In May 1995 a thirty-three-year-old American freelancer steps through a massacre site in Rwanda and his foot comes down on a skull. The dead lie so thick on the ground that he cannot avoid them. The killing ended almost a year before. The bodies have gone to bone. The country around him is quiet in a way that no country should be quiet, and Philip Gourevitch (b. 1961) has no book to his name, no staff job, and no credential for this work beyond a graduate degree in fiction and a conviction that the story does not add up. Out of that walk, and eight more trips over the next two years, comes a defining work of American literary journalism.
Gourevitch was born in Philadelphia and raised in Middletown, Connecticut, a college town on the Connecticut River where his father, Victor Gourevitch (1925-2020), taught political philosophy at Wesleyan University from 1967 to 1995. Victor was a Rousseau scholar whose translations of the Discourses and The Social Contract became standard English texts. His mother, Jacqueline Gourevitch (b. 1933), is a painter known for cloud studies and for a patient, observational realism. The household ran on two disciplines that rarely share a roof: the philosopher’s suspicion of loose language and the painter’s fidelity to what the eye can verify. Both marked the son. His brother Marc became a physician. Philip went to Choate Rosemary Hall, the boarding school in Wallingford, then to Cornell, where he knew he wanted to write. He interrupted his studies for three years to write full time and graduated in 1986. In 1992 he took an M.F.A. in fiction from Columbia University’s School of the Arts.
The fiction training matters more than the fiction. He published some short stories in literary magazines, then set invention aside. What survived from the M.F.A. was craft: scene, compression, the withheld detail, the sentence that carries more than it states.
His apprenticeship in journalism ran through the Forward, the English-language Jewish weekly in New York, where he worked from 1991 to 1993, first as New York bureau chief and then as cultural editor. The Forward years gave him two things. They gave him a beat education in institutions, memory, and communal politics. And they placed him inside the postwar Jewish conversation about the Holocaust at the moment that conversation was hardening into monuments. In April 1993 the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened in Washington. Schindler’s List followed that December. The official culture announced that memory had been secured and that the lesson had been learned. The phrase of the season was “never again.”
Then April 1994 arrived. Over roughly a hundred days, the Hutu Power government of Rwanda organized the murder of some 800,000 Tutsi and Hutu oppositionists, most of them killed by neighbors with machetes and clubs, at a pace that exceeded the industrial killing of the Nazi camps. The United States avoided the word genocide. The United Nations drew down its peacekeepers. Gourevitch followed the coverage from New York and could not square it with the promises. He later said the scale bewildered him and that he wanted to go and understand what had happened amid all the vows of never again. He was not assigned. He went.
Between May 1995 and 1997 he made nine trips to Rwanda and its neighbors, Zaire, Burundi, Uganda, and Tanzania. He worked the country: remote hills, regional towns, prisons, refugee camps, the capital. He interviewed Tutsi survivors, imprisoned Hutu killers, priests, bourgmestres, aid workers, and the leadership of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the rebel army that ended the genocide and took the state. The New Yorker began publishing his dispatches in 1995 and ran eight long articles; the magazine made him a staff writer in 1997. His interviewing method was patient to the point of self-erasure. He asked people to tell their story from birth. He told them, in words he has repeated in interviews since, “I’m not just here for your horror story.” He wanted to know where a life and a history intersected. The best transcripts, he found, showed his own questions shrinking as the subject talked.
The book appeared in 1998 as We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda. The title comes from a letter dated April 15, 1994. Seven Tutsi pastors, sheltering with their congregants at the Seventh-day Adventist hospital complex at Mugonero, wrote to their church president in Kibuye, Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana (1924-2007), to tell him the killing was coming and to plead for intercession. The intercession did not come. Survivors testified that the pastor answered that their fate was sealed, and that he later ferried attackers. Ntakirutimana fled to Laredo, Texas, was extradited, and became the first clergyman convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. The letter gave Gourevitch his title and his method in one document: the formal courtesy of the doomed, addressed to an institution that failed them, preserved on paper. His work returns again and again to that gap between language and act. Genocide becomes unrest. Abandonment becomes prudence. The record, assembled slowly, closes the exits.
We Wish to Inform You won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the George Polk Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Overseas Press Club’s Cornelius Ryan Award, the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, and, in Britain, the Guardian First Book Award. The Africanist René Lemarchand (b. 1932) credited Gourevitch, along with the human rights investigator Alison Des Forges (1942-2009), with making the story of Rwanda known in the United States at all. The Observer called him the leading writer on Rwanda in the world.
The book’s standing has never been simple, and an academic account owes the objections a hearing. Scholars of the region argued that Gourevitch described the horror without adequately explaining it, that his account thinned the colonial and agrarian history and resolved a complex catastrophe into innocents and avatars of hate. The sharper and more durable criticism concerns Paul Kagame (b. 1957), the RPF commander who became president. Gourevitch interviewed Kagame often and portrayed him from the first as calm, thoughtful, and questioning, a man repairing a broken country against immense odds. That portrait held steady across decades while evidence accumulated of RPF massacres in 1994, mass killings of Hutu refugees in Zaire in 1996 and 1997, and deepening authoritarian rule at home. A 2011 assessment in the Columbia Journalism Review noted that Gourevitch embraced the fashion for a new African leadership, adding Laurent Kabila to the roster of guerrilla-democrats in 1997, and that when Kabila revealed himself as another despot, Gourevitch published a long corrective in 2000. On Kagame the corrective never came in comparable form. Gourevitch has answered that Rwanda’s reconstruction is real, that the security of survivors is not an abstraction, and that outsiders who never faced the problem of governing a post-genocide society judge it cheaply. The argument continues. It is the largest open question over his body of work.
His second book turned from Central Africa to the West Side of Manhattan. In early 1997 Andy Rosenzweig, chief investigator for the Manhattan District Attorney, drove past the former site of a restaurant owned by a friend of his. The friend, Richie Glennon, an ex-prizefighter at ease with cops and hoodlums alike, had been shot dead in 1970 along with Pete McGinn, a restaurateur and father of four. Everyone knew the shooter was Frankie Koehler, a Hell’s Kitchen gunman who had killed a sixteen-year-old boy when he was himself fifteen and AWOL from the Army. The department, drowning in the thousand murders New York recorded that year, closed the case by presuming Koehler dead on no evidence. He was alive. Rosenzweig, on the eve of retirement, reopened the file and found him twenty-seven years late. A Cold Case (2001) tells that story in 182 pages. Gourevitch built it as a double portrait of two men from the same postwar streets, one who became the law and one who became its argument. He let Koehler talk. The old killer, garrulous in confession, unremorseful, armed with hollow-point bullets when arrested, kept circling his own respectability, at one point asking, “Why would people still think good of this asshole?” The book is sometimes filed as a minor work. It clarifies the major ones. Gourevitch writes aftermath. The crime is settled fact on page one; the subject is what thirty years do to guilt, memory, and the hunger of the living to speak for the dead. A film version with Tom Hanks was announced and never made.
In March 2005 he took over The Paris Review. The founder, George Plimpton (1927-2003), had edited the magazine for fifty years and died at his desk in every sense that counts. His first successor, Brigid Hughes, a longtime staff editor, lasted one year before the board declined to renew her contract amid a public fight over the magazine’s direction. The search committee, headed by Robert Silvers (1929-2017) of The New York Review of Books, chose a nonfiction writer to run a fiction magazine, and the old guard objected in the press. Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014), a founder, defended the choice and said the magazine had an energy it had lacked since Paris. Gourevitch told the Associated Press, “I’m not coming in to tear it up and make it over,” and ruled out the fashion issue the board was rumored to want. The scene at the new TriBeCa office in the fall of 2005 was a half-dozen staffers hunched over desks, working through more than a thousand submissions, ten-page stories coming out of a wire basket with three pages of handwritten reader comments attached. Under his editorship the Review redesigned itself, revived the old logo, added regular nonfiction and a photography spread for the first time, and roughly doubled its circulation. He edited the four-volume Paris Review Interviews (2006-2009), the codification of Plimpton’s great invention, the Writers at Work interview, which Gourevitch described as an idealized conversation drawn from transcripts. He announced his departure in September 2009 to return to his own writing and left in March 2010.
