a roundabout way of saying that entitled opinions will be going on hiatus
shortly, and that will return to the air sometime in early January, keeping in mind that
the future is uncertain and the end is always near.
I'm especially happy to have with me in the studio today a writer whom I admire, Philip
Gourevich, who has been the Stein visiting writer in Stanford's creative writing program
for the past six months.
Philip Gourevich is well known to those of you who read the New Yorker magazine, where he
has been a long time contributor and staff writer.
He is the author of three books, The Ballad of Abu Ghreib, 2008, a cold case 2001, and we wish
to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, stories from Rwanda,
1998.
The latter is a book about the Rwanda massacres of 1994 and their aftermath.
It has received a number of well-deserved literary awards, and during his residence at Stanford,
Philip has been working on finishing a sequel to that book, which will be coming out
sometime next year.
Nighted by the French Republican 2010, Philip Gourevich is a fellow Shouvalier de
L'Orth de Zad de L'Itz, he and I also share in common a connection to Cornell University.
We overlap there in the 1980s when Philip was an undergraduate and I was a graduate
student, so it is a real pleasure to welcome him to entitled opinions, Philip, thanks for joining
us today.
It is good to be with you, Robert.
I have been reading your remarkable book.
We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, stories from
Rwanda.
My impression is that this is a literary work that combines first-person journalistic investigation,
stories and the voices of both survivors and perpetrators of the Rwanda massacres.
A history of the tutus and tutuses and Rwanda political analysis, social psychology perhaps,
and also critical reflection all woven together in an unusually coherent narrative.
I suppose one could call this kind of writing creative nonfiction, but that would not be
very helpful.
Do you agree that there is not a well-defined category or genre for this kind of writing?
Yeah, I do.
I think broadly speaking, there isn't an English word that really works for it to some extent
what I do could be called reportage, which tends to mean what nowadays is called long-form
reported nonfiction writing.
Like a lot of people who get categorized as nonfiction, I don't love the term nonfiction.
It defines something by what it isn't.
It says it's not fiction, but there's a lot that is not fiction.
There are many, many more categories.
There's no word that's as good as the novel is for the huge range of fictional undertakings
that are good books of fiction.
I guess I'd like to think that I write books that are based on reporting that are fact-checkable
that are drawn from intensely close observation and a lot of interviews.
And they're a kind of hybrid form.
They're not all the same mix, but I feel that we've got a lot of instruments and forms that
are available to us in the nonfiction broadly orchestra.
And there's no reason that we should restrict ourself when we are using the methods
of journalism to acquire and process our material to write.
Writing is still a big broad undertaking.
So there's memoir, there's first person, travelogue, there's hard reporting, there's
investigative work, there's expose, there's essay writing, there's something akin to
elements of oral history, which is to say a mixing of voices as well as sub-genre's.
And all of that to the simple end, or a very complex end of trying to tell a complicated
story in a way that is as interesting to read as it is to dig into as a reporter.
Well that's the challenge because it is a complicated story that you undertook in that
book of years of 1998 and it's the one that I've just finished reading so it's fresh
in my mind.
If you don't mind, I'll try to use that as the case study in particular.
And a number of decisions had to be made by you, the author, about how to present that
complicated story in a way that combined all sorts of different elements that included
reporting in empirical fact checkable reporting, but also the narratives of the people that
you interviewed, the recent as well as long term history of the region and so forth.
And it's not, I think it takes a certain kind of literary creativity to put all these
things together so that page after page, the reader has a sense that there's a rather,
not just fluid and certainly not seamless as such, but a way of putting together that
brings out not just the facts of this complicated history but also the human pathos that
is, and political, perhaps, tragedy that the whole thing in tail.
Yeah, I mean some of that happens consciously and some of that happens unconsciously, the
sort of structuring of the material into the final telling or the telling that you settle
on in a book or a piece of writing, I was aware that there's a journalistic convention that
what you need to do to make people grasp things is kind of find a way to simplify them.
And I don't believe that at all because if something's just obviously complex, the first
thing that happens when somebody oversimplifies it or simplifies it a great deal is to lose
your, lose credibility at some level.
You start to think there must be more to it than that if it were so simple or so,
containable in a couple of basic concepts.
It would have been sorted out a long time ago.
And so the trick is, well, if you tell people this is going to be really complex and
hard going, that's obviously repellent too.
And you're dealing one of the challenges I was most conscious of in writing about this
material as you're dealing with material that is inherently repellent, a story that about
people killing each other in their communities, people you didn't probably since I was writing
largely for a non-reuan than audience, people who were, you weren't necessarily aware of
until calamity brought them to your attention.
And my feeling as well, if this is really a crime against humanity, as we say, that concerns
a soul, it is all of our story.
It happened there.
How do I get that across?
How do I draw close to people?
So a lot of that starts taking shape before you get down to sitting down with a piece of
paper or a screen.
It takes place when you're out reporting as you collect the material, as you start to talk
to people, as you figure out how long you're going to spend with people, how much you're
going to listen to them.
And it was always important to me that people's stories should not be anecdotes to illustrate
a larger thing.
You see a lot of that in daily newspaper reporting, almost by necessity.
But you'll have, we know the radio version of it.
You'll hear a goat and a chicken in the background and a well-wheel cranking.
And you'll hear that, here's so-and-so with a very foreign sounding name waiting for
the reins.
And then that personal disappear and you'll hear an interesting set of facts about the drought.
And then it'll end with, again, the person scanning the horizon looking for a cloud.
It's not a person.
It's not even a story.
It's an anecdote.
It's a situation.
It's a kind of stock photo with a caption in words.
And I was actually interested in the stories themselves carrying a great deal of it.
So one has to collect a lot more stories than when you use it in order in a sense to
figure out how they work and what you don't always know what the material, what you're
hearing until you've heard it many times in many versions.
And then you can tell, especially when you do foreign reporting, when you go to a place
at the beginning, everything's significant.
Everything's new.
Everything's like, oh my goodness, I can't believe that I just didn't know that before.
