06/15/2016
“It has happened. So it can happen again.” Philip Gourevitch on genocide
“It has happened. So it can happen again.” Philip Gourevitch on genocide We live in an era of genocides. Author Philip Gourevitch is one of its experts, probing how genocide happens, how the murderers rationalize their participation, and how they live with themselves later. With his new research, he reports the on the survivors, who […]
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[Music]
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This is KZSU, Stanford.
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Welcome to entitled opinions.
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My name is Robert Harrison.
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We're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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[Music]
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When the bears are most active, prowling the land, feeding on salmon, engaging in their
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or sign mating games, that's when entitled opinions goes into hibernation to reconnect
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with the spirit world.
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We'll wake up again sometime around the winter solstice when the bears seek out their
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slumber caves.
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And this is a roundabout way of saying that entitled opinions will be going on hiatus
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shortly, and that will return to the air sometime in early January, keeping in mind that
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the future is uncertain and the end is always near.
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I'm especially happy to have with me in the studio today a writer whom I admire, Philip
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Gourevich, who has been the Stein visiting writer in Stanford's creative writing program
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for the past six months.
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Philip Gourevich is well known to those of you who read the New Yorker magazine, where he
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has been a long time contributor and staff writer.
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He is the author of three books, The Ballad of Abu Ghreib, 2008, a cold case 2001, and we wish
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to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, stories from Rwanda,
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1998.
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The latter is a book about the Rwanda massacres of 1994 and their aftermath.
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It has received a number of well-deserved literary awards, and during his residence at Stanford,
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Philip has been working on finishing a sequel to that book, which will be coming out
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sometime next year.
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Nighted by the French Republican 2010, Philip Gourevich is a fellow Shouvalier de
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L'Orth de Zad de L'Itz, he and I also share in common a connection to Cornell University.
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We overlap there in the 1980s when Philip was an undergraduate and I was a graduate
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student, so it is a real pleasure to welcome him to entitled opinions, Philip, thanks for joining
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us today.
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It is good to be with you, Robert.
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I have been reading your remarkable book.
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We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, stories from
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Rwanda.
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My impression is that this is a literary work that combines first-person journalistic investigation,
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stories and the voices of both survivors and perpetrators of the Rwanda massacres.
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A history of the tutus and tutuses and Rwanda political analysis, social psychology perhaps,
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and also critical reflection all woven together in an unusually coherent narrative.
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I suppose one could call this kind of writing creative nonfiction, but that would not be
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very helpful.
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Do you agree that there is not a well-defined category or genre for this kind of writing?
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Yeah, I do.
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I think broadly speaking, there isn't an English word that really works for it to some extent
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what I do could be called reportage, which tends to mean what nowadays is called long-form
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reported nonfiction writing.
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Like a lot of people who get categorized as nonfiction, I don't love the term nonfiction.
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It defines something by what it isn't.
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It says it's not fiction, but there's a lot that is not fiction.
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There are many, many more categories.
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There's no word that's as good as the novel is for the huge range of fictional undertakings
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that are good books of fiction.
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I guess I'd like to think that I write books that are based on reporting that are fact-checkable
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that are drawn from intensely close observation and a lot of interviews.
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And they're a kind of hybrid form.
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They're not all the same mix, but I feel that we've got a lot of instruments and forms that
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are available to us in the nonfiction broadly orchestra.
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And there's no reason that we should restrict ourself when we are using the methods
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of journalism to acquire and process our material to write.
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Writing is still a big broad undertaking.
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So there's memoir, there's first person, travelogue, there's hard reporting, there's
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investigative work, there's expose, there's essay writing, there's something akin to
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elements of oral history, which is to say a mixing of voices as well as sub-genre's.
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And all of that to the simple end, or a very complex end of trying to tell a complicated
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story in a way that is as interesting to read as it is to dig into as a reporter.
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Well that's the challenge because it is a complicated story that you undertook in that
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book of years of 1998 and it's the one that I've just finished reading so it's fresh
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in my mind.
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If you don't mind, I'll try to use that as the case study in particular.
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And a number of decisions had to be made by you, the author, about how to present that
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complicated story in a way that combined all sorts of different elements that included
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reporting in empirical fact checkable reporting, but also the narratives of the people that
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you interviewed, the recent as well as long term history of the region and so forth.
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And it's not, I think it takes a certain kind of literary creativity to put all these
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things together so that page after page, the reader has a sense that there's a rather,
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not just fluid and certainly not seamless as such, but a way of putting together that
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brings out not just the facts of this complicated history but also the human pathos that
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is, and political, perhaps, tragedy that the whole thing in tail.
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Yeah, I mean some of that happens consciously and some of that happens unconsciously, the
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sort of structuring of the material into the final telling or the telling that you settle
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on in a book or a piece of writing, I was aware that there's a journalistic convention that
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what you need to do to make people grasp things is kind of find a way to simplify them.
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And I don't believe that at all because if something's just obviously complex, the first
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thing that happens when somebody oversimplifies it or simplifies it a great deal is to lose
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your, lose credibility at some level.
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You start to think there must be more to it than that if it were so simple or so,
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containable in a couple of basic concepts.
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It would have been sorted out a long time ago.
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And so the trick is, well, if you tell people this is going to be really complex and
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hard going, that's obviously repellent too.
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And you're dealing one of the challenges I was most conscious of in writing about this
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material as you're dealing with material that is inherently repellent, a story that about
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people killing each other in their communities, people you didn't probably since I was writing
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largely for a non-reuan than audience, people who were, you weren't necessarily aware of
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until calamity brought them to your attention.
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And my feeling as well, if this is really a crime against humanity, as we say, that concerns
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a soul, it is all of our story.
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It happened there.
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How do I get that across?
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How do I draw close to people?
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So a lot of that starts taking shape before you get down to sitting down with a piece of
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paper or a screen.
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It takes place when you're out reporting as you collect the material, as you start to talk
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to people, as you figure out how long you're going to spend with people, how much you're
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going to listen to them.
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And it was always important to me that people's stories should not be anecdotes to illustrate
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a larger thing.
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You see a lot of that in daily newspaper reporting, almost by necessity.
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But you'll have, we know the radio version of it.
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You'll hear a goat and a chicken in the background and a well-wheel cranking.
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And you'll hear that, here's so-and-so with a very foreign sounding name waiting for
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the reins.
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And then that personal disappear and you'll hear an interesting set of facts about the drought.
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And then it'll end with, again, the person scanning the horizon looking for a cloud.
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It's not a person.
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It's not even a story.
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It's an anecdote.
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It's a situation.
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It's a kind of stock photo with a caption in words.
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And I was actually interested in the stories themselves carrying a great deal of it.
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So one has to collect a lot more stories than when you use it in order in a sense to
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figure out how they work and what you don't always know what the material, what you're
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hearing until you've heard it many times in many versions.
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And then you can tell, especially when you do foreign reporting, when you go to a place
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at the beginning, everything's significant.
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Everything's new.
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Everything's like, oh my goodness, I can't believe that I just didn't know that before.
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And I just learned this.
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Oh, it's so fascinating to see what it actually looks like and put that together with
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the stories you've been hearing.
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After a while, you risk getting overly familiar and losing that sense of novelty.
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But you want to balance the two.
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You want to retain that sense of novelty and at the same time not become jaded, but become
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sensitive to what's distinctive about the story and what is universal about it.
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What is it that drew you to the Rwanda, to Rwanda after the massacre?
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Because it begins when you start collecting the stories in a certain sense of reportage,
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but even before the beginning there's a kind of pre-beginning, which is, wait a minute,
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I need to go over there and find out what happened.
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Can you tell us what that deeper motivation was that that initiated this whole quest
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on your part?
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Yeah, I mean, I had been really thinking about writing about two things a little bit in
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a couple of years before that.
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The main one that I was really interested in was now, it's something that's now even more
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relevant, but it's the mass scale of refugee movement on the planet at that point,
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over about 20 million, I think now they're 60 million.
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And both the human drama of that, I had been the year before in 1994, I had been to the
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refugee camps in the South China Sea that still existed with the last of the Vietnamese
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boat people had begun fleeing 20 years before that in the aftermath of the Vietnam one.
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The nobody in the world cared about the care, you know, America was obsessed with the
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Vietnam War and as long as it involved Americans once it involved are abandoned, allies,
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the South Vietnamese who were suddenly putting out to see in rickety boats that story was
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catchy, but it was forgotten quickly.
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And I was curious what becomes of people like in these very long term circumstances, also
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the politics of it in variably political movements arise from such situations, from mass
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long term displacement.
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And then I was also writing about a period of Holocaust commemoration in this country
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in the early 90s that involved the building of the museum in Washington, the release
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of Schindler's list, the Museum of Tolerance as they call it in LA.
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And the kind of what I thought was a false rhetoric of safety that these museums in some
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way immunized us.
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So that our consciousness of what happened 50 years ago and standing strongly against historical
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atrocity somehow protected us or was a safeguard against such things happening now.
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It was never again, is it writ large and sort of put into an American myth that didn't
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make sense to me.
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And then it started to coincide with the Balkan War.
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And then people paid a lot of attention to that because it was in the heart of Europe,
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part of NATO territory, heart of American sphere of influence.
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And then you had this killing in Rwanda that was very poorly understood at the time,
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it happened incredibly fast.
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And then it just sort of disappeared from the news very quickly.
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And I thought of it at that time originally mistakenly as my main interest being the refugee
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story that millions of people had fled and like many people I understood that people had
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fled genocide meant that they were people who were fearing that they would be killed in
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the genocide as opposed to people who were feeling that they would be associated with it
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afterwards because they were with the Hutu majority that mostly fled that they were basically
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told to flee by the killers who had previously told them to kill.
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And so that was what drew me the sense that there's this enormous event happened that
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we're telling ourselves that we stand against these things and that it wouldn't happen,
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that we had done nothing much to stop it.
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In fact, we had gotten out of the way.
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Even as we were telling ourselves, we would never put up with such a thing again.
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And that a story like this can't possibly be over, that the question of how on earth do
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you live with this, both in the most local sense.
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And in the broader sense, all our stories we tell ourselves about our human humanity.
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That was all floating around in there at the same time as I had no real idea about the
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particulars until I went reporting.
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So let's remind our listeners, some of whom know some of the basic facts of what happened
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in 1994 and Rwanda, where you had a country made up of two dominant, I mean, from what I
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gather, there's actually three different groups, I don't know if they're ethnically
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distinct or not.
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You claim that they're defined as ethnographic groups of store in the last century because
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of course that's not how they define themselves.
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So when they had, Rwanda is one of the few places in Africa that basically existed in
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roughly its current borders in pre-colonial times.