The editorship overlapped with his third book. Standard Operating Procedure (2008), written with the filmmaker Errol Morris (b. 1948) and later reissued as The Ballad of Abu Ghraib, examined the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib under the American occupation of Iraq. Morris had assembled hundreds of hours of interviews with the military police who appeared in the photographs and the interrogators who did not. Gourevitch wrote the book from that record, and the collaboration forced a question that ran under all his earlier work: what does a photograph prove? The Abu Ghraib images seemed to show everything. They concealed the system. The orders, the legal memoranda, the improvised categories of permitted cruelty, the command failures, all stood outside the frame, and the soldiers in the pictures absorbed the punishment for a policy. The book argued that the scandal was treated as the crime of seven bad apples so that the orchard could go uninspected. The argument echoed Rwanda. Atrocity is administered. Somebody licenses it, somebody organizes it, and afterward the licensing class discovers its innocence.
Gourevitch is married to Larissa MacFarquhar (b. 1968), a staff writer at The New Yorker whose subjects run to moral extremity of a different kind: extreme altruists, philosophers, people who try to live by an idea and pay for it. The pairing is apt. Both writers study people who cannot be reduced to a slogan, and both resist the reader’s appetite for easy admiration or easy contempt. They live in New York. He held a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library in 2012-13 and has served as a judge for the PEN/Newman’s Own award for free expression. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages.
He has kept going back to Rwanda for three decades. The later reporting tracks what he calls the après-gacaca, the period after 2012 when the community courts that tried some two million genocide cases finished their work and Rwandans, for the first time, could stand in the aftermath with the reckoning formally behind them. He is interested in what the state’s mandated reconciliation costs the people who must perform it: the survivor drinking with him in a bar who says he has learned to govern his devastations rather than be governed by them, the neighbors who rebuild a working peace out of necessity and silence. In 2017 he received a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant for the long-gestating book on this subject, You Hide That You Hate Me and I Hide That I Know, a title that states the terms of coexistence as plainly as the first book’s title stated the terms of abandonment. Farrar, Straus and Giroux lists the book as forthcoming, with a current on-sale date of May 1, 2028. The gap between announcement and delivery has become part of his legend, and he has been candid that the aftermath is harder to understand, and therefore to write, than the event.
His recent public writing has turned the Rwandan lens on his own country. Watching American politics after 2016, he observed that the stability outsiders once assumed when they looked at Rwanda from what Rwandans call “outside” rests less on law than on custom, social accord, and chance, and that a single man can coarsen a system whose spinelessness he sweeps along. The confidence of the comfortable observer, he argued, was always thinner than it looked.
An assessment. Gourevitch changed what American magazines expect atrocity writing to do. Before him the genre offered either the cable of horrors from a remote place or the policy essay that dissolved the dead into acronyms. He showed a third way: go after the event, stay long, let perpetrators explain themselves, follow the documents, and treat the aftermath as the main story rather than the epilogue. His prose enacts investigation. He builds a scene, lets ordinary detail accumulate, then introduces the letter or the admission that reorders everything the reader thought he understood. The delayed reveal is a moral instrument. The reader inhabits partial knowledge and then must revise it, which is the experience of everyone who ever said never again and meant it.
The costs of the method are also on the record. Proximity to sources built his authority and mortgaged part of it; the Kagame question shadows the Rwanda work the way access shadows all reporting on power. The literary control that makes the books permanent can make the horror coherent in ways the survivors’ experience was not, and critics who wanted more history and less witness have a case worth weighing. What cannot be taken from him is the record. Seven pastors wrote a letter to their church president and their church president failed them, and because one reporter kept going back, the letter did not disappear into the archive of the unheard. Rosenzweig, in A Cold Case, repeats an old line from a fellow officer: as a rule nobody speaks for the dead, unless we do. Gourevitch built a career on the unless.
Notes
The skull detail and the Kagame/Kabila critique come from Tristan McConnell’s 2011 Columbia Journalism Review assessment, which reports that Gourevitch wrote of accidentally crushing a skull at a massacre site, describes his fixed portrayal of Kagame as calm and thoughtful from his first article onward, and notes that he added Kabila to the roster of guerrilla-democrats in 1997 before publishing a corrective, “Forsaken,” in 2000: “One Man’s Rwanda”.
Basic biographical facts, the nine trips between 1995 and 1997 to Rwanda and its neighbors, the award list, the Lemarchand credit, and The Observer‘s description of him as the leading writer on Rwanda, plus the Forward dates from 1991 to 1993, the Cornell break and 1986 graduation, the 1992 Columbia MFA, the Cullman Fellowship, and the PEN/Newman’s Own judging, come from Wikipedia on Philip Gourevitch.
The title letter of April 15, 1994, to Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, president of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, his eventual ICTR conviction, and the scholarly criticism that the book describes the horror without explaining it and reduces the story to good guys and bad guys, come from Wikipedia on We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families and the Columbia Journalism Review assessment.
His account of what drew him to Rwanda, including the Holocaust Museum, Schindler’s List, the “never again” moment, and his bewilderment, plus his interviewing method of asking for a life story from birth, comes from “In His Own Words: Philip Gourevitch on Tough Interviews, Divisionist Media, and Covering Other Stories After Rwanda”.
The après-gacaca framing, gacaca ending in 2012, the new book title, and his reflection that American stability rests on custom, social accord, and chance, and that one man can sweep the spineless along, come from part one and part two of his Justice Info interview.
The survivor over drinks who governs his devastations rather than being governed by them, and the framing of gacaca as a stepping stone rather than reconciliation itself, come from the Allegheny Campus account of Gourevitch’s Rwanda talk.
A Cold Case: Rosenzweig, the 1970 Glennon and McGinn murders, Koehler’s 1997 arrest, and the stalled Tom Hanks film come from Wikipedia on A Cold Case. Koehler’s November 15, 1944 arrest at fifteen after going AWOL and his killing of a sixteen-year-old boy come from the Scribd edition of A Cold Case. The case closed on a baseless presumption of death, the hollow-point bullets at arrest, and the Koehler quote come from the Amazon page for A Cold Case. The “who speaks for the dead” line Rosenzweig quotes from a fellow officer comes from the Publishers Weekly review. The thousand-plus murders in New York in 1970 come from the Salon review.
The Paris Review material: the Silvers search committee, the Hughes non-renewal amid conflict, the board’s commercial ambitions, and Gourevitch’s AP quote ruling out a fashion issue come from the AP report carried by Today. The TriBeCa loft scene, the wire basket, the thousand-plus submissions, the septuagenarian revolt, and Matthiessen‘s defense come from NPR. The redesign, nonfiction and photography additions, the four Picador volumes, and the September 2009 departure announcement come from Wikipedia on The Paris Review. His description of George Plimpton‘s interview form as an idealized conversation drawn from transcripts comes from PBS American Masters.
Extrapolations I made without a link: the texture of a Wesleyan faculty home, the philosopher-painter double inheritance, the claim that the MFA gave him craft rather than a fiction career, and the reading of the delayed reveal as moral method.
The Journalist and the Murderers: Philip Gourevitch Through Janet Malcolm’s Frame
Janet Malcolm (1934-2021) opens The Journalist and the Murderer with the most quoted sentence in the literature on her trade. Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on, she writes, knows that what he does is “morally indefensible.” The book behind the sentence is a parable. Joe McGinniss (1942-2014) joined the defense team of Jeffrey MacDonald (b. 1943), a Green Beret doctor accused of murdering his wife and daughters. McGinniss ate with MacDonald, lifted weights with him, moved into the defense’s rented fraternity house, and after the conviction wrote MacDonald warm letters for years. The letters said the verdict was wrong. The letters said hang in there. All the while McGinniss was writing Fatal Vision, which told America that MacDonald was a psychopath who had slaughtered his family. MacDonald sued. Five of six jurors sided with the killer against the writer.
Malcolm drew the lesson wide. The journalist gains the confidence of a subject, plays the friend, the confessor, the man who understands, and then produces a text over which the subject has no power and in which the subject rarely recognizes himself. The subject consents the way a lover consents, expecting devotion, and the book arrives like the discovery of the affair’s true terms. She wrote this as a subject of the process herself. Jeffrey Masson (b. 1941) was suing her over quotations in her own profile of him when she published it, and she never claimed the high ground. Her claim ran lower and harder. The transaction cannot be cleaned up. The writer who tells you his case differs has begun the con.
Philip Gourevitch has spent his career inside Malcolm’s transaction, at both poles, and his body of work reads as a test of her frame at its extremes. He gained the confidence of murderers and wrote them up. Then, in the case that will decide his standing, he gained the confidence of a head of state and did not.
