We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families by Philip Gourevitch Page B

that made me act with such resolution,” he would recall. “It was without doubt the will to give the people back their dignity. And it was probably just as much the desire to put down the arrogance and expose the duplicity of a basically oppressive and unjust aristocracy.”
    That legitimate grievances lie behind a revolution does not, however, ensure that the revolutionary order will be just. In early 1960, Colonel Logiest staged a coup d’état by executive fiat, replacing Tutsi chiefs with Hutu chiefs. Communal elections were held at midyear, and with Hutus presiding over the polling stations, Hutus won at least ninety percent of the top posts. By then, more than twenty thousand Tutsis had been displaced from their homes, and that number kept growing rapidly as new Hutu leaders organized violence against Tutsis or simply arrested them arbitrarily, to assert their authority and to snatch Tutsi property. Among the stream of Tutsi refugees who began fleeing into exile was the Mwami.
    “The revolution is over,” Colonel Logiest announced in October, at the installation of a provisional government led by Grégoire Kayibanda, one of the original authors of the Hutu Manifesto, who gave a speech proclaiming: “Democracy has vanquished feudalism.” Logiest also gave a speech, and apparently he was feeling magnanimous in victory, because he issued this prophetic caution: “It will not be a democracy if it is not equally successful in respecting the rights of minorities … . A country in which justice loses this fundamental quality prepares the worst disorders and its own collapse.” But that was not the spirit of the revolution over which Logiest had presided.
    To be sure, nobody in Rwanda in the late 1950s had offered an alternative to a tribal construction of politics. The colonial state and the colonial church had made that almost inconceivable, and although the Belgians switched ethnic sides on the eve of independence, the new order they prepared was merely the old order stood on its head. In January of 1961, the Belgians convened a meeting of Rwanda’s new Hutu leaders, at which the monarchy was officially abolished and Rwanda was declared a republic. The transitional government was nominally based on a power-sharing arrangement between Hutu and Tutsi parties, but a few months later a UN commission reported that the Rwandan revolution had, in fact, “brought about the racial dictatorship of one party” and simply replaced “one type of oppressive regime with another.” The report also warned of the possibility “that some day we will witness violent reactions on the part of the Tutsis.” The Belgians didn’t much care. Rwanda was granted full independence in 1962, and Grégoire Kayibanda was inaugurated as President.
    So Hutu dictatorship masqueraded as popular democracy, and Rwanda’s power struggles became an internal affair of the Hutu elite, very much as the feuds among royal Tutsi clans had been in the past. Rwanda’s revolutionaries had become what the writer V. S. Naipaul calls postcolonial “mimic men,” who reproduce the abuses against which they rebelled, while ignoring the fact that their past masters were ultimately banished by those they enchained. President Kayibanda had almost certainly read Louis de Lacger’s famous history of Rwanda. But instead of Lacger’s idea of a Rwandan people unified by “national sentiment,” Kayibanda spoke of Rwanda as “two nations in one state.”
    Genesis identifies the first murder as a fratricide. The motive is political—the elimination of a perceived rival. When God asks what happened, Cain offers his notoriously barbed lie: “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?” The shock in the story is not the murder, which begins and ends in one sentence, but Cain’s shamelessness and the leniency of God’s punishment. For killing his brother, Cain is condemned to a life as “a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.” When he protests, “Whoever