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It's not a conglomerate of many, many, many smaller kingdoms that were forced together
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by the colonial powers.
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It was consolidating in the century before even more towards what it is now.
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And there were these groups and there's no written record, there was no alphabet in Rwanda
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prior to colonization.
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So there's no exact, you can't go back and look at sources from that time with great
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certainty, you can look at sources that were recorded subsequently from that time, but of course
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you always have to try to factor out the interests.
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But it's clear that they weren't races and ethnicities in the way that European race science
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very soon defined them and codified them and favored the Totsim minority who had a role
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as a kind of traditional aristocracy over the Hutu majority who were broadly speaking the
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peasantry.
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So whether they're defined as casts or classes with ethnic elements or ethnicized by colonial
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politics might be the best way to describe it.
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They had meaning.
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It's not that they were meaningless and that they didn't have any significance.
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But there was not a violent history of violent conflict between Hutu's and Totsim in
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Rwanda.
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Rwanda was first colonized by the Belgians but really very loosely or lightly overall.
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And then the Germans lost it in World War I as a spoil of war to Belgium would basically
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already had Congo next door.
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And it was run by the Belgians until independence in 1960, '61.
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So between the Totsis and the Hutu's and also the pygmy Tua people that they were seemed
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to be more aboriginal and they are less than half a percent of the population.
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So they are not generally factored into this conflict as a significant force although
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their fate was often determined by it.
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So as you point out this is another aspect of your book where we engage in certain especially
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biblical mythology because biblical mythology plays a role in the way the Western colonial
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powers saw the difference between these two groups, the Hutu's and the Totsis in so far
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as you had, well you invoke the story of Cain and Abel where Cain is the farmer,
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Abel, the nomadic herdsman and the Hutu's tended to be agriculturally based whereas
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the Totsis were pastoral and pastoral.
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And this is one way in which they are different culturally but also there are differences
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in their appearances and certain physiognomies that some of the early Westerners from what
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I gather associated with the Hutu's with one of the descendants of Noah and Ham which
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also figures in American slavery discourse that Ham for some reason is seen although if
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you read the Bible it's not entirely clear how this got twisted up into some idea that
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that is the original black person and that the Africans come from Ham, the banished son
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or one of these descendants of Noah.
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It may seem strange and imported to think in terms of biblical stories and it certainly
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was with the so-called hemitic hypothesis which was this type race theory that was brought
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in mostly by British Victorian explorers but then very much adopted by all European colonial
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race scientists and they went through Rwanda with measuring noses and cranial capacities
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in a completely eugenic kind of way that was the idea and the idea was that the Totsis
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being stereotypically at least there are many many many exceptions in trying to guess
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if physiognomy and identity does not work well in Rwanda past a point.
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The idea that they were tall and skinny and lordly and had alkaline noses and sometimes
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slightly more coppery than darker skin and that they also had these huge herds of elegant
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cattle that they had this and they had the court they controlled the kingdom at that point
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for the most part there were hoo-doo chiefs and sub chiefs quite significant numbers of them
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some of whom had some significant cattle also but this is what they saw and then they
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see these sort of you know short as they always described them sort of neagroid flat nose
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stocky black blacker skin that supposedly peasants out there planting you know subsistence
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crops in the fields and they thought well this is the natural order of things people who
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are more akin to us and whom we identify with are overlords over this peasant population
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and they really was that crude and they ascribed to the Totsis a different origin in
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Ethiopia or elsewhere so yes and that became very problematic over time because
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it's not it's highly disputed and certainly there's it's prehistory almost that you get
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to and there just be it's about that endlessly but they all spoke so if you look up for instance
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on the Harvard dictionary of ethnography the definition of ethnic groups by which they're
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going to be defined there's something like a checklist of twenty twenty five factors but
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the main ones are differences of religion differences of diet differences of language differences
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of like marital taboo one of the would you would you wouldn't marry the other group differences
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of social mobility differences of all kinds of customs and all of that and living together
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or isolating from one another at many many different straight up professional you know sort
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of cast none of those applied in all respects they are for all the facts for all the ways
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that they may have had a distinct identity they also shared a national identity which has been
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really crucial in putting the country and creating an ideology behind around the reconstruction
|
| 00:20:55.360 |
of the country which is a nationalist idea which is we are all Rwandans first of all so
|
| 00:21:02.120 |
the modern state of Rwanda it was not founded on this difference between the groups
|
| 00:21:07.520 |
on the contrary that it was it was the two season who to originally were incorporated
|
| 00:21:14.520 |
within you know the larger political pre-colonial state pre-colonial say yes and then what
|
| 00:21:21.320 |
did I mean when we get to the the actual genocide in nineteen ninety four a number of things
|
| 00:21:29.560 |
had led up to it that as you said it happened all very quickly I think within a hundred
|
| 00:21:34.520 |
days up to eight hundred thousand maybe a million tootsies and some of the moderate tootsies
|
| 00:21:41.600 |
were were massacred and it's true that the west we knew what was going on but it happened
|
| 00:21:47.320 |
very quickly but it was very hard to see that coming it wasn't it wasn't I mean there's
|
| 00:21:52.800 |
a there's a debate as to whether or not it was planned and obviously when you say planned
|
| 00:21:58.840 |
you say somebody says we'll show me the plan where did somebody plan this and I would say
|
| 00:22:03.400 |
that it's not clear that anybody planned exactly what we saw but it's absolutely clear that
|
| 00:22:07.840 |
it was prepared that if one must be precise about the words this was long the the patterns
|
| 00:22:14.360 |
of behavior the ways of killing the license to kill was very much part of the political
|
| 00:22:21.960 |
culture of Rwanda since nineteen fifty nine when you had the beginning of the upheaval
|
| 00:22:28.200 |
that led to independence which was a movement amongst who to leaders to redress the colonial
|
| 00:22:38.560 |
imbalance and preferential treatment of tootsies which of course many of the tootsies being
|
| 00:22:42.600 |
told that they were superior had thoroughly subscribed to it's not as if there's a
|
| 00:22:46.760 |
no complicity with that power but they also did to survive it was it was the way the
|
| 00:22:52.160 |
system worked and they didn't have a lot of agency at that time to necessarily change
|
| 00:22:56.560 |
it there was then of course resistance by the monarchy to being overthrown and the Belgians
|
| 00:23:04.240 |
basically switch sides dramatically in the late fifties early sixties from supporting
|
| 00:23:09.680 |
the tootsie oppression of who to to a kind of not they did in the name of majority
|
| 00:23:15.720 |
inism because who to constituted roughly eighty five percent of the population so it
|
| 00:23:20.880 |
seemed like this was some kind of democratization but in fact what they did is they created
|
| 00:23:25.080 |
an ethnic invert and inverse of the sort of colonial apartheid to a post colonial apartheid
|
| 00:23:31.400 |
and it was all about who to politics it wasn't about some other kind of idea and you
|
| 00:23:36.880 |
had quotas and you had a lot of violence you had tens of thousands of people killed
|
| 00:23:41.000 |
between fifty nine and sixty three you had hundreds of thousands who fled into exile
|
| 00:23:45.680 |
to tootsies and in many ways in exactly the same way you saw it in ninety four just
|
| 00:23:51.520 |
with lesser numbers and and less of a totalizing slaughter it was not necessarily an extermination
|
| 00:23:58.840 |
it was closer to what we called in the Balkans ethnic cleansing i.e. killing towards
|
| 00:24:03.920 |
expulsion killing towards disempowerment and expulsion and defeat but they were left usually
|
| 00:24:12.680 |
there was more property destruction and expulsion going on during that period but in nineteen
|
| 00:24:17.600 |
sixty three the massacres and this was two years after independence really was formalized
|
| 00:24:23.560 |
they were described in lemond as you know the genocide birchren rustle called at the worst
|
| 00:24:28.080 |
case of genocide we've seen since the european killing of the jews it was not ambiguous
|
| 00:24:32.720 |
what was going on and it was structured with the idea that this is not rogue peasants
|
| 00:24:40.280 |
being sort of allowed to take out old vendettas but actually being encouraged and mobilized
|
| 00:24:44.320 |
towards doing it and being rewarded for doing it rather than penalized for doing it that you saw
|
| 00:24:50.240 |
again when when it happened in ninety four and in both cases significantly though there
|
| 00:24:56.320 |
many differences of the exact political moment it was a way for when there was sort of contest
|
| 00:25:08.600 |
for political power amongst who to leaders
|
| 00:25:13.240 |
it was the movement towards the extreme we will unify our people around the fear of
|
| 00:25:18.560 |
a common enemy and with violence
|
| 00:25:21.000 |
uh... and that way we say why are we struggling with each other when we can be eliminating
|
| 00:25:26.800 |
these people who will take advantage of that otherwise and so the movement that became
|
| 00:25:31.000 |
who to power in ninety four uh... arose
|
| 00:25:34.040 |
uh... and and and that's a that's where the feeling that there's a long history to this
|
| 00:25:38.920 |
it's not a long history in the sense of ancient at a vistic hatreds at all it's a political
|
| 00:25:44.200 |
a modern political history but of several generations duration by the time that uh...
|
| 00:25:49.320 |
it happened these things don't happen overnight spontaneously
|
| 00:25:52.440 |
no they don't it's also
|
| 00:25:54.760 |
the idea that
|
| 00:25:56.440 |
many in the west had that
|
| 00:25:58.280 |
this wasn't at a vistic ancient
|
| 00:26:02.600 |
hatred between two ethnic groups
|
| 00:26:05.480 |
doesn't isn't born out at all by the facts that there's a
|
| 00:26:10.160 |
extraordinarily well ordered methodical state sponsored program
|
| 00:26:16.160 |
that uh... enlisted the people
|
| 00:26:19.080 |
many of them against their own will
|
| 00:26:21.400 |
figuring that each one each who to had to
|
| 00:26:25.200 |
kill a tootsy so that everyone will be implicated
|
| 00:26:28.320 |
and in such a way to agree i mean that the problem with with putting it like that
|
| 00:26:32.280 |
only is that it suggests that they all did whereas in fact there was a
|
| 00:26:35.960 |
obviously there was a the largest category where people who
|
| 00:26:39.320 |
were what neither resisted nor to part
|
| 00:26:42.440 |
uh... there was room for that uh... but an awful lot of people
|
| 00:26:46.520 |
had to take part
|
| 00:26:47.800 |
uh... for it to happen at the speed it didn't and when we talk about a hundred
|
| 00:26:51.720 |
days between april six thin
|
| 00:26:54.440 |
early july
|
| 00:26:55.840 |
most of the tootsies in the country were killed in april and may
|
| 00:26:59.080 |
i mean basically a million people were killed in six weeks by hand
|
| 00:27:02.920 |
uh... by hand held tools uh... in their communities
|
| 00:27:07.160 |
uh... and the
|
| 00:27:08.640 |
the really interesting uh...