Start with the murderers who fit the frame. Rwanda’s prisons after the genocide held more than a hundred thousand men in spaces built for a fraction of that number. The prisoners wore pink. They slept in shifts because the floors could not hold them all lying down. Gourevitch went in and asked killers to tell him their stories from birth, and the killers talked. They talked because a man from New York with a notebook offered the one commodity a confessed génocidaire in a pink uniform still wants, an audience that has not already judged him, or seems not to have. They explained the roadblocks. They explained the quotas and the pressure and the neighbors who went along. Each account carried its exculpatory architecture: I killed but I saved one, I was forced, everyone did it, the times were bad. The prisoner in that yard believes the interview serves him. His words will show the visitor a reasonable man caught in an unreasonable season.
Then the book comes out. We Wish to Inform You preserves the killers’ explanations and lets them convict the men who offered them. Gourevitch adds little denunciation. He does not need to. The self-account, laid against the record, performs the betrayal on its own. This is Malcolm’s structure with the moral polarity reversed. Her frame treats the betrayal as the scandal. In Rwanda the betrayal reads as the duty. A génocidaire’s flattering self-portrait deserves demolition, and the reader cheers the writer who demolishes it. But Malcolm’s point survives the reversal, because her point never depended on the subject deserving better. The transaction is identical. The subject talks in the belief that talking helps him. The writer permits the belief, harvests it, and prints a man the subject would never sign off on. The only variable is whether the reader approves, and the reader’s approval is not a moral solvent. It is a rooting interest.
Frank Koehler (b. 1929) makes the American case. Koehler shot two men in 1970 and vanished for twenty-seven years, and when Andy Rosenzweig ran him down, the old hood proved a talker. He talked through his confession. He talked to Gourevitch afterward, garrulous, courtly in the manner of a Hell’s Kitchen man who came up when manners covered everything, working always toward the same object, his own respectability. He drew lines. He would never kill for money; a scumbag does that. He had lived decent years under another name and wanted credit for them. At one point he put the question that runs under every interview Malcolm ever analyzed: “Why would people still think good of this asshole?” He wanted the writer to answer it in his favor. The question was a bid. A Cold Case (2001) declines the bid on every page. The book gives Koehler his charm and his war record of small decencies and then sets beside them the boy of sixteen he shot in 1945 and the two men he left dead on a floor in 1970 and the hollow-point bullets in his possession at his arrest at sixty-eight. Koehler talked to a man he thought might become his advocate. He got his biographer instead. Malcolm could have written the chapter herself, and the fit is close enough that the exception which follows cannot be blamed on the writer’s ignorance of the trap. Gourevitch and Malcolm shared a masthead at The New Yorker for a quarter century. Her book is canon in his trade. He knows how the transaction runs, which sharpens the question of the one relationship where it never ran to completion.
Paul Kagame gave Gourevitch access from the first trips, when he was the general behind a new government, through the decades of his presidency. The first dispatches drew him as calm, deliberate, questioning, a man of few words repairing a shattered country, and the portrait held. It held through Kibeho in April 1995, when soldiers of that new government fired into a camp of Hutu displaced and the dead ran into the thousands by most counts. It held through the campaigns in Zaire in 1996 and 1997, where the Rwandan army broke up the refugee camps and hundreds of thousands of Hutu fled into the forest and many thousands never came out; a United Nations mapping report in October 2010 catalogued those killings in language that raised the question of genocide. It held through the deaths and disappearances of opposition figures at home and abroad. It held through August 2020, when Rwandan agents lured Paul Rusesabagina (b. 1954) onto a private plane in Dubai that landed in Kigali, where a court gave him twenty-five years on terrorism charges; American pressure freed him in March 2023. Rusesabagina, the hotel manager whose sheltering of more than a thousand people at the Mille Collines reached the world through Gourevitch’s early reporting, had become the president’s most famous prisoner. The two Rwandans Gourevitch made legible to America ended on opposite sides of a cell door, and the writer’s sympathies tracked the man who held the key.
Gourevitch has shown he can retract. He praised Laurent Kabila in 1997 as one of a new generation of African leaders, watched Kabila reveal himself, and published a correction in 2000 that opened on a capital draped with lies. The instrument exists. On Kagame it has not been used at comparable scale, and this is the standing criticism of his career: the writer who built his authority on refusing euphemism, who taught readers that atrocity travels under words like unrest and chaos and prudence, extended to one source a patience he extended to no institution and no other man.
Malcolm’s frame explains the case better than the usual vocabulary of bias. Her deviant case, the journalist who does not betray, is not a moral success in her scheme. It is a professional failure with the structure of a romance that never ends because one party cannot afford the ending. And in this romance the power runs opposite to the one she described. Her journalist held the power: McGinniss could print anything, and MacDonald in his cell could only sue. A president reverses the poles. Kagame controls the visas, the ministers, the prison interviews, the return trips on which a thirty-year body of work and a still unfinished book depend. He is disciplined, attentive, generous with hours, and famous for making each interlocutor feel like the one outsider who understands. In Malcolm’s terms the confidence man in this pairing sits behind the president’s desk. The subject gained the writer’s confidence. The seduction she diagnosed operates in reverse, on the diagnostician’s colleague, over three decades, and the text over which one party has no power turns out to be the coverage.
Gourevitch has his answers, and Malcolm predicted that he would, since every writer has an account of why his case differs. His account deserves statement at full strength. Rwanda’s reconstruction is real. The security of survivors is not an abstraction to the people who sleep behind it. The men who ended the genocide were the only men who ended it, while the governments now auditing their record watched the killing on television. Outsiders who never governed a country of victims and perpetrators judge cheaply. Some of this is true, and its truth is what makes the position durable. A writer defends a compromised source longest when the defense contains real matter, because the real matter lets him keep faith and keep his self-respect in the same motion. McGinniss wrote loving letters while drafting the indictment. Gourevitch presents the inverse figure: the indictment accumulating in the record of other hands, the faith maintained in print.
The self-awareness question stays open, and his own titles keep raising it. The book he has worked on for a quarter century is called You Hide That You Hate Me and I Hide That I Know. He takes the phrase from Rwandans describing the truce on the hills, where survivor and killer trade greetings across a hedge because life requires it. It names an arrangement in which both parties understand the truth and both parties understand that naming it costs more than living with it. Whether the arrangement describes only the hills is the question his critics ask. Malcolm would put it without mercy. The journalist and the murderer sit down together, each believing he is using the other, and in the long run one of them writes the book. Koehler learned which one. The génocidaires in pink learned. The Kagame file stays open, on a desk in New York, next to a deadline that has moved for twenty years, and the title already written on it reads like a confession waiting for its author to notice whose it is.
Notes
Malcolm‘s book and the McGinniss–MacDonald case, including the post-conviction letters and the 5-1 jury split in MacDonald’s lawsuit, are from The Journalist and the Murderer (1990) and its standard reception. The Masson suit context is public record.
The Koehler material, including the confession, the money line, the “why would people still think good of this asshole” question, the hollow-points at arrest, and the 1945 killing of the sixteen-year-old, comes from A Cold Case via the reviews pulled earlier: Amazon, Scribd, and Publishers Weekly.
The fixed Kagame portrait, the Kabila praise in 1997, and the 2000 corrective “Forsaken,” with its opening on a capital draped with lies, come from “One Man’s Rwanda”, Columbia Journalism Review.
Facts I supplied from knowledge: Kibeho, April 1995, with disputed death tolls running into the thousands; the UN Mapping Report on Congo, released October 1, 2010, which used language raising the question of genocide against Hutu refugees; the Paul Rusesabagina rendition from Dubai in August 2020, the 25-year sentence in September 2021, and the release in March 2023 under American pressure. All are well documented. The AP, Reuters, and Human Rights Watch coverage of the Rusesabagina case and the OHCHR page for the Mapping Report will supply links. The claim that Rwandan prisons held over a hundred thousand and that prisoners wear pink is standard in the Rwanda literature and in Gourevitch‘s own book.
Extrapolations without links, all of the self-evident kind: prisoners sleeping in shifts, which is widely reported of the post-genocide prisons; the shared New Yorker masthead between Malcolm and Gourevitch; Kagame’s reputation for making interlocutors feel like the one outsider who understands, which is a reading of the access pattern the Columbia Journalism Review piece describes and is stated as characterization; and the closing image of the file on the desk, which is rhetoric, not reportage.