And I just learned this.
Oh, it's so fascinating to see what it actually looks like and put that together with
the stories you've been hearing.
After a while, you risk getting overly familiar and losing that sense of novelty.
But you want to balance the two.
You want to retain that sense of novelty and at the same time not become jaded, but become
sensitive to what's distinctive about the story and what is universal about it.
What is it that drew you to the Rwanda, to Rwanda after the massacre?
Because it begins when you start collecting the stories in a certain sense of reportage,
but even before the beginning there's a kind of pre-beginning, which is, wait a minute,
I need to go over there and find out what happened.
Can you tell us what that deeper motivation was that that initiated this whole quest
on your part?
Yeah, I mean, I had been really thinking about writing about two things a little bit in
a couple of years before that.
The main one that I was really interested in was now, it's something that's now even more
relevant, but it's the mass scale of refugee movement on the planet at that point,
over about 20 million, I think now they're 60 million.
And both the human drama of that, I had been the year before in 1994, I had been to the
refugee camps in the South China Sea that still existed with the last of the Vietnamese
boat people had begun fleeing 20 years before that in the aftermath of the Vietnam one.
The nobody in the world cared about the care, you know, America was obsessed with the
Vietnam War and as long as it involved Americans once it involved are abandoned, allies,
the South Vietnamese who were suddenly putting out to see in rickety boats that story was
catchy, but it was forgotten quickly.
And I was curious what becomes of people like in these very long term circumstances, also
the politics of it in variably political movements arise from such situations, from mass
long term displacement.
And then I was also writing about a period of Holocaust commemoration in this country
in the early 90s that involved the building of the museum in Washington, the release
of Schindler's list, the Museum of Tolerance as they call it in LA.
And the kind of what I thought was a false rhetoric of safety that these museums in some
way immunized us.
So that our consciousness of what happened 50 years ago and standing strongly against historical
atrocity somehow protected us or was a safeguard against such things happening now.
It was never again, is it writ large and sort of put into an American myth that didn't
make sense to me.
And then it started to coincide with the Balkan War.
And then people paid a lot of attention to that because it was in the heart of Europe,
part of NATO territory, heart of American sphere of influence.
And then you had this killing in Rwanda that was very poorly understood at the time,
it happened incredibly fast.
And then it just sort of disappeared from the news very quickly.
And I thought of it at that time originally mistakenly as my main interest being the refugee
story that millions of people had fled and like many people I understood that people had
fled genocide meant that they were people who were fearing that they would be killed in
the genocide as opposed to people who were feeling that they would be associated with it
afterwards because they were with the Hutu majority that mostly fled that they were basically
told to flee by the killers who had previously told them to kill.
And so that was what drew me the sense that there's this enormous event happened that
we're telling ourselves that we stand against these things and that it wouldn't happen,
that we had done nothing much to stop it.
In fact, we had gotten out of the way.
Even as we were telling ourselves, we would never put up with such a thing again.
And that a story like this can't possibly be over, that the question of how on earth do
you live with this, both in the most local sense.
And in the broader sense, all our stories we tell ourselves about our human humanity.
That was all floating around in there at the same time as I had no real idea about the
particulars until I went reporting.
So let's remind our listeners, some of whom know some of the basic facts of what happened
in 1994 and Rwanda, where you had a country made up of two dominant, I mean, from what I
gather, there's actually three different groups, I don't know if they're ethnically
distinct or not.
You claim that they're defined as ethnographic groups of store in the last century because
of course that's not how they define themselves.
So when they had, Rwanda is one of the few places in Africa that basically existed in
roughly its current borders in pre-colonial times.
It's not a conglomerate of many, many, many smaller kingdoms that were forced together
by the colonial powers.
It was consolidating in the century before even more towards what it is now.
And there were these groups and there's no written record, there was no alphabet in Rwanda
prior to colonization.
So there's no exact, you can't go back and look at sources from that time with great
certainty, you can look at sources that were recorded subsequently from that time, but of course
you always have to try to factor out the interests.
But it's clear that they weren't races and ethnicities in the way that European race science
very soon defined them and codified them and favored the Totsim minority who had a role
as a kind of traditional aristocracy over the Hutu majority who were broadly speaking the
peasantry.
So whether they're defined as casts or classes with ethnic elements or ethnicized by colonial
politics might be the best way to describe it.
They had meaning.
It's not that they were meaningless and that they didn't have any significance.
But there was not a violent history of violent conflict between Hutu's and Totsim in
Rwanda.
Rwanda was first colonized by the Belgians but really very loosely or lightly overall.
And then the Germans lost it in World War I as a spoil of war to Belgium would basically
already had Congo next door.
And it was run by the Belgians until independence in 1960, '61.
So between the Totsis and the Hutu's and also the pygmy Tua people that they were seemed
to be more aboriginal and they are less than half a percent of the population.
So they are not generally factored into this conflict as a significant force although
their fate was often determined by it.
So as you point out this is another aspect of your book where we engage in certain especially
biblical mythology because biblical mythology plays a role in the way the Western colonial
powers saw the difference between these two groups, the Hutu's and the Totsis in so far
as you had, well you invoke the story of Cain and Abel where Cain is the farmer,
Abel, the nomadic herdsman and the Hutu's tended to be agriculturally based whereas
the Totsis were pastoral and pastoral.
And this is one way in which they are different culturally but also there are differences
in their appearances and certain physiognomies that some of the early Westerners from what
I gather associated with the Hutu's with one of the descendants of Noah and Ham which
also figures in American slavery discourse that Ham for some reason is seen although if
you read the Bible it's not entirely clear how this got twisted up into some idea that
that is the original black person and that the Africans come from Ham, the banished son
or one of these descendants of Noah.
It may seem strange and imported to think in terms of biblical stories and it certainly
was with the so-called hemitic hypothesis which was this type race theory that was brought
in mostly by British Victorian explorers but then very much adopted by all European colonial
race scientists and they went through Rwanda with measuring noses and cranial capacities
in a completely eugenic kind of way that was the idea and the idea was that the Totsis
being stereotypically at least there are many many many exceptions in trying to guess
if physiognomy and identity does not work well in Rwanda past a point.