|
| 00:27:11.560 |
thing i've realized is that you know during the we all knew that obviously it
|
| 00:27:14.680 |
involved a whole lot of mobilization killing by ordinary people
|
| 00:27:18.960 |
uh... and at the same time
|
| 00:27:22.320 |
the
|
| 00:27:23.480 |
obvious
|
| 00:27:24.640 |
journalistic and historical and legalistic
|
| 00:27:27.680 |
political
|
| 00:27:29.080 |
emphasis in the early years of the research on roanda or just trying
|
| 00:27:32.400 |
reporting on roana was on showing how the state structure had organized
|
| 00:27:36.640 |
this that it wasn't just some random
|
| 00:27:39.160 |
cats and dogs kind of situation
|
| 00:27:41.560 |
uh... and
|
| 00:27:43.720 |
now what you see much more in roanda is because they've had a whole system
|
| 00:27:48.440 |
of communal trials over the last uh... decade
|
| 00:27:51.440 |
or fifteen years
|
| 00:27:53.080 |
uh... there's a much clearer uh...
|
| 00:27:55.920 |
body of information about how local participation took place also
|
| 00:28:00.360 |
and how on the one hand it was pressure from above but also there was a lot of
|
| 00:28:04.440 |
uh... agency from below
|
| 00:28:06.240 |
and once the license was created
|
| 00:28:08.560 |
once it's allowed
|
| 00:28:10.560 |
people took a lot of initiative not everybody
|
| 00:28:13.640 |
and
|
| 00:28:15.080 |
people emerged to where leaders and more avid
|
| 00:28:18.320 |
within each community
|
| 00:28:19.840 |
but at every level of society and that's also crucial because you saw
|
| 00:28:23.880 |
priests killing parishioners doctors killing patients in the hospitals you saw
|
| 00:28:27.680 |
at the university students killing
|
| 00:28:29.560 |
uh... their fellow students and professors killing their fellow professors
|
| 00:28:32.800 |
uh... so when people looked around to sort of say who is the authority that stands
|
| 00:28:36.160 |
against this who is the more not just legal authority but also moral authority
|
| 00:28:39.880 |
communal authority
|
| 00:28:41.240 |
uh... here and there there were few brave acts of resistance
|
| 00:28:45.520 |
some of those people were killed for resisting
|
| 00:28:48.080 |
uh... but for the most part there was uh... very high level of capitulation
|
| 00:28:52.680 |
uh... that then
|
| 00:28:54.560 |
added that sense of license below
|
| 00:28:58.040 |
that ends up
|
| 00:28:59.680 |
being profoundly demoralizing
|
| 00:29:01.920 |
however
|
| 00:29:02.920 |
because there was no higher authority
|
| 00:29:05.600 |
either political or spiritual
|
| 00:29:07.520 |
uh...
|
| 00:29:09.880 |
it uh...
|
| 00:29:12.600 |
it's hard to draw lessons
|
| 00:29:14.560 |
from what happened in Rwanda that
|
| 00:29:18.160 |
lead to
|
| 00:29:19.360 |
the sense that we can prevent this from happening in the future
|
| 00:29:22.760 |
where you have a state that has uh...
|
| 00:29:26.600 |
the means
|
| 00:29:27.920 |
to
|
| 00:29:29.080 |
encourage this this kind of
|
| 00:29:31.800 |
and genocide which as and you write the neutron bomb it has become
|
| 00:29:35.720 |
obviously we don't need it at atomic bomb or neutron bomb
|
| 00:29:38.800 |
you can have the most low tech means
|
| 00:29:41.600 |
that
|
| 00:29:42.640 |
incredibly rapidly as long as there is some
|
| 00:29:46.640 |
kind of complicity with state sponsored agencies that that the this kind of
|
| 00:29:50.320 |
thinking happen
|
| 00:29:51.400 |
you know in in in a hurry
|
| 00:29:53.920 |
uh... it is demoralizing on on many levels i mean uh...
|
| 00:29:58.960 |
the desire to extract uh... a lesson
|
| 00:30:02.720 |
that
|
| 00:30:05.800 |
offers us a sense of greater security
|
| 00:30:08.160 |
after the shock of
|
| 00:30:10.200 |
what happened in rwanda and and seeing this human capability
|
| 00:30:15.520 |
uh... or
|
| 00:30:17.040 |
various ways of at least reassuring ourselves that if you set up society
|
| 00:30:19.840 |
differently and never happen here
|
| 00:30:21.680 |
uh... and people would sometimes ask me well do you think this could happen
|
| 00:30:24.720 |
anywhere that what you're saying
|
| 00:30:26.680 |
and i would say yes i do i don't think it can happen anywhere tomorrow
|
| 00:30:30.040 |
that's where the preparing preparation in the long you know you need a system
|
| 00:30:33.560 |
that tends towards that
|
| 00:30:35.560 |
uh... highly monolithic state
|
| 00:30:37.920 |
uh...
|
| 00:30:38.680 |
it makes a big difference here if the radio started broadcasting
|
| 00:30:42.680 |
uh... that we should kill
|
| 00:30:45.120 |
whatever subgroup of people
|
| 00:30:47.240 |
uh... and especially neighbors that you were living amongst and so forth that you
|
| 00:30:51.240 |
had previously had recently good relationships with which
|
| 00:30:54.360 |
both killers and survivors described that to have been the case i don't
|
| 00:30:57.400 |
think that's just uh...
|
| 00:30:58.700 |
a slightly nostalgic uh... thing in within small farming communities people
|
| 00:31:02.960 |
spoke with each other yet we're intermarried we had
|
| 00:31:05.360 |
that suddenly
|
| 00:31:06.560 |
we were being put to death
|
| 00:31:10.160 |
you would have people chase a while the radio started to do that i think i'll
|
| 00:31:12.920 |
change the channel
|
| 00:31:14.200 |
well if you don't have a channel to change
|
| 00:31:16.400 |
which in rwanda there wasn't some other channels and no no no let's not do that
|
| 00:31:20.920 |
there was no such channel
|
| 00:31:22.360 |
uh... so
|
| 00:31:24.320 |
it requires
|
| 00:31:26.120 |
along
|
| 00:31:27.520 |
time or a long period of all of those processes and structures and
|
| 00:31:32.440 |
habits of control
|
| 00:31:34.920 |
and uh... of a bad leadership mean leadership matters that's one of the
|
| 00:31:38.800 |
things that does matter leadership can make a big difference
|
| 00:31:41.600 |
uh... it may not even even authoritarian leadership as you have in rwanda now
|
| 00:31:46.040 |
uh... some people want to say it's exactly the same as it was before
|
| 00:31:49.160 |
and it's certainly authoritarian and you don't have free exp
|
| 00:31:51.600 |
freedom of speech at the level that we think of we certainly don't have a
|
| 00:31:54.360 |
free press in any sense that we would recognize
|
| 00:31:56.880 |
uh... or in
|
| 00:31:58.200 |
pretty much any sense
|
| 00:31:59.480 |
uh... but you don't have anybody ordering anybody to kill
|
| 00:32:03.320 |
and what would happen if that happened
|
| 00:32:05.720 |
uh... i don't know
|
| 00:32:07.680 |
uh... many people say that
|
| 00:32:09.200 |
they've learned some lesson from it
|
| 00:32:11.240 |
uh... and i think many people have
|
| 00:32:14.240 |
uh... but the tendency is going the other way
|
| 00:32:17.360 |
uh... as far as actual organized communal violence goes
|
| 00:32:21.120 |
but i think people have this potential
|
| 00:32:22.920 |
uh... i was very struck and i used these two quotes next to each other in the
|
| 00:32:26.040 |
book at one point that when you read uh... when it was really primo levees
|
| 00:32:29.460 |
uh... survival and ouchwets
|
| 00:32:31.360 |
uh... which he wrote in the years immediately after his return
|
| 00:32:34.480 |
uh... from the camp
|
| 00:32:35.760 |
uh... he describes he has the line at some point basically saying
|
| 00:32:39.840 |
uh... we know that this can never happen again
|
| 00:32:42.520 |
uh... it has happened
|
| 00:32:44.960 |
and that has showed us what we must
|
| 00:32:47.920 |
not allow ever let happen
|
| 00:32:50.000 |
years later when he wrote the book that at least in english is called the
|
| 00:32:52.420 |
drowned in the saved
|
| 00:32:54.680 |
uh... which was uh... collection of some of his
|
| 00:32:56.840 |
will essays towards the end of his life
|
| 00:32:59.440 |
he had uh... an essay
|
| 00:33:01.160 |
uh... in there and he was talking in that book among other things about the
|
| 00:33:03.760 |
enormous frustration of trying to tell the story over time in a way that made
|
| 00:33:07.320 |
that made people understand it
|
| 00:33:08.840 |
and he would even go and talk to Italian school groups and talk to children
|
| 00:33:12.040 |
and children would often say well
|
| 00:33:13.920 |
well look you know you didn't try hard enough to escape describe again to
|
| 00:33:16.840 |
me the camp show me how i can show you you should have gone that
|
| 00:33:19.560 |
and he said that just means they don't understand what being totally caught
|
| 00:33:22.640 |
is
|
| 00:33:23.400 |
you know and the inadequacy of language even that when he said we were freezing
|
| 00:33:27.440 |
you know
|
| 00:33:28.200 |
uh... people say that their apartment in winter all the time on a cold-tear-in-winter
|
| 00:33:31.520 |
but he he was saying that we were freezing
|
| 00:33:33.840 |
you know that meant people died next to you of cold
|
| 00:33:36.960 |
and and all of that and then he he has a line where says
|
| 00:33:40.600 |
it has happened
|
| 00:33:41.720 |
so it can happen again
|
| 00:33:43.480 |
it can happen anywhere
|
| 00:33:45.520 |
and i actually think that's the true or
|
| 00:33:48.400 |
uh...
|
| 00:33:49.720 |
dark lesson of these things which is this is a potential in humankind
|
| 00:33:53.560 |
i don't think it means it needs to happen or will happen repeatedly
|
| 00:33:56.840 |
but i sometimes even make the analogy with
|
| 00:33:59.560 |
when we have a new medical
|
| 00:34:02.240 |
horror show up in our midst a new virus uh...