The Sentences of Philip Gourevitch: A Prose Analysis
Start with the title, because the title is a sentence and the sentence contains the method. We Wish to Inform You has a subject, a verb, an object, and a future tense. It is courteous. It is formal. Seven pastors wrote it to their superior, and the courtesy survives the content the way a man’s posture might survive his execution. Gourevitch found the sentence in the record and had the judgment to put it on the cover unaltered, and that judgment defines his prose. He trusts the found sentence over the composed one. The writer’s job, in his practice, is to build a structure in which the document, the admission, or the overheard phrase can detonate without the writer touching it.
The style has a lineage. His father read Rousseau for a living and translated him, and translation is the discipline of saying what the text says and nothing else. His mother painted clouds, which is the discipline of rendering what the eye can verify. The son took an M.F.A. in fiction and published a few stories, and the fiction training shows in scene construction and in his ear, though the deeper inheritance is the New Yorker plain style that runs back through John Hersey (1914-1993). Hiroshima set the precedent Gourevitch extends: atrocity rendered in flat declarative prose, the temperature dropped as the content rises, the writer’s composure standing in for the composure the reader cannot summon. George Orwell (1903-1950) called good prose a windowpane. Gourevitch’s variation puts the pane between the reader and the mass grave and refuses to fog it.
His signature move is the withheld judgment. In his first dispatch from Rwanda he wrote that the machete, the club, and a few grenades had “made the neutron bomb obsolete.” The sentence carries no outrage. It performs a technical comparison, weapons procurement as it were, and the horror arrives through the deadpan, which forces the reader to supply the response the writer declines to model. This move recurs at every scale. He writes that genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building, and the sentence works because every word is defensible. The killing of Rwanda required organization, mobilization, solidarity, shared purpose, all the goods of civic life turned to one end. A lesser writer states the paradox and admires it. Gourevitch states it as a finding and moves on, and the reader carries it for years.
The second move is the interrogated first person. He uses the “I” sparingly and almost always against himself. The famous instance comes at Nyarubuye, where he walks among the unburied dead and records that the dead looked like pictures of the dead, and then records something worse, that he found the scene beautiful, and then stops to examine what his own response convicts him of. The passage risks everything. A reporter who finds massacre victims beautiful invites the charge of aestheticizing atrocity, and Gourevitch runs at the charge instead of away from it, making his own perception part of the evidence. The move descends from fiction, where the unreliable perceiver is a standard instrument, and he imports it into reportage as a tool of honesty. The reader learns to trust him because he audits himself on the page.
Third, the delayed reveal. He builds a scene in ordinary detail, a hotel bar, a hillside, a prison yard, lets the reader settle into partial understanding, then introduces the fact that reorders everything. In A Cold Case the reader spends pages with Frankie Koehler’s charm, his courtliness, his code about never killing for money, before Gourevitch sets the boy Koehler shot at sixteen back into the frame. The sequence is an argument conducted through structure. The reader experiences the seduction and then the correction, which teaches more about how killers pass among us than any essay on the banality of evil. The technique requires patience and nerve, because for pages at a time the writer appears to be losing control of his own sympathies. He never is.
Fourth, the preserved voice. Gourevitch’s dialogue keeps the speaker’s syntax, and his subjects convict or reveal themselves in their own grammar. Koehler’s Hell’s Kitchen cadences, the careful French-inflected English of Rwandan officials, the pastoral formality of churchmen who failed their congregations, each register arrives intact. He almost never paraphrases a self-justification, because paraphrase launders it. The génocidaire who explains his quota in his own words does the prosecution’s work, and the writer’s restraint reads as confidence. He also knows when silence beats speech. Some of his strongest paragraphs record what a subject declined to say, the pause, the changed subject, the answer given to a different question.
The rhythm underneath all this alternates accumulation and arrest. He writes long sentences that gather clauses the way testimony gathers, qualifications and locations and names, then cuts to a sentence of four or five words that lands like a gavel. The long sentence earns the short one. Paragraphs follow the same law, a page of patient assembly closed by two lines that reorganize it. This is Hemingway’s iceberg administered at essay length, and it explains why his books, dense with policy and history, read at the pace of thrillers. The prose withholds the way a good interrogator withholds.
Now the costs. Control can make horror coherent, and coherence flatters the reader. The survivors experienced chaos; the reader of Gourevitch experiences architecture, and some critics of the Rwanda book argue that the architecture is the distortion, that clean moral lines emerged from prose too well made to accommodate mess. Reviewers of A Cold Case noticed the residue of magazine style, the intrusions of the first person that remind the reader the material ran elsewhere first. The elegance carries a subtler risk. A style this authoritative persuades below the line of argument, and the fixed portrait of Paul Kagame demonstrates the danger, since the same composed sentences that made abandonment undeniable made the ruler’s calm seem like a verdict rather than a performance. The prose does not distinguish between the writer’s best judgments and his worst. It dignifies both.
There is also the matter of pace. The method needs time the way concrete needs time, and the gap between his third book and his fourth now runs past fifteen years. A style built on the found sentence and the earned reveal cannot be hurried, and the aftermath he studies keeps extending, so the writer who taught American journalism to stay past the news cycle has stayed so long that staying became the story. The discipline that produces the sentences also defers them.
Set him in the tradition. Hersey supplies the flat register for atrocity. Orwell supplies the ethic of the windowpane. Joan Didion (1934-2021) supplies the controlled first person and the sentence as nerve, though her subject is her own perception and his is the world his perception audits. Michael Herr (1940-2016) marks the opposite pole, the hot style, prose that reproduces the derangement of war from inside, where Gourevitch reproduces the derangement by refusing to be deranged. V. S. Naipaul (1932-2018) offers the nearest cold comparison, the traveler among ruins declining consolation, but Naipaul’s coldness serves contempt and Gourevitch’s serves the record. What Gourevitch added to the tradition is a tense. His books run in the aftermath, the long present in which the dead stay dead and the living explain, and he built the prose for that tense: patient, forensic, courteous to every speaker, and unforgiving in the assembly. The pastors wished to inform. So does he, and the wish, stated that way, with that restraint, turns out to be the most damning sentence available in English.
The Recording Angel: Philip Gourevitch’s Hero System
Two terrors stand behind the career of Philip Gourevitch, and Ernest Becker (1924-1974) named them both. The first is the terror of the unrecorded death. On April 15, 1994, seven pastors at Mugonero wrote to their church president that they and their congregants expected to die the next day, and the sentence they chose was a bid for the record. They did not write save us. They wrote we wish to inform you. Facing the machetes, they reached for the one immortality still open to them, the fact of their murder set down on paper, addressed, dated, delivered. The second terror is worse and comes after. It is the terror that the record changes nothing, that the informed party files the letter, that a civilization can build museums to the last genocide while declining to interrupt the current one, and that the words a culture uses to promise permanence, never again, international community, the conscience of mankind, are paste. Becker taught that every man needs a hero system, a shared drama of significance that lets him feel of lasting use in the face of death. Gourevitch built his against both terrors at once. He became the man who makes the record and audits the paste.
The hero formed in Middletown. The Gourevitch home ran on permanence projects of the earthly kind. The father spent decades getting Rousseau’s sentences into exact English, a labor whose reward is that the text survives you with your name on the spine. The mother painted clouds, the least permanent objects in nature, fixed in oil. This was a secular Jewish home in the long shadow of the Holocaust, and in Becker’s terms the shadow set the problem. When God goes, the culture must supply the heroics, and for postwar Jewish intellectuals the supplied heroics centered on one commandment that survived the collapse of the others: remember. Record. Do not let them tell you it did not happen. The son took the commandment and made a trade of it. His hero is the witness who stays, the recording angel of a cosmos that no longer employs angels, and the immortality vehicle is the book, the account so exact and so severe that erasure fails.
Every hero system runs on sacred words, and the words look universal until you carry them across the border into another system. Take memory. For Gourevitch, memory is the sacred substance, the thing the hero gathers, guards, and monumentalizes; a fact preserved is a small victory over death, his subject’s and his own. Carry the word up a Rwandan hill and hand it to a survivor whose neighbor killed her sons, and memory turns into a beast she feeds on a schedule so it does not eat her; she has learned, as one man told Gourevitch over drinks, to govern her devastations, and governing means rationing, and rationing memory is a sin in the writer’s system and survival in hers. Hand the word to the state in Kigali and memory becomes an instrument of rule, a commemoration season each April, a curriculum, a license renewed annually for whatever the government must do to keep the killers from returning. Hand it to a defense lawyer at the tribunal in Arusha and memory becomes the weakest form of evidence, a thing to impeach on cross. Hand it to a trauma therapist and memory becomes a symptom to be processed toward discharge. Hand it to a Hasid saying kaddish and memory becomes liturgy, which needs no facts at all, only fidelity. Same word. Six hero systems. The recording angel holds one of six votes and writes as if he holds the gavel.