The idea that they were tall and skinny and lordly and had alkaline noses and sometimes
slightly more coppery than darker skin and that they also had these huge herds of elegant
cattle that they had this and they had the court they controlled the kingdom at that point
for the most part there were hoo-doo chiefs and sub chiefs quite significant numbers of them
some of whom had some significant cattle also but this is what they saw and then they
see these sort of you know short as they always described them sort of neagroid flat nose
stocky black blacker skin that supposedly peasants out there planting you know subsistence
crops in the fields and they thought well this is the natural order of things people who
are more akin to us and whom we identify with are overlords over this peasant population
and they really was that crude and they ascribed to the Totsis a different origin in
Ethiopia or elsewhere so yes and that became very problematic over time because
it's not it's highly disputed and certainly there's it's prehistory almost that you get
to and there just be it's about that endlessly but they all spoke so if you look up for instance
on the Harvard dictionary of ethnography the definition of ethnic groups by which they're
going to be defined there's something like a checklist of twenty twenty five factors but
the main ones are differences of religion differences of diet differences of language differences
of like marital taboo one of the would you would you wouldn't marry the other group differences
of social mobility differences of all kinds of customs and all of that and living together
or isolating from one another at many many different straight up professional you know sort
of cast none of those applied in all respects they are for all the facts for all the ways
that they may have had a distinct identity they also shared a national identity which has been
really crucial in putting the country and creating an ideology behind around the reconstruction
of the country which is a nationalist idea which is we are all Rwandans first of all so
the modern state of Rwanda it was not founded on this difference between the groups
on the contrary that it was it was the two season who to originally were incorporated
within you know the larger political pre-colonial state pre-colonial say yes and then what
did I mean when we get to the the actual genocide in nineteen ninety four a number of things
had led up to it that as you said it happened all very quickly I think within a hundred
days up to eight hundred thousand maybe a million tootsies and some of the moderate tootsies
were were massacred and it's true that the west we knew what was going on but it happened
very quickly but it was very hard to see that coming it wasn't it wasn't I mean there's
a there's a debate as to whether or not it was planned and obviously when you say planned
you say somebody says we'll show me the plan where did somebody plan this and I would say
that it's not clear that anybody planned exactly what we saw but it's absolutely clear that
it was prepared that if one must be precise about the words this was long the the patterns
of behavior the ways of killing the license to kill was very much part of the political
culture of Rwanda since nineteen fifty nine when you had the beginning of the upheaval
that led to independence which was a movement amongst who to leaders to redress the colonial
imbalance and preferential treatment of tootsies which of course many of the tootsies being
told that they were superior had thoroughly subscribed to it's not as if there's a
no complicity with that power but they also did to survive it was it was the way the
system worked and they didn't have a lot of agency at that time to necessarily change
it there was then of course resistance by the monarchy to being overthrown and the Belgians
basically switch sides dramatically in the late fifties early sixties from supporting
the tootsie oppression of who to to a kind of not they did in the name of majority
inism because who to constituted roughly eighty five percent of the population so it
seemed like this was some kind of democratization but in fact what they did is they created
an ethnic invert and inverse of the sort of colonial apartheid to a post colonial apartheid
and it was all about who to politics it wasn't about some other kind of idea and you
had quotas and you had a lot of violence you had tens of thousands of people killed
between fifty nine and sixty three you had hundreds of thousands who fled into exile
to tootsies and in many ways in exactly the same way you saw it in ninety four just
with lesser numbers and and less of a totalizing slaughter it was not necessarily an extermination
it was closer to what we called in the Balkans ethnic cleansing i.e. killing towards
expulsion killing towards disempowerment and expulsion and defeat but they were left usually
there was more property destruction and expulsion going on during that period but in nineteen
sixty three the massacres and this was two years after independence really was formalized
they were described in lemond as you know the genocide birchren rustle called at the worst
case of genocide we've seen since the european killing of the jews it was not ambiguous
what was going on and it was structured with the idea that this is not rogue peasants
being sort of allowed to take out old vendettas but actually being encouraged and mobilized
towards doing it and being rewarded for doing it rather than penalized for doing it that you saw
again when when it happened in ninety four and in both cases significantly though there
many differences of the exact political moment it was a way for when there was sort of contest
for political power amongst who to leaders
it was the movement towards the extreme we will unify our people around the fear of
a common enemy and with violence
uh... and that way we say why are we struggling with each other when we can be eliminating
these people who will take advantage of that otherwise and so the movement that became
who to power in ninety four uh... arose
uh... and and and that's a that's where the feeling that there's a long history to this
it's not a long history in the sense of ancient at a vistic hatreds at all it's a political
a modern political history but of several generations duration by the time that uh...
it happened these things don't happen overnight spontaneously
no they don't it's also
the idea that
many in the west had that
this wasn't at a vistic ancient
hatred between two ethnic groups
doesn't isn't born out at all by the facts that there's a
extraordinarily well ordered methodical state sponsored program
that uh... enlisted the people
many of them against their own will
figuring that each one each who to had to
kill a tootsy so that everyone will be implicated
and in such a way to agree i mean that the problem with with putting it like that
only is that it suggests that they all did whereas in fact there was a
obviously there was a the largest category where people who
were what neither resisted nor to part
uh... there was room for that uh... but an awful lot of people
had to take part
uh... for it to happen at the speed it didn't and when we talk about a hundred
days between april six thin
early july
most of the tootsies in the country were killed in april and may
i mean basically a million people were killed in six weeks by hand
uh... by hand held tools uh... in their communities
uh... and the
the really interesting uh...