|
| 00:34:05.640 |
Ebola or when
|
| 00:34:07.080 |
h_i_v_ started to appear
|
| 00:34:09.440 |
we don't think well we've seen a few cases of that now we don't have to worry
|
| 00:34:13.040 |
about it anymore because we'll know we think this could explode this some
|
| 00:34:17.160 |
this or something like it will keep
|
| 00:34:19.200 |
per
|
| 00:34:20.420 |
is a permanent
|
| 00:34:22.320 |
potential in our condition
|
| 00:34:25.040 |
and i think ruewanda makes that
|
| 00:34:27.360 |
clear
|
| 00:34:28.440 |
and one of the challenges of course overcoming the great desire we all have to
|
| 00:34:32.480 |
say
|
| 00:34:33.000 |
no no those are far away people who are different than us
|
| 00:34:36.320 |
therefore what
|
| 00:34:37.840 |
went on there
|
| 00:34:38.880 |
what it doesn't tell us much about ourselves
|
| 00:34:41.360 |
that's where the writing comes into break that down and make you make them
|
| 00:34:45.280 |
uh... as familiar to us as they are as soon as you are there talking to
|
| 00:34:48.760 |
anybody
|
| 00:34:49.440 |
well that's the that's the breakthrough of your book say you really do break
|
| 00:34:52.680 |
down
|
| 00:34:53.400 |
that uh...
|
| 00:34:54.480 |
barrier that
|
| 00:34:56.000 |
their world is a different world in our world
|
| 00:34:58.680 |
far from it
|
| 00:35:00.840 |
and yet what is also again going back to the demore
|
| 00:35:03.880 |
demorellization is that uh...
|
| 00:35:06.800 |
lecture you gave a hear a stand for you
|
| 00:35:09.560 |
quoted uh...
|
| 00:35:11.240 |
william gattice where he said if you want justice you get it in the next world
|
| 00:35:15.120 |
in this world you have
|
| 00:35:16.320 |
the law
|
| 00:35:17.680 |
and
|
| 00:35:19.680 |
you see that would be edifying if you say okay as long as we have good laws
|
| 00:35:23.280 |
and good enforcement of the laws these kind of things will never happen
|
| 00:35:27.480 |
but reading
|
| 00:35:28.840 |
you on what happened one that seems like if it's not the law
|
| 00:35:33.160 |
uh... it certainly wasn't a complete breakdown
|
| 00:35:36.640 |
of the state system
|
| 00:35:38.480 |
and so it wasn't like a stateless society where law and order had collapsed on
|
| 00:35:42.280 |
the contrary law and order and all the forces at that the sub ten law and order
|
| 00:35:46.600 |
had actually conspired to uh...
|
| 00:35:48.840 |
promote
|
| 00:35:50.120 |
and encourage this thing from happening so that tends to be the case in
|
| 00:35:54.360 |
mass violence really mass political violence
|
| 00:35:58.160 |
obviously there are things like riots
|
| 00:36:00.800 |
most of those are orchestrated to
|
| 00:36:02.560 |
or they require me that people don't just write somebody has to sort of
|
| 00:36:06.400 |
break down certain and also the mob then creates license right because you're
|
| 00:36:10.480 |
not acting alone
|
| 00:36:12.160 |
you're not actually taking initiative you are if anything obeying the energy and
|
| 00:36:17.120 |
the drive of the mob
|
| 00:36:19.160 |
and this is not a mob it's it's the art of mobilizing a population as a mob
|
| 00:36:25.160 |
and i think that's true it's true
|
| 00:36:28.160 |
if you look at the history of the gym crosace which is
|
| 00:36:30.840 |
uh... not exactly now that you can see how the structures of authority
|
| 00:36:36.320 |
create the vigilante justice that you then see
|
| 00:36:39.400 |
uh... that seems to be arising outside the law
|
| 00:36:42.500 |
uh... and the reason i say you know you don't get justice you get the laws
|
| 00:36:45.800 |
i think there's a lot of very high blown talk about justice in amongst human
|
| 00:36:49.280 |
rights types and others
|
| 00:36:50.780 |
who talk about it is if justice were a something we all agree what that is
|
| 00:36:54.600 |
and it's something that we're in a position to attain it's it's it's an ideal and
|
| 00:36:58.520 |
it's very far from the law for better and for worse
|
| 00:37:02.120 |
is an instrument that we write
|
| 00:37:05.160 |
in each time and we adapt it and uh... in a situation like rwanda
|
| 00:37:12.600 |
part of the idea of mass involvement is that no law is going to be adequate to
|
| 00:37:17.320 |
it you can't arrest a mob you can't try a mob so how do you
|
| 00:37:21.120 |
you need to
|
| 00:37:22.640 |
the lock only deal really with individual responsibility
|
| 00:37:25.520 |
we're all very much on guard against collectively couple rising people who
|
| 00:37:29.920 |
uh... are by association in reverse so you don't want to do that
|
| 00:37:34.400 |
and then there's a real dilemma which you see in the aftermath and rwanda
|
| 00:37:37.640 |
which is
|
| 00:37:38.680 |
on the one hand you know that people didn't do this simply of their own
|
| 00:37:41.720 |
initiative
|
| 00:37:42.820 |
even in the local communities with these local trials on the other hand
|
| 00:37:46.880 |
you can't absolve the individual responsibility
|
| 00:37:49.880 |
and so you need to weigh those things which is where you end up with a kind of
|
| 00:37:52.520 |
political settlement around the law you hold them responsible but you maybe
|
| 00:37:55.720 |
don't hold them
|
| 00:37:56.960 |
to the same kind of standards you would if they were a common murderer ten years
|
| 00:37:59.880 |
before
|
| 00:38:00.880 |
they may have killed twenty people
|
| 00:38:02.800 |
and get twelve years in prison
|
| 00:38:04.700 |
under the new system
|
| 00:38:05.920 |
where before they would have been hung
|
| 00:38:08.120 |
for one and and this has to do with your uh...
|
| 00:38:11.960 |
reflections on human human rights organizations in
|
| 00:38:15.640 |
in the
|
| 00:38:16.360 |
talk that you gave a stanford where
|
| 00:38:18.400 |
uh...
|
| 00:38:19.080 |
the obsession with justice is something that
|
| 00:38:22.480 |
you uh... you say that there's a
|
| 00:38:24.600 |
uh... a risk of a historicism that
|
| 00:38:27.080 |
when you're obsessed with
|
| 00:38:29.880 |
justice you freeze
|
| 00:38:31.800 |
moments in time
|
| 00:38:33.120 |
and you extract them from their political the political reality in which
|
| 00:38:37.160 |
they are embedded
|
| 00:38:38.960 |
and
|
| 00:38:40.320 |
you uh... you say that the
|
| 00:38:43.120 |
human that there's a human rights absolutism
|
| 00:38:46.280 |
and that these human rights groups are important in the last universal
|
| 00:38:49.520 |
as organizations still standing
|
| 00:38:52.240 |
and they're neither you know right-wing or left-wing but they take the side of
|
| 00:38:56.160 |
the suffering and demand that human rights abuses be adjudicated as crimes
|
| 00:39:02.240 |
and that uh...
|
| 00:39:04.920 |
there's a certain danger in this because none of us live in an extra
|
| 00:39:08.920 |
state world and therefore
|
| 00:39:11.200 |
without considering the political reality which
|
| 00:39:14.480 |
provoke these kinds of crimes against humanity you might provoke
|
| 00:39:18.100 |
worse atrocities
|
| 00:39:19.960 |
uh... through that adjudication so therefore
|
| 00:39:22.880 |
uh... is justice the
|
| 00:39:26.360 |
absolute highest priority in each case and i think that you're suggesting that
|
| 00:39:31.080 |
in in some cases
|
| 00:39:33.160 |
justice has to
|
| 00:39:35.240 |
not have that sort of priority that human rights i think organizations
|
| 00:39:38.360 |
accord i think everything we've seen in history shows us that justice is just one
|
| 00:39:43.000 |
of the elements one of spires to end
|
| 00:39:45.720 |
uh... redressing past wrongs and past conflict
|
| 00:39:49.640 |
uh... it has a place
|
| 00:39:51.360 |
it uh...
|
| 00:39:52.960 |
it may be a useful instrument
|
| 00:39:56.120 |
but it's very absolutist
|
| 00:39:57.920 |
uh...
|
| 00:40:00.480 |
fact is that people think pretty highly of the way that south africa managed
|
| 00:40:04.840 |
never mind the truth in reconciliation commission simply but the fact that
|
| 00:40:07.960 |
they managed
|
| 00:40:08.960 |
to get through
|
| 00:40:10.920 |
the transition from apartheid to post-apartate with all of its problems
|
| 00:40:15.160 |
nonetheless
|
| 00:40:16.320 |
without massively violent conflict required negotiated settlement
|
| 00:40:20.800 |
it required a settlement in which people on both sides a_n_c_ and
|
| 00:40:25.720 |
the apartheid regime
|
| 00:40:27.000 |
would be uh... given
|
| 00:40:29.520 |
if not amnesty the truth in reconciliation commission steps in and sort of
|
| 00:40:32.960 |
says well you have to account for yourself but you
|
| 00:40:35.080 |
you're not going to
|
| 00:40:36.200 |
pay for it in the same way
|
| 00:40:39.000 |
it allows for people to deal with each other you have to make peace with your
|
| 00:40:42.360 |
enemies
|
| 00:40:43.200 |
and basically
|
| 00:40:44.440 |
justice is a war position
|
| 00:40:46.520 |
it means i must defeat you totally and bring you to trial and it also means that
|
| 00:40:50.680 |
there's a huge conflict like just take a simple situation
|
| 00:40:54.680 |
we want
|
| 00:40:56.000 |
uh...
|
| 00:40:57.680 |
as as sort of the human rights community in the pro democracy community and
|
| 00:41:01.800 |
the nut countries that claim that's an important part of their foreign policy
|
| 00:41:05.240 |
want
|
| 00:41:06.360 |
uh...