Or take witness, the sacred act of Gourevitch’s drama. In his system the witness is the hero’s function, and the ethics of it are strict: stay past the news cycle, refuse euphemism, let the killer speak and hang. In the survivor’s system, witness is a burden the living owe the dead and pay at cost, since every telling reopens the account. In the system of the American news producer, witness is footage, a commodity with a shelf life of days, and the man who stays three years in Rwanda is a man with no sense of the market. In the system of the evangelical, witness means testimony to salvation, good news, the one meaning Gourevitch’s usage inverts. In the system of the Rwandan state, a witness is a resource or a threat depending on what he saw and where he says it. The word does not travel. The hero who lives by it must subtract the other meanings to keep his own sacred, and subtraction is where every hero system pays its bills.
Here is the subtraction story. Gourevitch’s hero requires that the record wants to exist, that the dead want speaking for and the living want to speak. Some do. The pastors did. But his method, the request that a subject tell his story from birth, harvests the ones who want a record and passes over the ones whose survival strategy is silence, so the record skews toward the temperament of the recorder. The hero also requires a reader who receives the record as summons. The actual reader receives it between advertisements. His witness traveled to America in a magazine that sold it alongside watches and resort wear, and the career the dead of Rwanda financed came with the full Manhattan package, the staff position, the prize dinners, the editorship of a literary quarterly that hands out an engraved ostrich egg at its annual revel. None of this convicts him. All of it must vanish from the drama for the drama to feel holy, because a recording angel with a fee schedule is a stenographer, and the hero system runs on the difference. The deepest subtraction concerns power. The record, to exist, needs access; access, in a post-genocide state, is a grant; and the granting power has appeared in the record for thirty years in the same flattering light. The auditor of everyone’s paste has one set of books he has yet to audit, and his hero system explains why better than any theory of bias: the man who controls the visas also guards the site of the hero’s life work, and a hero cannot subpoena his own temple.
Set his system beside the rival system that shares its vocabulary, because the sharing is the trap. Paul Kagame runs a hero drama too. Its hero is the soldier-builder, the man who stopped the killing when the world’s conscience stayed home, and its immortality project is the state, clean streets, order, growth, the country as monument. Its sacred words are the same words. Memory, in the builder’s system, means the state’s account of the rescue, renewed each April. Never again means whatever force the rescue requires, forever, without audit. Justice means the killers stay broken. Unity means the categories that produced the machetes may not be spoken. The two systems interlocked because each needed the other’s sacred object. The witness needed the state for access to the record; the state needed the witness for the record’s blessing abroad. Each man became a load-bearing wall in the other’s immortality project, and Becker predicts the rest: a man defends his immortality project with everything, because the project is his answer to death, and evidence against the project arrives as a kind of dying. The evidence arrived, Kibeho, the forests of the Congo, the plane from Dubai, and the witness’s ledger, so pitiless everywhere else, went quiet at the door of the temple. Call it corruption and you miss the engine. He guards the portrait the way a man guards the thing that makes his death survivable.
There is also a rival he fights without naming — the consoler. The consoling hero system, therapeutic, humanitarian, ecumenical, holds that suffering exists to be healed, that stories end in closure, that reconciliation is a destination and forgiveness a policy deliverable. Its saints run workshops. Its sacred words are healing, closure, moving forward. Gourevitch’s style wars on this system without declaring the war. His sentences refuse consolation the way a fast refuses food. He stays when the consolers leave, mistrusts every ceremony of resolution, and titles his unfinished book with the sentence the consolers can least afford, you hide that you hate me and I hide that I know. In his drama, premature comfort is the enemy of the record, a second erasure dressed as kindness. The consoler, from inside her own system, sees him as a man who feeds on wounds and calls the feeding rigor. Both readings are correct inside their walls. That is Becker’s grim joke about hero systems.
How much does he know? Some. He audits his own perception on the page, he confessed to finding the dead beautiful and prosecuted himself for it, and his late writing on America concedes that the stable ground he reported from was custom and chance. He has said the aftermath is harder to write than the event, which is a craftsman’s way of saying the hero’s task has no finish line. What he shows no sign of pricing is the interlock, the degree to which his answer to death and the president’s answer to death hold each other up, and the way the unfinished book serves him. The book has been coming for a quarter century. Finishing it would close the project, and a closed project can be judged, and a judged hero is a dead one. Deferral keeps the drama open and the author necessary. The deadline moves the way a horizon moves.
The hero, then, is the recording angel without a God, the man who answers oblivion with the exact account and answers fraudulence by auditing every consolation except one. The rival he fights without naming is the consoler, the closure industry that offers the survivors an exit he believes is a second burial. And the cost his ledger cannot price is this: he built his stay against death out of other men’s dead. The pastors wrote one letter to their president and it failed, and a stranger from Connecticut made their sentence immortal and made it carry him too. They wished to inform. He wished to last. The record holds both wishes now and cannot tell them apart, and no entry in it says whether the dead of Mugonero would have signed.
Convenient Beliefs: Philip Gourevitch and the Audit He Never Finished
On June 10, 1994, a State Department spokeswoman named Christine Shelly stood at the podium in Washington and worked through her guidance on Rwanda. The killing had run for nine weeks. The dead numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Shelly told the room that “acts of genocide may have occurred.” Alan Elsner of Reuters asked the question the guidance existed to prevent: how many acts of genocide does it take to make genocide? Shelly said she was not in a position to answer. She was in a position to answer. The Genocide Convention obligated its signatories to act against genocide, the administration had decided against acting, and so the administration required a belief, held with a straight face at a podium, that the question of what to call the killing remained open. The belief did its work. No one had to lie. Everyone had to believe something convenient.
Stephen P. Turner (b. 1951) gives us the tool for this scene. Beliefs, in Turner’s account, do not survive on evidence alone. They survive on convenience, on their fit with the believer’s position, income, alliances, and institutional needs. An organization generates the beliefs it requires the way a body generates enzymes, and the believers are sincere, which is what makes the sorting invisible from inside. The test of a convenient belief is what testing it would cost the holder. Philip Gourevitch built his reputation as an auditor of such beliefs. He walked through the humanitarian order of the 1990s and priced its convictions one by one, and the audit stands as the most thorough anyone has run on that world. Then the frame turns on the auditor, because Turner’s tool has no owner, and the second audit remains unwritten.
Start with the beliefs he exposed, and note in each case who needed the belief and what it spared them.
The press and the governments called Rwanda chaos, and behind chaos stood the older belief in ancient tribal hatred. The belief was convenient at every level. Chaos has no author, so it creates no duty; a hatred that is ancient is a hatred no policy can touch, so the failure to touch it is wisdom rather than abandonment. Editors needed the belief because it fit the wire template for Africa. Governments needed it because the alternative description, a planned extermination run through the state’s administrative structure, radio, and militia payroll, named a crime with treaty obligations attached. Gourevitch’s reporting broke the belief by supplying the organization chart. He showed the lists, the rehearsals, the imported machetes, the bourgmestres directing their communes, and once the killing had managers the chaos belief died of exposure. It had never rested on evidence. It rested on the price of replacing it.
The phrase international community carried a subtler convenience. Gourevitch mistrusted it above all official language because it performed a service for everyone who used it: it distributed responsibility until responsibility had no address. A community that includes every government, agency, court, and mandate can fail without any member failing. The belief that such a community exists, and that it learns lessons, lets each institution mourn the outcome as a collective shortcoming and return to budget season. Never again worked the same way at the level of the culture. The Holocaust Memorial Museum opened in Washington in April 1993, Schindler’s List followed in December, and the belief took hold that memory immunizes, that a society which builds the museum has done the moral work the museum commemorates. The belief was convenient because commemoration costs less than intervention and pays better. Gourevitch’s first book runs on the collision between that belief and the year 1994, and his title, a sentence from men who informed a world that had promised to be informed, prices the belief at its true value.