thing i've realized is that you know during the we all knew that obviously it
involved a whole lot of mobilization killing by ordinary people
uh... and at the same time
the
obvious
journalistic and historical and legalistic
political
emphasis in the early years of the research on roanda or just trying
reporting on roana was on showing how the state structure had organized
this that it wasn't just some random
cats and dogs kind of situation
uh... and
now what you see much more in roanda is because they've had a whole system
of communal trials over the last uh... decade
or fifteen years
uh... there's a much clearer uh...
body of information about how local participation took place also
and how on the one hand it was pressure from above but also there was a lot of
uh... agency from below
and once the license was created
once it's allowed
people took a lot of initiative not everybody
and
people emerged to where leaders and more avid
within each community
but at every level of society and that's also crucial because you saw
priests killing parishioners doctors killing patients in the hospitals you saw
at the university students killing
uh... their fellow students and professors killing their fellow professors
uh... so when people looked around to sort of say who is the authority that stands
against this who is the more not just legal authority but also moral authority
communal authority
uh... here and there there were few brave acts of resistance
some of those people were killed for resisting
uh... but for the most part there was uh... very high level of capitulation
uh... that then
added that sense of license below
that ends up
being profoundly demoralizing
however
because there was no higher authority
either political or spiritual
uh...
it uh...
it's hard to draw lessons
from what happened in Rwanda that
lead to
the sense that we can prevent this from happening in the future
where you have a state that has uh...
the means
to
encourage this this kind of
and genocide which as and you write the neutron bomb it has become
obviously we don't need it at atomic bomb or neutron bomb
you can have the most low tech means
that
incredibly rapidly as long as there is some
kind of complicity with state sponsored agencies that that the this kind of
thinking happen
you know in in in a hurry
uh... it is demoralizing on on many levels i mean uh...
the desire to extract uh... a lesson
that
offers us a sense of greater security
after the shock of
what happened in rwanda and and seeing this human capability
uh... or
various ways of at least reassuring ourselves that if you set up society
differently and never happen here
uh... and people would sometimes ask me well do you think this could happen
anywhere that what you're saying
and i would say yes i do i don't think it can happen anywhere tomorrow
that's where the preparing preparation in the long you know you need a system
that tends towards that
uh... highly monolithic state
uh...
it makes a big difference here if the radio started broadcasting
uh... that we should kill
whatever subgroup of people
uh... and especially neighbors that you were living amongst and so forth that you
had previously had recently good relationships with which
both killers and survivors described that to have been the case i don't
think that's just uh...
a slightly nostalgic uh... thing in within small farming communities people
spoke with each other yet we're intermarried we had
that suddenly
we were being put to death
you would have people chase a while the radio started to do that i think i'll
change the channel
well if you don't have a channel to change
which in rwanda there wasn't some other channels and no no no let's not do that
there was no such channel
uh... so
it requires
along
time or a long period of all of those processes and structures and
habits of control
and uh... of a bad leadership mean leadership matters that's one of the
things that does matter leadership can make a big difference
uh... it may not even even authoritarian leadership as you have in rwanda now
uh... some people want to say it's exactly the same as it was before
and it's certainly authoritarian and you don't have free exp
freedom of speech at the level that we think of we certainly don't have a
free press in any sense that we would recognize
uh... or in
pretty much any sense
uh... but you don't have anybody ordering anybody to kill
and what would happen if that happened
uh... i don't know
uh... many people say that
they've learned some lesson from it
uh... and i think many people have
uh... but the tendency is going the other way
uh... as far as actual organized communal violence goes
but i think people have this potential
uh... i was very struck and i used these two quotes next to each other in the
book at one point that when you read uh... when it was really primo levees
uh... survival and ouchwets
uh... which he wrote in the years immediately after his return
uh... from the camp
uh... he describes he has the line at some point basically saying
uh... we know that this can never happen again
uh... it has happened
and that has showed us what we must
not allow ever let happen
years later when he wrote the book that at least in english is called the
drowned in the saved
uh... which was uh... collection of some of his
will essays towards the end of his life
he had uh... an essay
uh... in there and he was talking in that book among other things about the
enormous frustration of trying to tell the story over time in a way that made
that made people understand it
and he would even go and talk to Italian school groups and talk to children
and children would often say well
well look you know you didn't try hard enough to escape describe again to
me the camp show me how i can show you you should have gone that
and he said that just means they don't understand what being totally caught
is
you know and the inadequacy of language even that when he said we were freezing
you know
uh... people say that their apartment in winter all the time on a cold-tear-in-winter
but he he was saying that we were freezing
you know that meant people died next to you of cold
and and all of that and then he he has a line where says
it has happened
so it can happen again
it can happen anywhere
and i actually think that's the true or
uh...
dark lesson of these things which is this is a potential in humankind
i don't think it means it needs to happen or will happen repeatedly
but i sometimes even make the analogy with
when we have a new medical
horror show up in our midst a new virus uh...
Ebola or when
h_i_v_ started to appear
we don't think well we've seen a few cases of that now we don't have to worry
about it anymore because we'll know we think this could explode this some
this or something like it will keep
per
is a permanent
potential in our condition
and i think ruewanda makes that
clear
and one of the challenges of course overcoming the great desire we all have to
say
no no those are far away people who are different than us
therefore what
went on there
what it doesn't tell us much about ourselves
that's where the writing comes into break that down and make you make them
uh... as familiar to us as they are as soon as you are there talking to
anybody
well that's the that's the breakthrough of your book say you really do break
down
that uh...
barrier that
their world is a different world in our world
far from it
and yet what is also again going back to the demore
demorellization is that uh...
lecture you gave a hear a stand for you
quoted uh...
william gattice where he said if you want justice you get it in the next world
in this world you have
the law
and
you see that would be edifying if you say okay as long as we have good laws
and good enforcement of the laws these kind of things will never happen
but reading
you on what happened one that seems like if it's not the law
uh... it certainly wasn't a complete breakdown
of the state system
and so it wasn't like a stateless society where law and order had collapsed on
the contrary law and order and all the forces at that the sub ten law and order
had actually conspired to uh...