|
| 00:41:08.000 |
leaders
|
| 00:41:08.960 |
to step down and have succession from one
|
| 00:41:11.560 |
government to another
|
| 00:41:12.680 |
and to seed power and have transition of power because that's actually the
|
| 00:41:16.080 |
deepest form of stability that a country can get to and that's when you start to
|
| 00:41:19.080 |
build institutions it's always around that
|
| 00:41:22.920 |
on the other hand we want to hold people to account
|
| 00:41:25.880 |
supposedly for
|
| 00:41:27.720 |
all of their offenses
|
| 00:41:29.860 |
on a criminal justice basis
|
| 00:41:32.080 |
which we don't hold ourselves to account doing we sort of shrug will
|
| 00:41:34.920 |
like well who can really hold the president of the states to account it's
|
| 00:41:37.560 |
part of the price we pay
|
| 00:41:39.040 |
well now part of the price we pay is that we want transitions here
|
| 00:41:42.320 |
if if we
|
| 00:41:43.960 |
felt that any time you step down as the most powerful leader in the world
|
| 00:41:47.960 |
you're going to go to jail
|
| 00:41:49.720 |
because the other power party would now prosecute you sooner or later
|
| 00:41:54.280 |
and we would not protect you against prosecutions abroad
|
| 00:41:58.360 |
you'd have a big difference in the way people made their calculations these
|
| 00:42:01.600 |
are too conflicting
|
| 00:42:03.240 |
urges on our part
|
| 00:42:05.000 |
please step down
|
| 00:42:06.720 |
for the good of your society
|
| 00:42:08.600 |
and please go to jail for the good of our ideal abstract ideas of justice which we
|
| 00:42:13.000 |
don't apply to ourselves
|
| 00:42:14.880 |
uh... so i feel like there's
|
| 00:42:17.240 |
uh...
|
| 00:42:18.560 |
again this is where we we over simplify other people's history
|
| 00:42:22.160 |
and apply these rules elsewhere
|
| 00:42:24.440 |
instead of taking the the more interesting idea that like
|
| 00:42:27.880 |
we need to see how
|
| 00:42:31.080 |
on earth you could make
|
| 00:42:33.920 |
a safer
|
| 00:42:35.080 |
more
|
| 00:42:36.640 |
a better balance over time does that sometimes mean
|
| 00:42:40.360 |
that one will live with
|
| 00:42:43.160 |
both in the short term
|
| 00:42:44.840 |
and you know for how long you don't know
|
| 00:42:47.000 |
did they have to forgive all the Germans
|
| 00:42:49.000 |
that they forgive almost nobody went to court in Germany
|
| 00:42:52.080 |
enduring after denotification
|
| 00:42:54.320 |
uh... people hold up near and burned near and burned was not some kind of
|
| 00:42:56.920 |
ideal and nowadays were not allowed to hang people i'm not saying we should be
|
| 00:42:59.920 |
able to hang people saying you know what when people idealize that that was
|
| 00:43:02.440 |
actually
|
| 00:43:03.640 |
a choice between we could take these twenty-nazis outback and shoot them or we could
|
| 00:43:06.720 |
put them on trial and then take them out back and hang up
|
| 00:43:09.520 |
which is what they did
|
| 00:43:10.960 |
and it then we create a record that people talk about that like it was
|
| 00:43:14.560 |
uh... some fantastic model
|
| 00:43:17.080 |
and it's not a very good model in most cases
|
| 00:43:19.560 |
uh... do you
|
| 00:43:21.860 |
basically incriminate all sides in a conflict without any reflection on
|
| 00:43:25.960 |
which sides uh... you think you would like to have win
|
| 00:43:30.480 |
uh... you'd because we commit a lot of war crimes in the course of
|
| 00:43:33.580 |
war
|
| 00:43:35.120 |
uh... and we don't hold all of those to be the same if we think the cause
|
| 00:43:39.360 |
our cause is good
|
| 00:43:40.700 |
look at a roshima
|
| 00:43:42.500 |
well you know you're saying something quite radical at least from the
|
| 00:43:45.500 |
american
|
| 00:43:46.700 |
psychic point of view
|
| 00:43:48.140 |
justice is a supreme value
|
| 00:43:52.620 |
also i i think among the french also you like you see is a true it's a
|
| 00:43:56.660 |
transcendental and that everything is sacrificed under the name of uh...
|
| 00:44:00.940 |
justice
|
| 00:44:02.180 |
we did a show on albert comi recently with ales caplyn where a
|
| 00:44:05.460 |
perfect job
|
| 00:44:08.100 |
where i i invoke the what come said about the uh...
|
| 00:44:11.220 |
the aljurian war was very conflicted and and that
|
| 00:44:14.540 |
controversial statement
|
| 00:44:16.060 |
that got him into a lot of trouble
|
| 00:44:17.820 |
that if i have to choose between justice and my mother
|
| 00:44:20.460 |
i guess i'll choose my mother
|
| 00:44:22.060 |
which is uh...
|
| 00:44:23.700 |
so anathema
|
| 00:44:24.660 |
to a certain way of the body is the greatest french writer that period of
|
| 00:44:27.860 |
the model
|
| 00:44:29.660 |
but here let me let me uh...
|
| 00:44:32.620 |
go back to an uh... an anecdote
|
| 00:44:35.220 |
in rueanda that you report about these school children
|
| 00:44:38.460 |
who uh... are
|
| 00:44:40.100 |
who to and to see
|
| 00:44:41.820 |
and the who to come in there
|
| 00:44:43.620 |
and they
|
| 00:44:44.620 |
tell
|
| 00:44:45.820 |
the school children to separate themselves according to their groups
|
| 00:44:49.180 |
and those school children actually refused to do that
|
| 00:44:52.240 |
and you call that that dark courage that's what hope looks like in that
|
| 00:44:56.620 |
place and those kind of moments the dark courage that it would take
|
| 00:44:59.600 |
for the
|
| 00:45:01.340 |
those children not to separate themselves and then they themselves were all
|
| 00:45:04.700 |
masochard or many of them they were a masochard and experimentally
|
| 00:45:07.980 |
another words that that this is uh...
|
| 00:45:10.220 |
two years after the jennus three years after sorry it was in i think
|
| 00:45:13.420 |
march of nineteen ninety seven
|
| 00:45:15.480 |
in western rueanda and you basically had a renewal
|
| 00:45:18.680 |
of the of a sort of genocidal guerrilla war
|
| 00:45:22.060 |
uh... infiltrators coming in from congo from the refugee camps and what was
|
| 00:45:26.180 |
and so you know
|
| 00:45:27.860 |
just to become congo again
|
| 00:45:29.620 |
uh... was about to and you had uh...
|
| 00:45:32.720 |
uh... much of the northwest of the country was was was being played by these
|
| 00:45:36.100 |
kinds of
|
| 00:45:36.760 |
basically terra what we would call terrorist attacks
|
| 00:45:39.320 |
and this was uh... some of these who to power gorillas who came into
|
| 00:45:43.260 |
attacked the school and set sort yourselves out
|
| 00:45:45.500 |
uh... and then there was basically who to stand over there to its east
|
| 00:45:47.740 |
and over there was understood that
|
| 00:45:49.580 |
i've learned much more about these attacks uh... in in the recent years and
|
| 00:45:53.300 |
uh... the particular of some of the school of those two there were two school
|
| 00:45:56.940 |
attacks that happened on one
|
| 00:45:59.380 |
uh... of which became more famous than the other
|
| 00:46:01.900 |
uh... and
|
| 00:46:03.660 |
and this is at the young a school in western rueanda
|
| 00:46:06.820 |
and it was actually uh... o_ two girl who was the first one they killed because she
|
| 00:46:10.220 |
said we had you know you know you know who you are
|
| 00:46:13.580 |
uh... and and she was the daughter of somebody was in jail accused of
|
| 00:46:17.020 |
genocide
|
| 00:46:18.460 |
and uh... you know you can't tell us to separate their their note there
|
| 00:46:21.940 |
they're only Rwandans here
|
| 00:46:23.740 |
so this is the
|
| 00:46:25.300 |
uh...
|
| 00:46:26.660 |
it's it's in some ways the idea of the post genocide government
|
| 00:46:31.300 |
uh... it can seem that it's erasing a lot of identity at times for people
|
| 00:46:35.620 |
uh... met tutsi survivors who are totally happy being told were all
|
| 00:46:38.700 |
Rwandans now
|
| 00:46:39.860 |
they say no well you know i was my parents were killed as tutsi don't tell
|
| 00:46:43.140 |
me i'm not one
|
| 00:46:44.420 |
but it's a very very powerful
|
| 00:46:46.860 |
uh... active defiance obviously
|
| 00:46:49.860 |
and obviously above all on the part of those who to students who had the
|
| 00:46:54.620 |
out they had the opportunity to save their necks so is it
|
| 00:46:58.260 |
the case that that the gorilla commander who was
|
| 00:47:02.300 |
allegedly responsible for that massacre is someone who has
|
| 00:47:06.180 |
was subsequently reintegrated into the army
|
| 00:47:08.940 |
and that you managed to get his phone number or is that a different event where
|
| 00:47:12.540 |
he wanted one of these attacks there there are all what's that what's happened is
|
| 00:47:16.420 |
that over the last uh...
|
| 00:47:17.980 |
really almost twenty years now many of the former military uh... and and
|
| 00:47:22.140 |
uh... combatants from
|
| 00:47:23.900 |
from the army that served uh... the genocidal government
|
| 00:47:26.700 |
some of whom were genocidal some of whom were not
|
| 00:47:29.020 |
uh... they were just soldiers
|
| 00:47:30.580 |
have been reintegrated
|
| 00:47:31.980 |
and many of the fighters from the genocidal
|
| 00:47:35.180 |
uh... militia the f_d_l_r_ and its various uh...
|
| 00:47:39.420 |
earlier manifestations in conno
|
| 00:47:41.580 |
also returned to to roanda
|
| 00:47:43.900 |
and uh... were reintegrated if they had genocide crimes so here's what
|
| 00:47:47.960 |
happened in roanda's that was a
|
| 00:47:49.480 |
decade of war inside roanda as well as quite a bit of war outside in conno in
|
| 00:47:53.720 |
the late nineties and early two thousand
|
| 00:47:57.320 |
roanda's had a process for adjudicating the crimes committed in the genocidal
|
| 00:48:02.000 |
nineteen ninety four
|
| 00:48:03.600 |
the crimes
|
| 00:48:04.680 |
of masocharic tutsi civilians
|
| 00:48:06.880 |
during that period
|
| 00:48:09.120 |
all other
|
| 00:48:10.000 |
crimes or atrocities are treated as things that happen in the course of the
|
| 00:48:13.760 |
war
|
| 00:48:14.680 |
and there's a kind of quid pro quo
|
| 00:48:16.480 |
we're not going to hold you to account for that if you reintegrate
|
| 00:48:20.040 |
that's what i'm talking about peacemaking it's an extremely uncomfortable
|
| 00:48:23.200 |
accommodation uh... i didn't
|
| 00:48:25.080 |
rap once mind around but in practical terms
|
| 00:48:27.880 |
it is the reason that there is not open war fair inside the country well
|
| 00:48:31.400 |
exactly that that's where the human rights uh...
|
| 00:48:34.360 |
absolutism on justice it it's iraq and silv all with that that kind of uh...