His hardest audit came at Goma. In July 1994 the defeated Hutu Power government pushed a million people across the border into Zaire, and the humanitarian order arrived with tents, water, and television. The operating belief held that the camps held refugees, a category that triggers funding, sympathy, and the machinery of relief. The camps held refugees and also held the army and militias that had run the genocide, intact, armed, and administering the food lines. Aid agencies fed the force that had murdered the people the world had declined to save, and the belief in neutral humanitarianism, aid without politics, was convenient for budgets, for recruitment, for the self-image of a profession, and for donors who wanted their compassion uncomplicated. Some workers saw it; Médecins Sans Frontières pulled sections of its operation out of the camps over it. Most stayed, and the belief stayed with them, because testing it meant conceding that charity can extend a war. Gourevitch wrote the concession for them. The camps chapter of his book remains the standard demonstration that a belief can be sincere, humane, and load-bearing for an atrocity at the same time.
So he knows the frame. He has run it on governments, agencies, churches, and the press, and he taught two generations of readers to ask what a comforting description spares its holder. Turner’s discipline requires one more step, the step from audit to self-audit, and here the record thins.
Gourevitch believes Kagame’s Rwanda works. He has held the belief since his first dispatches drew the general as calm, deliberate, and questioning, and he has held it through Kibeho, through the campaigns in Zaire that a United Nations mapping report catalogued in language raising the question of genocide, through the deaths of opposition figures, and through the rendition and imprisonment of Paul Rusesabagina, the man his own early reporting made famous. Price the belief as Turner prices beliefs, by asking what it buys. It buys access: the visas, the ministers, the prison interviews, the return trips on which a reporting life in Rwanda depends. It buys the coherence of a life’s work, because thirty years of writing rest on an arc that runs from rescue through reconstruction, and revising the ruler revises the books. It buys the unfinished manuscript, which needs entry to the hills and the government’s tolerance to exist. A state that jails its famous critics will also sort its famous visitors, and the visitor who believes the state works keeps his appointment. None of this requires insincerity. Turner’s frame runs on sincerity. The belief may even be true in part; Rwanda’s order, growth, and safety are real by measures that a visitor can check against the region around it, and convenience and accuracy can ride in the same sentence. The tell lies elsewhere. A belief held on evidence gets tested when contrary evidence arrives, and Gourevitch has shown he can test: he praised Laurent Kabila in 1997 and published the correction in 2000, a capital draped with lies, because the Kabila belief cost him little to drop. The Kagame belief has absorbed thirty years of contrary evidence without a correction of similar weight, and the difference between the two beliefs is not the evidence. The difference is the price.
His secondary beliefs guard the primary one, which is how convenient beliefs travel, in convoys. He believes that outsiders who never governed a country of victims and perpetrators judge cheaply, a belief that disqualifies his auditors as a class. He believes the RPF’s killings belong to a different category than the genocide, reprisal rather than program, a belief that keeps the moral architecture of his first book standing. He believes long presence confers authority, and he has the longest presence, so the belief crowns the man who holds it. Each of these has arguments behind it. Each also happens to protect the position of the believer, and Turner teaches us to notice when the arguments and the interests point the same way every time.
The two directions of the audit meet in his own forthcoming title. You Hide That You Hate Me and I Hide That I Know describes the hills, where survivor and killer manage an economy of convenient beliefs because the alternative is unlivable: each party holds a public belief about the other that both know to be false, and the falseness, jointly maintained, is the peace. Gourevitch heard the sentence in Rwanda and recognized it as the truth about coexistence after mass murder. Turner’s frame asks whether he recognized the rest of it. The sentence describes a man and his source of thirty years as well as it describes any two neighbors on a hill, and the writer who chose it for his cover chose the most exact description of his own arrangement available in the language. Whether he chose it knowingly is the open question of his late career. The auditor of the humanitarian order priced every belief in the system except the one he pays with, and the book that might settle the account has been forthcoming for twenty years, which is what a belief too expensive to test looks like on a publishing schedule.
Notes:
The Shelly briefing of June 10, 1994 and Elsner’s question are in the public record; the exchange appears in contemporaneous Reuters coverage, in Samantha Power’s A Problem from Hell, and in Gourevitch’s own book, and the State Department transcript circulates in the Foreign Relations archives. Link candidates: the PBS Frontline “Ghosts of Rwanda” materials carry the clip and transcript. The Goma camps, the ex-FAR and interahamwe control of food distribution, and the MSF withdrawal over aid capture are standard in the literature; MSF’s own reflections on Goma (the MSF-CRASH case studies, “Rwandan refugee camps in Zaire and Tanzania 1994-1995”) document the withdrawal decision. The museum opening in April 1993 and the film in December 1993 are public record. The Kabila praise and the 2000 corrective.
The mapping report, Kibeho, and the Rusesabagina case were flagged with link guidance earlier in the thread. Gourevitch’s stated defense that outsiders judge cheaply paraphrases positions he takes in the two JusticeInfo interviews linked earlier.
Extrapolations without links, the self-evident kind: the reading of Shelly’s position (she followed guidance; the administration’s decision against intervention that spring is documented, and I frame her belief as institutional rather than personal), the enzyme figure for institutional belief production, the claim that a state which jails critics also sorts visitors, and the closing turn on the title.
The Field and the Witness: Philip Gourevitch Through Pierre Bourdieu
Succession crises expose a field the way autopsies expose a body. Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) taught that the structure of a cultural field, the positions, the powers, the kinds of capital that count, stays half hidden until the moment of transmission, when everyone must show what he holds. In 2004 and 2005 the small field of American literary magazines held such a moment. George Plimpton (1927-2003) had edited The Paris Review for half a century from a townhouse on East 72nd Street, where the staff worked around a pool table and the parties ran late and the magazine’s authority was the man’s authority, personal, charismatic, and untransferable. He died in September 2003. The board tried continuity first and named Brigid Hughes, a staff editor trained under the founder. Continuity lasted a year. The board declined to renew her, the fight went public, and a search committee headed by Robert Silvers (1929-2017) of The New York Review of Books, the nearest thing the field has to a pope, chose Philip Gourevitch (b. 1961), a war reporter, to run the country’s most famous fiction quarterly. Founders and old contributors, men in their seventies, denounced the choice in the press as a betrayal of the founding spirit. Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014), who had founded the magazine with Plimpton in Paris, blessed the choice and said the energy had returned. Gourevitch told the Associated Press, “I’m not coming in to tear it up and make it over.” Everyone in the field understood the sentence as a coronation speech, because the fight had never concerned the magazine’s contents. It concerned who holds the power to consecrate, and Silvers had answered.
To see how a reporter of genocide arrived at that chair, run the trajectory as Bourdieu runs trajectories, as a series of capital conversions, each one moving holdings from a weaker currency into a stronger one.
The initial endowment came from Middletown. Victor Gourevitch (1925-2020) translated Rousseau at Wesleyan; Jacqueline Gourevitch (b. 1933) painted. A child of that home inherits the capital Bourdieu called cultural in its embodied state: the ease with books, the trained eye, the feel for the game of intellectual life that no school can fully teach and every school rewards. The institutions then certified the inheritance, Choate, Cornell, and a Columbia M.F.A. in fiction, credentials that convert home advantage into paper. The fiction degree looks like a false start in the résumé and reads as shrewd holding in the ledger. Literary technique is scarce in journalism and common in fiction, so a man who carries novelistic craft across the border into reportage arrives rich in the one currency his new field lacks. The M.F.A. never produced the novel. It produced the differential.
The Forward gave him his entry position, and entry positions in Bourdieu run on social capital as much as skill. The paper sat inside the New York Jewish intellectual circuit, small in circulation, dense in connections, a field position from which a young writer becomes known to the editors who staff the consecrating institutions. He ran the New York bureau, then the culture pages. Then came the wager that made the career, and Bourdieu supplies the logic of it. A newcomer to a crowded field profits most by finding the unoccupied position, the move the incumbents have left open because their own sense of the game marks it as worthless. In 1994 African mass death was such a position. The beat belonged to wire copy and stringers; the field’s dominant players, the writers at the glossy monthlies and The New Yorker, held positions in politics, profiles, and the culture, and their instincts filed Rwanda under the unprofitable. Gourevitch took the devalued subject and worked it with the techniques of the field’s autonomous pole, patience, structure, literary craft, moral severity, nine trips on a freelancer’s budget. The move looks like sacrifice and functions as arbitrage. He bought low.