promote
and encourage this thing from happening so that tends to be the case in
mass violence really mass political violence
obviously there are things like riots
most of those are orchestrated to
or they require me that people don't just write somebody has to sort of
break down certain and also the mob then creates license right because you're
not acting alone
you're not actually taking initiative you are if anything obeying the energy and
the drive of the mob
and this is not a mob it's it's the art of mobilizing a population as a mob
and i think that's true it's true
if you look at the history of the gym crosace which is
uh... not exactly now that you can see how the structures of authority
create the vigilante justice that you then see
uh... that seems to be arising outside the law
uh... and the reason i say you know you don't get justice you get the laws
i think there's a lot of very high blown talk about justice in amongst human
rights types and others
who talk about it is if justice were a something we all agree what that is
and it's something that we're in a position to attain it's it's it's an ideal and
it's very far from the law for better and for worse
is an instrument that we write
in each time and we adapt it and uh... in a situation like rwanda
part of the idea of mass involvement is that no law is going to be adequate to
it you can't arrest a mob you can't try a mob so how do you
you need to
the lock only deal really with individual responsibility
we're all very much on guard against collectively couple rising people who
uh... are by association in reverse so you don't want to do that
and then there's a real dilemma which you see in the aftermath and rwanda
which is
on the one hand you know that people didn't do this simply of their own
initiative
even in the local communities with these local trials on the other hand
you can't absolve the individual responsibility
and so you need to weigh those things which is where you end up with a kind of
political settlement around the law you hold them responsible but you maybe
don't hold them
to the same kind of standards you would if they were a common murderer ten years
before
they may have killed twenty people
and get twelve years in prison
under the new system
where before they would have been hung
for one and and this has to do with your uh...
reflections on human human rights organizations in
in the
talk that you gave a stanford where
uh...
the obsession with justice is something that
you uh... you say that there's a
uh... a risk of a historicism that
when you're obsessed with
justice you freeze
moments in time
and you extract them from their political the political reality in which
they are embedded
and
you uh... you say that the
human that there's a human rights absolutism
and that these human rights groups are important in the last universal
as organizations still standing
and they're neither you know right-wing or left-wing but they take the side of
the suffering and demand that human rights abuses be adjudicated as crimes
and that uh...
there's a certain danger in this because none of us live in an extra
state world and therefore
without considering the political reality which
provoke these kinds of crimes against humanity you might provoke
worse atrocities
uh... through that adjudication so therefore
uh... is justice the
absolute highest priority in each case and i think that you're suggesting that
in in some cases
justice has to
not have that sort of priority that human rights i think organizations
accord i think everything we've seen in history shows us that justice is just one
of the elements one of spires to end
uh... redressing past wrongs and past conflict
uh... it has a place
it uh...
it may be a useful instrument
but it's very absolutist
uh...
fact is that people think pretty highly of the way that south africa managed
never mind the truth in reconciliation commission simply but the fact that
they managed
to get through
the transition from apartheid to post-apartate with all of its problems
nonetheless
without massively violent conflict required negotiated settlement
it required a settlement in which people on both sides a_n_c_ and
the apartheid regime
would be uh... given
if not amnesty the truth in reconciliation commission steps in and sort of
says well you have to account for yourself but you
you're not going to
pay for it in the same way
it allows for people to deal with each other you have to make peace with your
enemies
and basically
justice is a war position
it means i must defeat you totally and bring you to trial and it also means that
there's a huge conflict like just take a simple situation
we want
uh...
as as sort of the human rights community in the pro democracy community and
the nut countries that claim that's an important part of their foreign policy
want
uh...
leaders
to step down and have succession from one
government to another
and to seed power and have transition of power because that's actually the
deepest form of stability that a country can get to and that's when you start to
build institutions it's always around that
on the other hand we want to hold people to account
supposedly for
all of their offenses
on a criminal justice basis
which we don't hold ourselves to account doing we sort of shrug will
like well who can really hold the president of the states to account it's
part of the price we pay
well now part of the price we pay is that we want transitions here
if if we
felt that any time you step down as the most powerful leader in the world
you're going to go to jail
because the other power party would now prosecute you sooner or later
and we would not protect you against prosecutions abroad
you'd have a big difference in the way people made their calculations these
are too conflicting
urges on our part
please step down
for the good of your society
and please go to jail for the good of our ideal abstract ideas of justice which we
don't apply to ourselves
uh... so i feel like there's
uh...
again this is where we we over simplify other people's history
and apply these rules elsewhere
instead of taking the the more interesting idea that like
we need to see how
on earth you could make
a safer
more
a better balance over time does that sometimes mean
that one will live with
both in the short term
and you know for how long you don't know
did they have to forgive all the Germans
that they forgive almost nobody went to court in Germany
enduring after denotification
uh... people hold up near and burned near and burned was not some kind of
ideal and nowadays were not allowed to hang people i'm not saying we should be
able to hang people saying you know what when people idealize that that was
actually
a choice between we could take these twenty-nazis outback and shoot them or we could
put them on trial and then take them out back and hang up
which is what they did
and it then we create a record that people talk about that like it was
uh... some fantastic model
and it's not a very good model in most cases
uh... do you
basically incriminate all sides in a conflict without any reflection on
which sides uh... you think you would like to have win
uh... you'd because we commit a lot of war crimes in the course of
war
uh... and we don't hold all of those to be the same if we think the cause
our cause is good
look at a roshima
well you know you're saying something quite radical at least from the
american
psychic point of view
justice is a supreme value
also i i think among the french also you like you see is a true it's a
transcendental and that everything is sacrificed under the name of uh...
justice
we did a show on albert comi recently with ales caplyn where a
perfect job
where i i invoke the what come said about the uh...
the aljurian war was very conflicted and and that
controversial statement
that got him into a lot of trouble
that if i have to choose between justice and my mother
i guess i'll choose my mother
which is uh...
so anathema
to a certain way of the body is the greatest french writer that period of
the model
but here let me let me uh...