|
| 00:48:39.400 |
and that's why i don't think it's that radical idea it's radical to maybe to
|
| 00:48:42.520 |
say it out loud and to say it as like we are but we're to purist on human
|
| 00:48:47.360 |
rights but no politician finds this a radical idea
|
| 00:48:50.240 |
it's not actually how policy makers in washington think they may pay lip
|
| 00:48:54.120 |
service to this
|
| 00:48:55.280 |
and in fact americans
|
| 00:48:56.840 |
you said we have this ideal of justice
|
| 00:48:59.080 |
but it's often uh... a very vengeful idea of justice
|
| 00:49:02.920 |
uh... we actually have a very strong idea of vengeance
|
| 00:49:06.000 |
uh... and that's the frontier justice that's the gun culture feeds into that
|
| 00:49:10.280 |
uh... and it also feeds into
|
| 00:49:12.760 |
the work i did it up with great baron the abel great uh...
|
| 00:49:17.000 |
prison guards
|
| 00:49:18.120 |
you know many of them why were they
|
| 00:49:20.200 |
why they enlisted
|
| 00:49:21.920 |
you know because they hit our buildings
|
| 00:49:24.120 |
and and there was and and when and then they thought what what what they
|
| 00:49:27.480 |
were happy to be going over and being told they were going to be
|
| 00:49:29.560 |
liberating people from a terrible time but when they found themselves instead
|
| 00:49:32.760 |
in it and sort of running torture chambers
|
| 00:49:35.560 |
the idea was always what look what they did to us or what they would do to us
|
| 00:49:39.480 |
and
|
| 00:49:41.560 |
one of the things that's very striking in real wonders that from very early on
|
| 00:49:44.960 |
even against tremendous resistance uh... from
|
| 00:49:48.600 |
and healthy resistance from survivors
|
| 00:49:51.680 |
uh... because it was too fast
|
| 00:49:52.960 |
there was this talk of we're going to have to have some kind of system
|
| 00:49:57.040 |
of forgiveness
|
| 00:49:58.360 |
whatever that meant
|
| 00:49:59.800 |
or forgetting
|
| 00:50:01.720 |
both
|
| 00:50:02.840 |
both uh... you quote someone saying that if we keep a judicating will never
|
| 00:50:06.280 |
build a nation
|
| 00:50:07.640 |
and integrate the army so at a certain point it's a the adjudication as is
|
| 00:50:11.880 |
has to come to an end
|
| 00:50:13.360 |
even if it's at the cost of not
|
| 00:50:16.860 |
executing full justice
|
| 00:50:18.880 |
there is no full justice possible in a situation like this there simply isn't
|
| 00:50:22.200 |
the nature of the scale of the crime as such
|
| 00:50:24.600 |
what would full justice mean after world war two what would full justice
|
| 00:50:27.520 |
mean after
|
| 00:50:29.800 |
uh... boston you know the indian you know you so then you have select if you
|
| 00:50:32.760 |
pick out certain political leaders who are simply
|
| 00:50:35.180 |
beyond the pale you know
|
| 00:50:36.720 |
uh... they become both
|
| 00:50:38.640 |
uh...
|
| 00:50:39.760 |
everyone can more or less agree that they had a disproportionate hand in all of
|
| 00:50:43.040 |
this but they also become symbolic
|
| 00:50:44.960 |
uh... and
|
| 00:50:46.320 |
sometimes you get a little bit of a cross section of pick out a few smaller
|
| 00:50:49.160 |
people
|
| 00:50:50.080 |
who basically had the bad luck to be the people who got picked off
|
| 00:50:53.840 |
uh... and brought to justice
|
| 00:50:55.960 |
was this one really worse than those thirty not necessarily right but
|
| 00:51:00.240 |
yeah so i think we actually know
|
| 00:51:03.240 |
look what we did it look along it's taken us in this country after the civil
|
| 00:51:06.000 |
war
|
| 00:51:07.720 |
and part of that was
|
| 00:51:09.400 |
the balance between not fully reaccepting
|
| 00:51:13.880 |
opposing party but not
|
| 00:51:16.480 |
simply laying it totally to waste
|
| 00:51:18.800 |
and and and so even with things
|
| 00:51:21.680 |
to do with the obviously aftermath of slavery letting people
|
| 00:51:25.720 |
the northerners allowing certain things go on that they could have maybe
|
| 00:51:28.840 |
stopped that they were like well
|
| 00:51:30.840 |
we want those people stay in the union
|
| 00:51:33.760 |
lots of things going on like that for a long period of time and and people
|
| 00:51:37.400 |
talking about it for
|
| 00:51:38.840 |
centuries as you know
|
| 00:51:40.320 |
a lost cause or defeat or we mustn't humiliate them
|
| 00:51:43.680 |
how do you defeat people properly who have a totally wrong idea ideology in
|
| 00:51:47.680 |
your view not just that they're on the other side of a war but they actually
|
| 00:51:50.600 |
represent something you think is a threat to humanity and to your
|
| 00:51:54.800 |
state
|
| 00:51:56.360 |
and i humiliate them that's an extremely difficult challenge
|
| 00:51:59.640 |
and so you have to be punitive but only so much and you have to be inclusive but
|
| 00:52:03.840 |
only to a degree that doesn't
|
| 00:52:05.920 |
indianjou
|
| 00:52:06.960 |
it nobody knows how to get this right which is what makes it actually fascinating
|
| 00:52:10.360 |
if it were if it were is much clearer
|
| 00:52:13.280 |
uh... we just go and apply the template
|
| 00:52:15.840 |
and see where their story doesn't fit
|
| 00:52:18.440 |
well that's why you and you also say the moral clarity rams into political
|
| 00:52:22.320 |
reality every step of the way
|
| 00:52:24.400 |
and moral clarity might be for the next world
|
| 00:52:27.600 |
they read and they and people that that's where justice uh... no one escapes
|
| 00:52:33.960 |
the the the absolute moral clarity of of a kind of
|
| 00:52:37.400 |
ultimate justice there in the other world but in this world where we have the law
|
| 00:52:41.440 |
rather than that kind of justice and
|
| 00:52:44.120 |
it uh... it's a question of of us making judicious uh...
|
| 00:52:49.080 |
decisions that you might mean the suspension of judication
|
| 00:52:52.920 |
making political judgments that's what political judgments are
|
| 00:52:56.480 |
uh... i think that's i think something come in understood to you know that the
|
| 00:53:00.000 |
people look after their comrades not because their comrades are
|
| 00:53:03.960 |
more innocent than the other guys comrades because they have sort of
|
| 00:53:07.920 |
join the cause
|
| 00:53:09.000 |
and there
|
| 00:53:10.280 |
is part of what the Rwandan
|
| 00:53:12.800 |
project
|
| 00:53:15.160 |
about which i can tell you many the people involved in
|
| 00:53:18.440 |
implementing it them so called victorious army
|
| 00:53:22.160 |
uh... i mean they they won the war but they don't always feel after the
|
| 00:53:25.440 |
genocide
|
| 00:53:27.280 |
like we we're the winners
|
| 00:53:29.840 |
they feel very ambivalent about implementing this policy at times you know
|
| 00:53:32.960 |
accepting a guy next to them
|
| 00:53:34.800 |
as a comrade in arms who previously may
|
| 00:53:38.000 |
uh... and the idea is if we're not going to hold them to account
|
| 00:53:41.520 |
we want to know what they did we want them to
|
| 00:53:43.840 |
disavow it
|
| 00:53:45.120 |
in a way that's meaningful because if they don't they're still sort of playing
|
| 00:53:48.160 |
a double game
|
| 00:53:49.360 |
on the other hand we don't want to know too much because that makes it harder to do
|
| 00:53:51.680 |
this
|
| 00:53:53.080 |
and if you really know what the other person uh... did if they did terrible
|
| 00:53:57.000 |
things
|
| 00:53:58.000 |
uh... even if you people on your side did terrible things
|
| 00:54:01.160 |
uh... you it's much harder to
|
| 00:54:02.960 |
except that person uh... in so there's this balancing act even in terms of
|
| 00:54:07.240 |
when you say forgetting yes it's not forgetting
|
| 00:54:10.040 |
it's uh... not letting memory control it
|
| 00:54:13.040 |
it's not because memory and grudge are so close
|
| 00:54:16.160 |
uh... especially with these historical score settling
|
| 00:54:19.560 |
uh... and so
|
| 00:54:22.280 |
i think one of the difficulties dot dot day
|
| 00:54:25.080 |
you know
|
| 00:54:28.120 |
so well
|
| 00:54:29.280 |
dot day was writing a time when the idea that there was another light the next
|
| 00:54:32.800 |
life
|
| 00:54:33.680 |
was pretty generally accepted
|
| 00:54:35.760 |
and uh... at pretty much all levels of thought and imagination
|
| 00:54:40.520 |
and here
|
| 00:54:41.480 |
it's not totally clear
|
| 00:54:43.120 |
how much of a hold
|
| 00:54:44.400 |
the promise or threat of justice in the next world
|
| 00:54:47.600 |
really
|
| 00:54:48.440 |
assures people maybe a lot of the very catholic or now very
|
| 00:54:52.920 |
fundamentalist peasantry in rwanda
|
| 00:54:55.720 |
uh... takes some solace in that idea but a lot of them when i've talked to
|
| 00:54:58.880 |
them ever pretty materialistic view of what the next world's gonna be
|
| 00:55:01.560 |
oh yes no i think
|
| 00:55:03.160 |
the next world is lost that that kind of purchase for sure yeah which would put
|
| 00:55:07.200 |
put so much more pressure on this one
|
| 00:55:09.720 |
exactly
|
| 00:55:10.760 |
and political judge we're not necessarily doing very well with that
|
| 00:55:14.280 |
and the problem with judgment
|
| 00:55:15.680 |
is that it's not a technique and it's
|
| 00:55:18.040 |
doesn't have a set of universal principles or norms from which you can derive
|
| 00:55:23.560 |
a particular cases of how you apply
|
| 00:55:26.880 |
norms
|
| 00:55:27.960 |
and
|
| 00:55:29.160 |
therefore it it requires something that is uh...
|
| 00:55:34.480 |
somewhat fugitive because you
|
| 00:55:36.560 |
judgment
|
| 00:55:38.000 |
is not a
|
| 00:55:38.840 |
science is not an art it's it's some
|
| 00:55:40.760 |
uh... some kind of
|
| 00:55:42.640 |
based in common sense in a way that
|
| 00:55:44.640 |
is uh...