The returns arrived in 1998 and 1999 as symbolic capital, the currency Bourdieu ranks above money because it converts into everything else. The National Book Critics Circle Award, the Polk, the Los Angeles Times prize, the PEN award for first nonfiction, the Guardian First Book Award: each prize is an act of consecration by a field authority, and the sum of them installed Gourevitch in a position that had not existed before he occupied it, the literary atrocity writer. Bourdieu’s economic world reversed operates here at full strength. The cultural field rewards visible indifference to the market, and no performance of disinterestedness exceeds the writer who spends years among the dead of a country no advertiser wants. The subject’s moral gravity transfers to the author as authority; the apparent renunciation of profit becomes the profit. A man cannot be accused of careerism while walking through Nyarubuye, which is what made the walk, in field terms, the best career move available in his generation of magazine writers.
The New Yorker made the arrival official, staff writer in 1997, and the magazine’s role in this story is the role Bourdieu assigned to the great reviews of Paris: the consecrating instance, the institution whose acceptance defines membership in the field’s first rank. But the 2005 appointment marks the rarer promotion, the one Bourdieu watched most closely, the move from producer to consecrator. An editor of The Paris Review holds the power that prizes hold, the power to make writers. Gourevitch used the chair as consecrators use it. He edited the four volumes of The Paris Review Interviews, and the act codified a canon; to select which conversations about craft constitute the tradition is to legislate the tradition. He gave out the Plimpton Prize at the annual Revel, presided over the redesign, revived the founder’s logo, added nonfiction and photography, and doubled the circulation, managing the heteronomous success, the commerce, while the masthead performed autonomy. The septuagenarian revolt of 2005 reads in this light as the standard grief of a displaced orthodoxy. The old guard held capital denominated in the founder’s person, memories of Paris, proximity to George, and the succession revalued the currency to zero. Their letters to the editor were the sound of a devaluation.
The position he created has outlived his occupancy of its frontier. After 1998 every American magazine wanted its witness, and the literary atrocity writer became a recognized chair in the field, with its own career path, its own prize circuit, its own conventions, stay long, refuse euphemism, let the perpetrator speak. Samantha Power (b. 1970) converted an adjacent version of the position into policy capital and a government career, which Bourdieu might call a transfer between fields. Younger writers at the glossies now occupy the position as a known destination rather than a wager, and the writers who refuse it, who insist the genre aestheticizes horror or launders access, define themselves against it, which is the other way of confirming a position’s existence. In Bourdieu’s terms Gourevitch changed the space of possibles. A field is a structure of positions, and he added one, which is the rarest form of success the theory recognizes.
Two holdings in his portfolio remain live and price the late career. The first sits in Kigali. Thirty years of access to Paul Kagame (b. 1957) and his government constitute social capital of a concentrated and fragile kind, capital that exists only while the relationship exists and liquidates at a total loss if spent. A writer draws on such a holding for material and pays for it in position-takings, in what can and cannot appear under his name, and the constraint operates without instruction, through the trained feel for what the relationship will bear. Bourdieu would read the fixed portrait of the president as a portfolio effect. The second holding is the announced book. A masterwork in progress functions in a field as a promissory note; it holds the author’s position open, accrues expectation as interest, and commands deference no published book can revoke, since the field cannot judge what it cannot read. The note has circulated for twenty years. Publication converts it to ordinary capital, subject to review, comparison, and decline, and the conversion date has moved accordingly. Farrar, Straus and Giroux lists May 1, 2028.
The trajectory, assembled, shows no wasted motion. Inherited cultural capital, certified at Choate and Columbia; craft arbitraged from fiction into reportage; entry through the Forward’s dense small world; the unoccupied position seized at maximum discount in 1994; consecration by the full prize apparatus; arrival at the consecrating magazine; elevation to consecrator in the founder’s chair, anointed by the field’s pope over the bodies of the old orthodoxy. Bourdieu built his theory against the field’s own preferred story, in which talent meets subject and the rest follows, and Gourevitch’s case will read to some as the theory’s vindication and to others as its limit, since the sentences, whatever the portfolio behind them, hold their value on any exchange.
The Tribe and the Witness: Philip Gourevitch Read Through John Mearsheimer
John J. Mearsheimer (b. 1947) argues in The Great Delusion that we are social beings from the start to the finish of our lives, that individualism runs a distant second, and that liberalism builds its politics on an anthropology that gets man wrong. Man is born into a group. The group shapes his identity before his critical faculties mature, so socialization imposes his moral code and reason arrives late to ratify it. He survives through the group, sacrifices for it, and remains, in the phrase Mearsheimer endorses, tribal at his core. Liberalism treats him as an atomistic bearer of universal rights, and this universalism drives liberal states toward ambitious moral commitments abroad that their nature as survival-seeking groups prevents them from honoring. Stipulate that Mearsheimer is right and read Philip Gourevitch, and the career reorganizes into a thirty-year demonstration of the argument, conducted by a writer whose idiom stays liberal while his findings keep coming back tribal.
Begin on the hill in April 1994, because the killing tests the two anthropologies against each other and one of them fails the test. The liberal account needs individuals: deranged men, criminal men, men who chose evil one by one. The record Gourevitch assembled shows something else. It shows ordinary men who killed their neighbors because their group asked, organized through the structures that socialize a man from birth, the commune, the church, the radio, the family. The bourgmestre passed the word, the radio named the targets, the neighbors formed the crews, and men who had never broken a law cut down the children they had watched grow. Reason, the faculty liberalism crowns, performed as Mearsheimer ranks it, least among the three sources of preference. The value infusion did the work. Hutu Power spent years teaching that the Tutsi were inyenzi, cockroaches, an alien nation inside the nation, and when the order came the teaching ran. Gourevitch wrote the sentence that concedes the anthropology: genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building. The line reads as irony in a liberal magazine. Read straight, it is Mearsheimer’s premise with the moral sign reversed. The killing was social. Solidarity ran the machetes.
The Mugonero letter shows the group logic at the level of one man. Seven Tutsi pastors wrote to their church president, Elizaphan Ntakirutimana (1924-2007), as members of his confession, appealing to the brotherhood of the church. The president answered as a member of his ethnic group. Faith and blood claimed the same man, blood won, and the tribunal later convicted him. Under the liberal anthropology his choice is a monstrous individual failure. Under Mearsheimer’s it is the expected result when memberships collide, since the deepest group claims the man, and confession sat above ethnicity on paper only. Gourevitch put the letter on his cover. The letter is a document of group hierarchy, and his book, read with the stipulation, is an archive of such documents.
Now the podium in Washington. The liberal order had spent the postwar decades building the architecture Mearsheimer describes, universal rights, a Genocide Convention, a museum on the Mall, an official aspiration in which the rights of every man on the planet engage the conscience of every state. Samuel Moyn (b. 1972), whom Mearsheimer cites, calls human rights the era’s most elevated aspiration. April 1994 audited the aspiration. No liberal state’s survival ran through Rwanda, so no liberal state moved, and the spokeswoman at the State Department performed the accounting in public, conceding acts of genocide while withholding the noun that carried obligations. Mearsheimer predicts the performance. Liberal universalism writes the checks; nationalism keeps the accounts; the checks clear only when the group’s interests permit. Gourevitch made this collision his subject and gave it its permanent record, and his contempt for the phrase international community states a Mearsheimerite finding in a reporter’s register: there is no community above the tribes. He found the moral vocabulary of the liberal order to be what the stipulation says it must be, aspiration without an army.
The army that came belonged to a kin group. The Rwandan Patriotic Front marched out of Uganda as the children of Tutsi exiles, a force bound by blood, shared catastrophe, and thirty years of refugee memory, fighting for the survival of their people because no one else intended to secure it. The rescue of the remnant came from tribal solidarity, organized, disciplined, and willing to sacrifice, everything Mearsheimer says the group commands and the atomistic individual cannot. The liberal order sent condolences and, later, tribunals. The tribe sent soldiers. A man reporting from the hills in 1995 saw the finding on the ground whatever his magazine’s premises, and Gourevitch reported what he saw.
