Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
This book is a tremendous documentation effort by Rakiya Omar, who runs African Rights. While other human rights organizations have largely devoted themselves to holding the post-genocide government to account for its treatment of accused perpetrators of genocide, and for its various shortcomings, African Rights has kept its eye on the injustices suffered by the victims of the genocide – not just at the time, but in the aftermath of the massacres.
Hatzfeld keeps politics at a distance – which is the distance at which these poor peasants experience it. So when you hear about the government, you hear about it in the sense that a van shows up, three government officials come out, announce there will be a meeting, everyone has to show up, everybody shows up, they get lectured about how they’re supposed to live together, then the guy disappears and then they get on with living together – or not. And there is much more to it than that. The reason that people are living together, without violence to a large degree, the fact that people are in jail or out of jail – all that has to do with policies, which are another story.
Your second book is actually the work of a human rights agency.
Yes, there’s an organisation called African Rights that I admire, run by a woman called Rakiya Omar. She is Somalian by background and she had worked for Human Rights Watch and had had a falling out with them about their policy on the American operations in Somalia – which of course just preceded the Rwandan genocide. And she started her own organisation with Alex de Waal, who is perhaps better known as a writer about Darfur. And she really made it her mission, in the immediate aftermath of the genocide, to start documenting the experiences of survivors. She recorded the experiences of everybody she could talk to, but typically she focused on survivors. And, while other human rights organisations have largely devoted themselves to holding the post-genocide government to account for its treatment of accused perpetrators of genocide, and for its various shortcomings, African Rights has kept its eye on the injustices suffered by the victims of the genocide – not just at the time, but in the aftermath of the massacres. Rakiya Omar wrote one of the first books that came out after the genocide, and it’s almost entirely an oral history. It’s a huge fat book and everyone just calls it ‘the yellow book’. Death, Despair and Defiance was a tremendous documentation effort.
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Philip Gourevitch is editor of the Paris Review, a staff writer at the New Yorker, and an author whose books include "We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with our Families", an account of the Rwandan genocide that left 800,000 dead in 100 days.