go back to an uh... an anecdote
in rueanda that you report about these school children
who uh... are
who to and to see
and the who to come in there
and they
tell
the school children to separate themselves according to their groups
and those school children actually refused to do that
and you call that that dark courage that's what hope looks like in that
place and those kind of moments the dark courage that it would take
for the
those children not to separate themselves and then they themselves were all
masochard or many of them they were a masochard and experimentally
another words that that this is uh...
two years after the jennus three years after sorry it was in i think
march of nineteen ninety seven
in western rueanda and you basically had a renewal
of the of a sort of genocidal guerrilla war
uh... infiltrators coming in from congo from the refugee camps and what was
and so you know
just to become congo again
uh... was about to and you had uh...
uh... much of the northwest of the country was was was being played by these
kinds of
basically terra what we would call terrorist attacks
and this was uh... some of these who to power gorillas who came into
attacked the school and set sort yourselves out
uh... and then there was basically who to stand over there to its east
and over there was understood that
i've learned much more about these attacks uh... in in the recent years and
uh... the particular of some of the school of those two there were two school
attacks that happened on one
uh... of which became more famous than the other
uh... and
and this is at the young a school in western rueanda
and it was actually uh... o_ two girl who was the first one they killed because she
said we had you know you know you know who you are
uh... and and she was the daughter of somebody was in jail accused of
genocide
and uh... you know you can't tell us to separate their their note there
they're only Rwandans here
so this is the
uh...
it's it's in some ways the idea of the post genocide government
uh... it can seem that it's erasing a lot of identity at times for people
uh... met tutsi survivors who are totally happy being told were all
Rwandans now
they say no well you know i was my parents were killed as tutsi don't tell
me i'm not one
but it's a very very powerful
uh... active defiance obviously
and obviously above all on the part of those who to students who had the
out they had the opportunity to save their necks so is it
the case that that the gorilla commander who was
allegedly responsible for that massacre is someone who has
was subsequently reintegrated into the army
and that you managed to get his phone number or is that a different event where
he wanted one of these attacks there there are all what's that what's happened is
that over the last uh...
really almost twenty years now many of the former military uh... and and
uh... combatants from
from the army that served uh... the genocidal government
some of whom were genocidal some of whom were not
uh... they were just soldiers
have been reintegrated
and many of the fighters from the genocidal
uh... militia the f_d_l_r_ and its various uh...
earlier manifestations in conno
also returned to to roanda
and uh... were reintegrated if they had genocide crimes so here's what
happened in roanda's that was a
decade of war inside roanda as well as quite a bit of war outside in conno in
the late nineties and early two thousand
roanda's had a process for adjudicating the crimes committed in the genocidal
nineteen ninety four
the crimes
of masocharic tutsi civilians
during that period
all other
crimes or atrocities are treated as things that happen in the course of the
war
and there's a kind of quid pro quo
we're not going to hold you to account for that if you reintegrate
that's what i'm talking about peacemaking it's an extremely uncomfortable
accommodation uh... i didn't
rap once mind around but in practical terms
it is the reason that there is not open war fair inside the country well
exactly that that's where the human rights uh...
absolutism on justice it it's iraq and silv all with that that kind of uh...
and that's why i don't think it's that radical idea it's radical to maybe to
say it out loud and to say it as like we are but we're to purist on human
rights but no politician finds this a radical idea
it's not actually how policy makers in washington think they may pay lip
service to this
and in fact americans
you said we have this ideal of justice
but it's often uh... a very vengeful idea of justice
uh... we actually have a very strong idea of vengeance
uh... and that's the frontier justice that's the gun culture feeds into that
uh... and it also feeds into
the work i did it up with great baron the abel great uh...
prison guards
you know many of them why were they
why they enlisted
you know because they hit our buildings
and and there was and and when and then they thought what what what they
were happy to be going over and being told they were going to be
liberating people from a terrible time but when they found themselves instead
in it and sort of running torture chambers
the idea was always what look what they did to us or what they would do to us
and
one of the things that's very striking in real wonders that from very early on
even against tremendous resistance uh... from
and healthy resistance from survivors
uh... because it was too fast
there was this talk of we're going to have to have some kind of system
of forgiveness
whatever that meant
or forgetting
both
both uh... you quote someone saying that if we keep a judicating will never
build a nation
and integrate the army so at a certain point it's a the adjudication as is
has to come to an end
even if it's at the cost of not
executing full justice
there is no full justice possible in a situation like this there simply isn't
the nature of the scale of the crime as such
what would full justice mean after world war two what would full justice
mean after
uh... boston you know the indian you know you so then you have select if you
pick out certain political leaders who are simply
beyond the pale you know
uh... they become both
uh...
everyone can more or less agree that they had a disproportionate hand in all of
this but they also become symbolic
uh... and
sometimes you get a little bit of a cross section of pick out a few smaller
people
who basically had the bad luck to be the people who got picked off
uh... and brought to justice
was this one really worse than those thirty not necessarily right but
yeah so i think we actually know
look what we did it look along it's taken us in this country after the civil
war
and part of that was
the balance between not fully reaccepting
opposing party but not
simply laying it totally to waste
and and and so even with things
to do with the obviously aftermath of slavery letting people
the northerners allowing certain things go on that they could have maybe
stopped that they were like well
we want those people stay in the union
lots of things going on like that for a long period of time and and people
talking about it for
centuries as you know
a lost cause or defeat or we mustn't humiliate them
how do you defeat people properly who have a totally wrong idea ideology in
your view not just that they're on the other side of a war but they actually
represent something you think is a threat to humanity and to your
state
and i humiliate them that's an extremely difficult challenge
and so you have to be punitive but only so much and you have to be inclusive but
only to a degree that doesn't
indianjou
it nobody knows how to get this right which is what makes it actually fascinating
if it were if it were is much clearer
uh... we just go and apply the template
and see where their story doesn't fit
well that's why you and you also say the moral clarity rams into political
reality every step of the way
and moral clarity might be for the next world
they read and they and people that that's where justice uh... no one escapes
the the the absolute moral clarity of of a kind of
ultimate justice there in the other world but in this world where we have the law
rather than that kind of justice and
it uh... it's a question of of us making judicious uh...