|
| 00:55:46.680 |
unfortunately cannot be standardized
|
| 00:55:49.440 |
well especially when it gets on to a mass political level obviously we have our
|
| 00:55:52.840 |
you know
|
| 00:55:53.680 |
better we all are fascinated
|
| 00:55:55.960 |
with police procedures
|
| 00:55:57.800 |
i wrote about a double homicide in the book after the rwanda book we
|
| 00:56:00.720 |
are partly because it's just like nice and cole clear and so forth in a cold
|
| 00:56:04.480 |
case it's uh... about a thirty-year-old murder and how you go about finding the
|
| 00:56:07.680 |
guy and carrying out even there
|
| 00:56:09.960 |
it's a dissatisfaction
|
| 00:56:11.600 |
conclusion in certain ways because by by by by having avoided
|
| 00:56:15.520 |
the law for so long
|
| 00:56:17.880 |
uh... this guy really served himself very well because all the evidence
|
| 00:56:20.720 |
goes cold the few witnesses are either
|
| 00:56:24.520 |
too frail or gone
|
| 00:56:26.480 |
uh... and he sort of outlived the case even though there's no statute of
|
| 00:56:29.840 |
limitations on murder
|
| 00:56:31.600 |
uh... so i think that uh...
|
| 00:56:34.760 |
the the
|
| 00:56:36.520 |
problem
|
| 00:56:37.640 |
uh... also with justice is not terribly satisfying
|
| 00:56:41.360 |
because it's backward looking
|
| 00:56:43.160 |
uh... so
|
| 00:56:44.800 |
justices about trying to figure out what happened
|
| 00:56:47.440 |
and to make sure that we've got that settled
|
| 00:56:49.920 |
uh... and and so
|
| 00:56:52.240 |
the impulse to
|
| 00:56:54.120 |
move on
|
| 00:56:56.160 |
and to build the future that's what i meant in part when my talk here about
|
| 00:57:00.080 |
at Stanford about uh... the way that
|
| 00:57:03.000 |
impulse towards justice in political and historical circumstances
|
| 00:57:05.820 |
freezes moments
|
| 00:57:07.520 |
it works at the end of a war or something but otherwise you're always saying at
|
| 00:57:10.280 |
this moment we have to stop
|
| 00:57:11.640 |
onward movement and adjudicate backwards what happened
|
| 00:57:14.760 |
and if you're talking about whole systems
|
| 00:57:17.160 |
you really
|
| 00:57:18.040 |
uh... it's very risky
|
| 00:57:19.240 |
yes
|
| 00:57:20.040 |
for and that freezing of them of the moment so
|
| 00:57:22.960 |
after pick up
|
| 00:57:24.240 |
i don't want to insist on down to too much but it is a case that went
|
| 00:57:27.640 |
down to has his sinners he traps them he freezes them in one act or one
|
| 00:57:32.080 |
gesture or
|
| 00:57:33.600 |
one
|
| 00:57:34.400 |
uh...
|
| 00:57:35.480 |
decision that they made
|
| 00:57:37.160 |
that damsel
|
| 00:57:38.320 |
and
|
| 00:57:39.320 |
that's what damnation is for that is being frozen in one particular act
|
| 00:57:46.320 |
it's forecloses
|
| 00:57:47.400 |
the future
|
| 00:57:48.480 |
of course those who are in purgatory they do have future they're working out
|
| 00:57:51.960 |
their purgation and and and they can they can think forward
|
| 00:57:55.080 |
but uh... that that sort of
|
| 00:57:57.080 |
in for let's say
|
| 00:57:58.520 |
infernal justice is one of freezing
|
| 00:58:02.160 |
it's very hard
|
| 00:58:03.360 |
i could tell you to meet for instance i've been meeting
|
| 00:58:06.400 |
uh... some of the
|
| 00:58:07.440 |
jennessee d_l_ the killers in rwanda
|
| 00:58:10.640 |
over a quite a long period of time same guy in the same little village
|
| 00:58:16.280 |
he should be in some ways always defined by this thing
|
| 00:58:19.720 |
he killed
|
| 00:58:20.760 |
tens of his neighbors dozens
|
| 00:58:23.000 |
scores maybe we're not it's not totally clear with his final death
|
| 00:58:26.060 |
count is
|
| 00:58:26.920 |
he destroyed
|
| 00:58:27.880 |
families those families
|
| 00:58:29.800 |
remain destroyed the people may be
|
| 00:58:32.480 |
uh... doing better and worse they are summer doing okay summer not
|
| 00:58:36.560 |
that's not all up to him
|
| 00:58:40.760 |
but
|
| 00:58:40.760 |
to see him sort of get on with his life
|
| 00:58:44.200 |
uh... or so
|
| 00:58:45.200 |
uh... to see him
|
| 00:58:46.600 |
building a new house and his families intact and his children are going to
|
| 00:58:51.440 |
university and doing all right uh... which they never were able to do one of
|
| 00:58:55.160 |
the
|
| 00:58:55.720 |
government that he
|
| 00:58:56.840 |
killed for
|
| 00:58:57.920 |
uh... all of that
|
| 00:58:59.720 |
uh... seems really to me
|
| 00:59:01.440 |
very hard not to want to freeze him in time and so so it's very hard in one
|
| 00:59:05.320 |
mind to sort of keep track of that guy
|
| 00:59:08.320 |
uh... really belongs to that moment and yet here he is with all this other
|
| 00:59:12.020 |
life to live
|
| 00:59:13.440 |
it's not clear to me that it would be in fact better for him it might serve my
|
| 00:59:16.360 |
sense of justice a whole lot more for him to be in jail forever
|
| 00:59:19.280 |
but what it on the huge social
|
| 00:59:21.600 |
scale
|
| 00:59:22.400 |
for everybody like him
|
| 00:59:24.000 |
uh...
|
| 00:59:24.800 |
to be
|
| 00:59:26.240 |
locked away and loyal to that crime
|
| 00:59:28.560 |
rather than having disavowed it and done what they could
|
| 00:59:31.920 |
uh... to redress it pay some fines for the property they destroyed
|
| 00:59:35.280 |
and
|
| 00:59:36.440 |
in some ways since some different signal to the generation that follows them
|
| 00:59:39.880 |
that
|
| 00:59:40.680 |
honestly we're not likely to live long enough to know how to call that one
|
| 00:59:44.640 |
uh... to see how that one turns out
|
| 00:59:47.920 |
right so
|
| 00:59:49.440 |
i think you want to run about eight times in
|
| 00:59:54.960 |
when you were preparing this book
|
| 00:59:56.440 |
and it was yeah
|
| 00:59:57.480 |
and i think that
|
| 00:59:58.360 |
yeah it was eight or nine i think i don't know whatever it was yeah and now you
|
| 01:00:02.400 |
are your you have a follow-up coming
|
| 01:00:05.000 |
this going to be coming out next year have you been going back to rwan
|
| 01:00:08.000 |
and recently i went back to rwan a lot between two thousand nine and two
|
| 01:00:12.120 |
thousand fourteen fifteen
|
| 01:00:13.520 |
um...
|
| 01:00:14.320 |
i
|
| 01:00:15.240 |
have not actually counted up all the trips but i was going to three times a year
|
| 01:00:18.680 |
and for two or three weeks at a time
|
| 01:00:20.840 |
uh...
|
| 01:00:22.400 |
to
|
| 01:00:23.520 |
collect
|
| 01:00:24.960 |
stories and put pieces together and follow-up with people and
|
| 01:00:28.600 |
uh...
|
| 01:00:29.960 |
a lot of it was wanting to revisit the same people over and over
|
| 01:00:32.960 |
uh... because i find
|
| 01:00:35.000 |
uh... you can get off a lot
|
| 01:00:37.760 |
uh... of information and understanding in a couple of hours of non-stop talking
|
| 01:00:41.960 |
to somebody about
|
| 01:00:43.840 |
very specific events but if you go back and back
|
| 01:00:46.680 |
and you visit
|
| 01:00:47.680 |
the people connected to it and the people around
|
| 01:00:51.080 |
an event
|
| 01:00:52.080 |
uh... more and more comes out and it comes out differently and the fact that
|
| 01:00:57.040 |
you become familiar
|
| 01:00:58.640 |
uh... makes you a very different
|
| 01:01:00.720 |
makes what people say you very different date they talk to you better over time
|
| 01:01:04.680 |
uh... so you're so are there any big surprises when you went back
|
| 01:01:09.920 |
in some ways the fact that it's held
|
| 01:01:12.520 |
however frat and whatever fragile form as long as it has is a surprise
|
| 01:01:17.160 |
uh... i went back
|
| 01:01:19.000 |
over
|
| 01:01:20.000 |
uh... the spirit of time and i would i would reread my notebooks for my first
|
| 01:01:24.080 |
trips
|
| 01:01:26.520 |
everybody in ninety five ninety six the immediate years of aftermath
|
| 01:01:31.200 |
assumed that
|
| 01:01:33.480 |
it would either happen again whatever they meant by that but they meant to
|
| 01:01:37.160 |
kind of mass calamitous total societal breakdown into violence
|
| 01:01:41.840 |
that it wasn't spent
|
| 01:01:43.600 |
the violence wasn't spent there was a lot of violence in the aftermath both
|
| 01:01:46.640 |
inside rwanda and
|
| 01:01:48.440 |
in exile primarily in kongo's a year
|
| 01:01:52.000 |
and there was a lot of force used to create the stability that exists now
|
| 01:01:56.240 |
uh... and but that that would
|
| 01:01:59.180 |
stand stem over time that it wouldn't just turn into a place like eastern kongo
|
| 01:02:03.320 |
looks or like
|
| 01:02:04.340 |
uh... many places that seem to be
|
| 01:02:06.280 |
places of decades of grinding violence
|
| 01:02:08.640 |
and that people would have a kind of basic physical security
|
| 01:02:11.880 |
and if not uh...
|
| 01:02:14.520 |
uh... many of the things in terms of political freedom that we might
|
| 01:02:17.880 |
uh...
