Writing Assignment

THE

NEW YORKER

AFTER THE GENOCIDE When a people murders up to a million fellow-countrymen, what does it mean to survive？

By Philip Gourevitch

Decimation means the killing of every tenth person in a population, and in the spring and early summer of 1994 a program of massacres decimated the Republic of Rwanda. Although the killing was low-tech—performed largely by machete— it was carried out at dazzling speed: of an original population of seven million seven hundred thousand, at least eight hundred thousand were killed in just a hundred days. By comparison, Pol Pot's slaughter of a million Cambodians in four years looks amateurish, and the bloodletting in the former Yugoslavia measures up as little more than a neighborhood riot. The dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust. Members of the Hutu majority group began massacring the Tutsi minority in early April, and at the end of the month dead Tutsis were easier to find in Rwanda than live Tutsis. The hunt continued until mid-July, when a rebel army conquered Rwanda and brought the massacres to a halt. That October, a United Nations Commission of Experts found that the "concerted, planned, systematic and methodical" acts of "mass extermination perpetrated by Hutu elements against the Tutsi group"in Rwaxnda "constitute genocide." (This week, the International Tribunal for Rwanda is expected to hand down its first indictment of Rwandans charged with participation in the genocide.） Hutus in Rwanda had been massacring Tutsis on and off since the waning days of Belgian colonial rule, in the late fifties.These state-sanctioned killings were generally referred to as "work." or "clearing the bush."The current crisis was triggered in 1990.