decisions that you might mean the suspension of judication
making political judgments that's what political judgments are
uh... i think that's i think something come in understood to you know that the
people look after their comrades not because their comrades are
more innocent than the other guys comrades because they have sort of
join the cause
and there
is part of what the Rwandan
project
about which i can tell you many the people involved in
implementing it them so called victorious army
uh... i mean they they won the war but they don't always feel after the
genocide
like we we're the winners
they feel very ambivalent about implementing this policy at times you know
accepting a guy next to them
as a comrade in arms who previously may
uh... and the idea is if we're not going to hold them to account
we want to know what they did we want them to
disavow it
in a way that's meaningful because if they don't they're still sort of playing
a double game
on the other hand we don't want to know too much because that makes it harder to do
this
and if you really know what the other person uh... did if they did terrible
things
uh... even if you people on your side did terrible things
uh... you it's much harder to
except that person uh... in so there's this balancing act even in terms of
when you say forgetting yes it's not forgetting
it's uh... not letting memory control it
it's not because memory and grudge are so close
uh... especially with these historical score settling
uh... and so
i think one of the difficulties dot dot day
you know
so well
dot day was writing a time when the idea that there was another light the next
life
was pretty generally accepted
and uh... at pretty much all levels of thought and imagination
and here
it's not totally clear
how much of a hold
the promise or threat of justice in the next world
really
assures people maybe a lot of the very catholic or now very
fundamentalist peasantry in rwanda
uh... takes some solace in that idea but a lot of them when i've talked to
them ever pretty materialistic view of what the next world's gonna be
oh yes no i think
the next world is lost that that kind of purchase for sure yeah which would put
put so much more pressure on this one
exactly
and political judge we're not necessarily doing very well with that
and the problem with judgment
is that it's not a technique and it's
doesn't have a set of universal principles or norms from which you can derive
a particular cases of how you apply
norms
and
therefore it it requires something that is uh...
somewhat fugitive because you
judgment
is not a
science is not an art it's it's some
uh... some kind of
based in common sense in a way that
is uh...
unfortunately cannot be standardized
well especially when it gets on to a mass political level obviously we have our
you know
better we all are fascinated
with police procedures
i wrote about a double homicide in the book after the rwanda book we
are partly because it's just like nice and cole clear and so forth in a cold
case it's uh... about a thirty-year-old murder and how you go about finding the
guy and carrying out even there
it's a dissatisfaction
conclusion in certain ways because by by by by having avoided
the law for so long
uh... this guy really served himself very well because all the evidence
goes cold the few witnesses are either
too frail or gone
uh... and he sort of outlived the case even though there's no statute of
limitations on murder
uh... so i think that uh...
the the
problem
uh... also with justice is not terribly satisfying
because it's backward looking
uh... so
justices about trying to figure out what happened
and to make sure that we've got that settled
uh... and and so
the impulse to
move on
and to build the future that's what i meant in part when my talk here about
at Stanford about uh... the way that
impulse towards justice in political and historical circumstances
freezes moments
it works at the end of a war or something but otherwise you're always saying at
this moment we have to stop
onward movement and adjudicate backwards what happened
and if you're talking about whole systems
you really
uh... it's very risky
yes
for and that freezing of them of the moment so
after pick up
i don't want to insist on down to too much but it is a case that went
down to has his sinners he traps them he freezes them in one act or one
gesture or
one
uh...
decision that they made
that damsel
and
that's what damnation is for that is being frozen in one particular act
it's forecloses
the future
of course those who are in purgatory they do have future they're working out
their purgation and and and they can they can think forward
but uh... that that sort of
in for let's say
infernal justice is one of freezing
it's very hard
i could tell you to meet for instance i've been meeting
uh... some of the
jennessee d_l_ the killers in rwanda
over a quite a long period of time same guy in the same little village
he should be in some ways always defined by this thing
he killed
tens of his neighbors dozens
scores maybe we're not it's not totally clear with his final death
count is
he destroyed
families those families
remain destroyed the people may be
uh... doing better and worse they are summer doing okay summer not
that's not all up to him
but
to see him sort of get on with his life
uh... or so
uh... to see him
building a new house and his families intact and his children are going to
university and doing all right uh... which they never were able to do one of
the
government that he
killed for
uh... all of that
uh... seems really to me
very hard not to want to freeze him in time and so so it's very hard in one
mind to sort of keep track of that guy
uh... really belongs to that moment and yet here he is with all this other
life to live
it's not clear to me that it would be in fact better for him it might serve my
sense of justice a whole lot more for him to be in jail forever
but what it on the huge social
scale
for everybody like him
uh...
to be
locked away and loyal to that crime
rather than having disavowed it and done what they could
uh... to redress it pay some fines for the property they destroyed
and
in some ways since some different signal to the generation that follows them
that
honestly we're not likely to live long enough to know how to call that one
uh... to see how that one turns out
right so
i think you want to run about eight times in
when you were preparing this book
and it was yeah
and i think that
yeah it was eight or nine i think i don't know whatever it was yeah and now you
are your you have a follow-up coming
this going to be coming out next year have you been going back to rwan
and recently i went back to rwan a lot between two thousand nine and two
thousand fourteen fifteen
um...
i
have not actually counted up all the trips but i was going to three times a year
and for two or three weeks at a time
uh...
to
collect
stories and put pieces together and follow-up with people and
uh...