|
| 01:02:18.760 |
think that you know why not
|
| 01:02:20.720 |
uh... certainly
|
| 01:02:22.840 |
a greater economic physical
|
| 01:02:25.200 |
medical
|
| 01:02:26.360 |
other security and stability
|
| 01:02:28.440 |
so that you can start to
|
| 01:02:30.480 |
consider the question
|
| 01:02:32.000 |
which is a big wide open one
|
| 01:02:34.520 |
what happens with the next generations
|
| 01:02:36.560 |
nobody could think that far ahead
|
| 01:02:38.560 |
and nobody
|
| 01:02:39.920 |
would have been on
|
| 01:02:41.360 |
so that's the surprise that's in a sense what i went back to see so
|
| 01:02:45.040 |
what's that look like and feel like it sounds like
|
| 01:02:48.240 |
do you have a title for the
|
| 01:02:49.720 |
the sequel
|
| 01:02:50.840 |
the new book is called uh... you hide that you hate me
|
| 01:02:54.160 |
and i hide that i know
|
| 01:02:56.400 |
and where does that come from
|
| 01:02:57.800 |
it's a saying i heard in in ronanda in ninety
|
| 01:03:02.000 |
six or seven
|
| 01:03:03.560 |
when i first heard it there was really
|
| 01:03:06.300 |
it struck me as pretty cynical sinister sounding sort of gallows humor
|
| 01:03:10.040 |
almost like a little nursery rhyme can you repeat you hide the two hate me
|
| 01:03:13.840 |
and i hide that i know
|
| 01:03:16.920 |
the more i thought about it especially
|
| 01:03:19.320 |
in the light of the fact that people have
|
| 01:03:23.120 |
uh... been living together again
|
| 01:03:27.160 |
even if it's
|
| 01:03:28.160 |
under a great deal of pressure and
|
| 01:03:30.160 |
forced unity as it were
|
| 01:03:31.960 |
it becomes real
|
| 01:03:32.840 |
lot of things that are forced from above become real
|
| 01:03:36.000 |
racial integration in this country to the extent that it's been successful
|
| 01:03:39.600 |
it has not been
|
| 01:03:41.040 |
by the great goodwill of the masses
|
| 01:03:43.840 |
unled by anybody
|
| 01:03:48.120 |
the more i thought about it you hide that you hate me and i hide that i
|
| 01:03:50.400 |
know it's it's the civil code
|
| 01:03:53.000 |
that's what it means you
|
| 01:03:54.400 |
it doesn't mean you don't know
|
| 01:03:56.240 |
that there's
|
| 01:03:57.240 |
problems and when i use that i'm not crazy but the word hate to describe what
|
| 01:04:00.680 |
went on in ronanda
|
| 01:04:01.960 |
but i think everybody understands the term there to mean
|
| 01:04:05.040 |
uh... you threaten you represent a threat to me you you were problem for
|
| 01:04:09.200 |
those of the people that you have to
|
| 01:04:10.840 |
what's the alternative to do you hiding it
|
| 01:04:13.600 |
you're showing it
|
| 01:04:15.320 |
so in many ways
|
| 01:04:16.920 |
uh... i realize this actually reflects a very deep understanding of what it
|
| 01:04:20.720 |
is to
|
| 01:04:23.320 |
manage a conflict
|
| 01:04:25.040 |
and with time it becomes not just less visible but perhaps
|
| 01:04:29.320 |
less real
|
| 01:04:31.120 |
and finally the it's
|
| 01:04:33.840 |
ninety eight book as such a striking title can you tell our listeners where
|
| 01:04:37.240 |
where that title come from
|
| 01:04:38.800 |
we wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families is
|
| 01:04:42.720 |
almost verbatim i took a few words out for
|
| 01:04:46.920 |
in order to leave room on the cover for you know
|
| 01:04:49.840 |
my name uh... no that it was a very long phrase but it was from a letter
|
| 01:04:54.480 |
uh... that was written
|
| 01:04:57.720 |
by a group of uh...
|
| 01:04:59.840 |
seventh day adventist
|
| 01:05:01.320 |
pastors
|
| 01:05:02.320 |
who had taken refuge in their church they were tootsies
|
| 01:05:05.800 |
uh... with much of their flock two thousand people had taken refuge in this
|
| 01:05:09.040 |
church in rusted rueana as they did it many churches across rueana and in the
|
| 01:05:12.760 |
past as i mentioned in fifty nine and in sixty's and those massacres
|
| 01:05:17.800 |
churches had always been sanctuaries if you made it
|
| 01:05:19.800 |
to the church
|
| 01:05:21.720 |
uh... you were basically your house might get destroyed
|
| 01:05:25.320 |
uh... you might
|
| 01:05:26.360 |
but after a week or two you'd be able to go home and that was a safe place they
|
| 01:05:30.120 |
were sanctuaries
|
| 01:05:31.800 |
so people remembered that and they went and this time they became the scenes of
|
| 01:05:35.880 |
some of the biggest massacres in rueana
|
| 01:05:38.840 |
and in place after place
|
| 01:05:40.880 |
in this church in muganero in western rueana
|
| 01:05:44.360 |
these uh... ministers and everybody realized that the
|
| 01:05:48.400 |
attack was coming and they'd been given signals and they saw the attackers
|
| 01:05:52.080 |
preparing outside and they
|
| 01:05:53.760 |
wrote a letter to the church president who was a hootoo who was there
|
| 01:05:57.520 |
senior
|
| 01:05:58.680 |
uh...
|
| 01:06:00.080 |
church father
|
| 01:06:01.320 |
uh... saying dear
|
| 01:06:03.080 |
our president
|
| 01:06:06.160 |
we uh... hope everything's going well for you in these difficult times
|
| 01:06:10.280 |
we wish to inform you that we have heard that tomorrow we will be killed
|
| 01:06:14.120 |
along with our families that was i think the full phrase
|
| 01:06:17.160 |
and we hope that you will intercede on our behalf as ester
|
| 01:06:20.440 |
interceded on behalf of the israelites
|
| 01:06:23.520 |
uh... in the
|
| 01:06:24.640 |
so again a biblical reference in this case to the book of ester and the
|
| 01:06:27.960 |
babylonian exile
|
| 01:06:29.480 |
uh... and uh... of course they all knew their scripture they knew exactly
|
| 01:06:34.160 |
what the story was
|
| 01:06:35.560 |
and uh...
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| 01:06:37.160 |
and that you will do what you can to to save us
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| 01:06:39.720 |
and
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| 01:06:41.360 |
according to the
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| 01:06:42.320 |
survivors the massacre the church president responded verbally but
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| 01:06:46.120 |
basically said you know that
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| 01:06:48.880 |
god no longer wants you you're going to be killed
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| 01:06:51.600 |
uh...
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| 01:06:52.760 |
amazingly i got the letter from him
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| 01:06:55.240 |
i've been told about it by survivors and to them it was a proof of how deeply
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| 01:06:59.120 |
their trusted been to betrayed
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| 01:07:01.200 |
that even the ministers from his church who were to see in the church
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| 01:07:04.600 |
pleading directly to him were rejected
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| 01:07:07.400 |
he brought this letter with him into exile
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| 01:07:10.120 |
i found him in texas
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| 01:07:11.680 |
uh... some years later
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| 01:07:13.680 |
and uh... just before as it turned out he was arrested
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| 01:07:16.720 |
uh... and he
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| 01:07:19.000 |
uh...
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| 01:07:20.240 |
mentioned the letter
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| 01:07:21.640 |
and i said something like that would be remember exactly what it said i heard
|
| 01:07:24.240 |
something about that letter when i was in in the town in village in rahuanda
|
| 01:07:28.080 |
and he opened this little folder in his lap and he handed me the actual hand
|
| 01:07:30.780 |
written letter we and i made a copy on his
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| 01:07:33.600 |
son's fax machine in texas
|
| 01:07:35.680 |
and he presented it obviously as like see they trusted me
|
| 01:07:39.720 |
and they presented it again we trusted him he betrayed us
|
| 01:07:42.840 |
he he died in jail eventually the pastor
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| 01:07:45.960 |
in texas
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| 01:07:46.920 |
no in uh... i
|
| 01:07:49.160 |
i think in a rusa tansenia but anyway who's tried at the international tribunal
|
| 01:07:52.280 |
for rahuanda in tansenia i'm not sure where he was finally imprisoned
|
| 01:07:57.440 |
well felt by i would uh...
|
| 01:07:59.360 |
looked at on a high note but it's not the the kind of topic and uh...
|
| 01:08:04.240 |
political reality that
|
| 01:08:05.600 |
lenses up to the you know edifying
|
| 01:08:08.280 |
uh... you know last words so except that i would i would say that will
|
| 01:08:12.720 |
in
|
| 01:08:13.960 |
they're an enormous number of people
|
| 01:08:15.760 |
i have met and talked to in the stories after i tell and whose voices of
|
| 01:08:20.080 |
tried to record
|
| 01:08:22.680 |
who i find deeply impressive in moving
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| 01:08:25.400 |
and wise
|
| 01:08:28.760 |
in the midst of these very dire situations
|
| 01:08:31.200 |
and if there's anything that keeps me going back it's not out of
|
| 01:08:34.040 |
more of a fascination or gore
|
| 01:08:36.200 |
i try to keep that to as much of a minimum as one can without being false
|
| 01:08:39.600 |
about these things because that's not where the interest lies
|
| 01:08:42.600 |
uh... those people are who mom trying to
|
| 01:08:47.040 |
record
|
| 01:08:50.560 |
and who stories i'm putting together
|
| 01:08:52.600 |
in these books uh... i do think are
|
| 01:08:55.080 |
at times really quite an inspiration at least to me they are well to me as well
|
| 01:08:58.240 |
in reading reading and in the first
|
| 01:09:00.720 |
the accounts in in the actual voices of the of some of these survivors
|
| 01:09:04.800 |
really quite moving
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| 01:09:06.200 |
and um...
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| 01:09:08.520 |
what can i say we're looking forward to the next one
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| 01:09:12.200 |
and
|
| 01:09:14.200 |
thanks for coming on to entitled opinions
|
| 01:09:16.520 |
i hope next time
|
| 01:09:17.920 |
when you're in town we can talk about
|
| 01:09:20.080 |
the abou grave uh... story and see what the connections are between that
|
| 01:09:24.680 |
very different context and
|
| 01:09:26.640 |
what we've been talking about today but uh...
|
| 01:09:29.080 |
will have to
|
| 01:09:29.960 |
get you back to california for that one since good at all for that and
|
| 01:09:33.480 |
thanks for having me okay let me remind our listeners we've been speaking with
|
| 01:09:36.760 |
phillip gurevich
|
| 01:09:38.320 |
uh... from the new york or magazine
|
| 01:09:40.440 |
who's been
|
| 01:09:41.640 |
here at stanford as a visiting uh... writer and residence for the last
|
| 01:09:45.160 |
several months
|
| 01:09:46.600 |
i'm robert harris and for entitled opinions
|
| 01:09:49.000 |
and uh... just stay tuned will be with you one more time next week and then we
|
| 01:09:53.520 |
go on high it's
|
| 01:09:54.720 |
thanks again for
|
| 01:09:55.800 |
thank you
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| 01:09:56.800 |
uh...
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uh...
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uh...
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uh...
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uh...
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uh...
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uh...
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uh...
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uh...
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uh...
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uh...
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uh...
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uh...
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uh...
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uh...
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uh...
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uh...
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uh...
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uh...
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uh...
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uh...
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uh...
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uh...
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uh...
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uh...
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