a lot of it was wanting to revisit the same people over and over
uh... because i find
uh... you can get off a lot
uh... of information and understanding in a couple of hours of non-stop talking
to somebody about
very specific events but if you go back and back
and you visit
the people connected to it and the people around
an event
uh... more and more comes out and it comes out differently and the fact that
you become familiar
uh... makes you a very different
makes what people say you very different date they talk to you better over time
uh... so you're so are there any big surprises when you went back
in some ways the fact that it's held
however frat and whatever fragile form as long as it has is a surprise
uh... i went back
over
uh... the spirit of time and i would i would reread my notebooks for my first
trips
everybody in ninety five ninety six the immediate years of aftermath
assumed that
it would either happen again whatever they meant by that but they meant to
kind of mass calamitous total societal breakdown into violence
that it wasn't spent
the violence wasn't spent there was a lot of violence in the aftermath both
inside rwanda and
in exile primarily in kongo's a year
and there was a lot of force used to create the stability that exists now
uh... and but that that would
stand stem over time that it wouldn't just turn into a place like eastern kongo
looks or like
uh... many places that seem to be
places of decades of grinding violence
and that people would have a kind of basic physical security
and if not uh...
uh... many of the things in terms of political freedom that we might
uh...
think that you know why not
uh... certainly
a greater economic physical
medical
other security and stability
so that you can start to
consider the question
which is a big wide open one
what happens with the next generations
nobody could think that far ahead
and nobody
would have been on
so that's the surprise that's in a sense what i went back to see so
what's that look like and feel like it sounds like
do you have a title for the
the sequel
the new book is called uh... you hide that you hate me
and i hide that i know
and where does that come from
it's a saying i heard in in ronanda in ninety
six or seven
when i first heard it there was really
it struck me as pretty cynical sinister sounding sort of gallows humor
almost like a little nursery rhyme can you repeat you hide the two hate me
and i hide that i know
the more i thought about it especially
in the light of the fact that people have
uh... been living together again
even if it's
under a great deal of pressure and
forced unity as it were
it becomes real
lot of things that are forced from above become real
racial integration in this country to the extent that it's been successful
it has not been
by the great goodwill of the masses
unled by anybody
the more i thought about it you hide that you hate me and i hide that i
know it's it's the civil code
that's what it means you
it doesn't mean you don't know
that there's
problems and when i use that i'm not crazy but the word hate to describe what
went on in ronanda
but i think everybody understands the term there to mean
uh... you threaten you represent a threat to me you you were problem for
those of the people that you have to
what's the alternative to do you hiding it
you're showing it
so in many ways
uh... i realize this actually reflects a very deep understanding of what it
is to
manage a conflict
and with time it becomes not just less visible but perhaps
less real
and finally the it's
ninety eight book as such a striking title can you tell our listeners where
where that title come from
we wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families is
almost verbatim i took a few words out for
in order to leave room on the cover for you know
my name uh... no that it was a very long phrase but it was from a letter
uh... that was written
by a group of uh...
seventh day adventist
pastors
who had taken refuge in their church they were tootsies
uh... with much of their flock two thousand people had taken refuge in this
church in rusted rueana as they did it many churches across rueana and in the
past as i mentioned in fifty nine and in sixty's and those massacres
churches had always been sanctuaries if you made it
to the church
uh... you were basically your house might get destroyed
uh... you might
but after a week or two you'd be able to go home and that was a safe place they
were sanctuaries
so people remembered that and they went and this time they became the scenes of
some of the biggest massacres in rueana
and in place after place
in this church in muganero in western rueana
these uh... ministers and everybody realized that the
attack was coming and they'd been given signals and they saw the attackers
preparing outside and they
wrote a letter to the church president who was a hootoo who was there
senior
uh...
church father
uh... saying dear
our president
we uh... hope everything's going well for you in these difficult times
we wish to inform you that we have heard that tomorrow we will be killed
along with our families that was i think the full phrase
and we hope that you will intercede on our behalf as ester
interceded on behalf of the israelites
uh... in the
so again a biblical reference in this case to the book of ester and the
babylonian exile
uh... and uh... of course they all knew their scripture they knew exactly
what the story was
and uh...
and that you will do what you can to to save us
and
according to the
survivors the massacre the church president responded verbally but
basically said you know that
god no longer wants you you're going to be killed
uh...
amazingly i got the letter from him
i've been told about it by survivors and to them it was a proof of how deeply
their trusted been to betrayed
that even the ministers from his church who were to see in the church
pleading directly to him were rejected
he brought this letter with him into exile
i found him in texas
uh... some years later
and uh... just before as it turned out he was arrested
uh... and he
uh...
mentioned the letter
and i said something like that would be remember exactly what it said i heard
something about that letter when i was in in the town in village in rahuanda
and he opened this little folder in his lap and he handed me the actual hand
written letter we and i made a copy on his
son's fax machine in texas
and he presented it obviously as like see they trusted me
and they presented it again we trusted him he betrayed us
he he died in jail eventually the pastor
in texas
no in uh... i
i think in a rusa tansenia but anyway who's tried at the international tribunal
for rahuanda in tansenia i'm not sure where he was finally imprisoned
well felt by i would uh...
looked at on a high note but it's not the the kind of topic and uh...
political reality that
lenses up to the you know edifying
uh... you know last words so except that i would i would say that will
in
they're an enormous number of people
i have met and talked to in the stories after i tell and whose voices of
tried to record
who i find deeply impressive in moving
and wise
in the midst of these very dire situations
and if there's anything that keeps me going back it's not out of
more of a fascination or gore
i try to keep that to as much of a minimum as one can without being false
about these things because that's not where the interest lies
uh... those people are who mom trying to
record
and who stories i'm putting together
in these books uh... i do think are
at times really quite an inspiration at least to me they are well to me as well
in reading reading and in the first
the accounts in in the actual voices of the of some of these survivors
really quite moving
and um...
what can i say we're looking forward to the next one
and
thanks for coming on to entitled opinions
i hope next time
when you're in town we can talk about
the abou grave uh... story and see what the connections are between that
very different context and
what we've been talking about today but uh...
will have to
get you back to california for that one since good at all for that and
thanks for having me okay let me remind our listeners we've been speaking with
phillip gurevich
uh... from the new york or magazine
who's been
here at stanford as a visiting uh... writer and residence for the last
several months
i'm robert harris and for entitled opinions
and uh... just stay tuned will be with you one more time next week and then we
go on high it's
thanks again for
thank you
uh...