Then the reconstruction, where the stipulation produces its sharpest reading. Paul Kagame built his state on Mearsheimer’s anthropology and against its vocabulary. The government bans the ethnic categories, punishes divisionism, and teaches Ndi Umunyarwanda, I am Rwandan, a single nation above the hills. This looks anti-tribal and runs on the tribal engine. Kagame does not reason his citizens into unity. He socializes them: the ingando camps, the commemoration season each April, the curriculum, the managed vocabulary. He controls the value infusion because he understands where a man’s moral code comes from, and he understood it before the political scientists wrote it down, having watched socialization arm a million neighbors. Nationalism, in Mearsheimer’s account, is tribalism at scale, the most powerful political ideology on earth, and the Rwandan project is nation-building by a man who takes the social nature of man as his first premise. Security precedes rights. The group precedes the individual. Order precedes speech.
The standing complaint against him holds that a writer who audits every power spared this one. Stipulate Mearsheimer and the portrait stops looking like a lapse and starts looking like a conclusion. Gourevitch watched the liberal anthropology fail its test, watched the universalist order abandon a people to the machetes, and watched a kin army stop the killing and a nationalist strongman keep the survivors alive. His defense of Kagame runs in the vocabulary of group survival, the security of survivors, the men who ended the genocide while the auditors watched television. That is the realist’s hierarchy of values spoken by a liberal magazine’s star writer. He chose the tribe’s protector over the proceduralists, and he keeps choosing, and the choice is an unacknowledged concession that on the question of what man is, Mearsheimer holds the better hand. The concession stays unacknowledged because acknowledging it costs him his idiom. The New Yorker’s civilization rests on the anthropology Mearsheimer rejects, and its greatest atrocity writer built his life’s work on evidence for the rejection.
The stipulation also prices the costs, because Mearsheimer’s anthropology carries no comfort. A world of groups has no restraint above the group. The kin army that saved the remnant also fired into the camp at Kibeho, and its columns pursued the fleeing enemy nation into the Congo forests, where a United Nations report later counted the dead in language that raised the question of genocide. The logic that rescues also pursues. A writer who accepts group survival as the supreme value loses the standing to audit the protector, since every audit weighs against the survival that justifies him, and Gourevitch’s weakened audits of Kigali follow from the premise as surely as the strong ones of Washington did. The frame convicts and acquits him in the same motion. He saw the world as it is, and seeing it that way took his knife away at the one door where his readers wanted it used.
His own formation closes the circle, because Mearsheimer’s account of socialization describes the witness as well as the killers. Gourevitch’s moral code arrived before his reasoning matured, in a secular Jewish home in the Holocaust’s long shadow, where the surviving commandment was remember. His people’s catastrophe imposed the value infusion; the Forward gave it an apprenticeship; Rwanda gave it a field. His universalism, the insistence that the dead of a Rwandan hill claim the same memory owed the dead of Europe, is his tribe’s commandment extended outward, which is how Mearsheimer says moral codes travel, outward from the group, carried by men who mistake their inheritance for a deduction. The pastors wrote to their church president because the group was where salvation lay. The president chose his blood. The witness who preserved their letter was serving his own inheritance, and the book that resulted stands as the era’s record of what men do for their groups, written by a man doing the same, in the one idiom his group’s civilization gave him, and the idiom has never yet admitted what the record shows.
‘A Big Misunderstanding‘
Applying David Pinsof’s essay to the journalism of Philip Gourevitch reveals a writer who operates, in many ways, at the opposite end of the spectrum from the “misunderstanding” myth Pinsof critiques, yet who remains susceptible to the intellectual hazards Pinsof identifies.
Pinsof argues that intellectuals often fabricate “misunderstandings” to claim a savior role, asserting that if only the masses knew the “truth” or the “science,” they would act differently. Gourevitch, best known for his reporting on the Rwandan genocide in We Wish to Inform You, operates in a field where the “truth” is not a hidden intellectual secret, but a massive, observable tragedy that the world chose to ignore.
Where Pinsof’s target intellectual claims that people support bad policies because they are “biased” or “gullible,” Gourevitch argues that the international community and the perpetrators of the genocide understood the reality, and chose to act (or not act) anyway. Gourevitch’s work is an extended argument against the idea that the world was simply confused. He posits that the “misunderstanding” was a convenient fiction used by global powers to justify their indifference. In this way, Gourevitch actually engages in a Pinsof-esque deconstruction of the “misunderstanding” myth itself.
Gourevitch stares unflinchingly into the “hole” of human nature including the capacity for organized, intimate slaughter. While Pinsof argues that intellectuals use the study of this “hole” to cement their own status, Gourevitch’s work feels more like a necessary, if agonizing, record-keeping. He does not offer a “moral grammar” that promises world peace or salvation; he offers a record of the failure of all such grammars when confronted with human agency.
Gourevitch’s stated motive is to bear witness to the victims and hold the international community accountable. Pinsof’s framework forces us to ask if this, too, serves to elevate the status of the “witnessing intellectual.” By documenting the absolute failure of global institutions, Gourevitch establishes his own voice as the one that remains clear and uncorrupted by the convenient “misunderstandings” that plagued the rest of the world.
Pinsof notes that “most cognitive biases aren’t really biases, they’re savvy strategies”. Gourevitch applies this grim logic to the Rwandan genocidaires. He demonstrates that the slaughter was not the result of a “brain fart” or a “misunderstanding,” but a rational, strategic, and zero-sum competition for control of the state. He meticulously details how the perpetrators understood their incentives perfectly well, debunking the idea that they were simply “gullible idiots” who had been misled by “misinformation”.
In Pinsof’s terms, Gourevitch is a writer who refuses the “beautiful option” of blaming humanity’s problems on ignorance. Instead, he forces his readers to confront the bracing realization that the perpetrators and the bystanders knew what they were doing. Gourevitch does not want to be a savior; he wants to be a chronicler of the reality that, in the face of absolute evil, the “misunderstanding” myth is the ultimate form of bad faith.
CJR: ‘One Man’s Rwanda’
Tristan McConnell writes in the Feb. 1, 2011 issue under the subhead “Philip Gourevitch softens some hard truths”:
And then Gourevitch all but stopped reporting on Rwanda, Congo, Central Africa, and the genocide. He returned to the United States, where his career flourished. His second book, A Cold Case, was about an unsolved New York murder. He reported on domestic politics for The New Yorker, was appointed editor of the literary magazine the Paris Review, and co-wrote The Ballad of Abu Ghraib with Errol Morris, about torture and abuse by U. S. forces in Iraq.
As the years of Kagame’s rule—now as president—went on, the dominant narrative around him of reconciliation and visionary rule was buffeted by growing evidence from Congo—of ethnic murder, political meddling, and economic exploitation—as well as by increasing repression at home in Rwanda. Yet the broadly positive reception that Kagame received in the media persisted. “The authoritarianism has deepened with time, not lessened,” says Anderson. “Sometimes the rose-tinted spectacles can be blinding.”
Rwanda’s misadventures in Congo have been the basis of criticism of Kagame beyond the two Congo wars fought between 1996 and 2002. In December 2008, a UN report detailed links between the Rwandan elite and a rebel Congolese Tutsi warlord, Laurent Nkunda. The UN’s Group of Experts on the Congo, appointed to monitor violations of international sanctions imposed in the Congo, showed what many already suspected: that Nkunda, a rebel general accused of war crimes, was supported by members of Kagame’s inner circle, and that Rwanda was directly benefiting from the theft of minerals dug from the resource-rich hillsides of eastern Congo.
Just weeks after the Nkunda report was published, Gourevitch returned to Rwanda for the first time in years. The report was the talk among Rwandans: it fell like a bomb, damaging Kagame’s carefully maintained international reputation. The New Yorker published Gourevitch’s most recent full-length article on Rwanda in May 2009, a few months after the UN report had been published. Yet Nkunda is not mentioned until the third-to-last of fourteen pages, after which the links between the warlord and the Rwandan regime are briskly dismissed in a series of quotes from Kagame and his generals.
More recently, the signs of growing repression in Rwanda itself have grown more clear. International press coverage of Kagame’s landslide election victory in August 2010 was dominated by stories of a pair of local-language newspapers being closed down, opposition parties banned from running, an attempted assassination of a dissident general in exile, and two gruesome murders of Kagame critics. An editor working for one of the banned newspapers, Umuvugizi, was shot in the face and killed in Kigali, a virtually crime-free city; and in the southern town of Butare, a senior figure in one of the blocked opposition parties had his head all but severed by machete in an attack echoing the genocidal murders of 1994.
Kagame’s inevitable victory marked no change in leadership, policy, or style of government, but there was a departure in his portrayal in the Western press. “Doubts rise in Rwanda as election approaches” was the New York Times headline before the vote. “Rwanda’s success story fails to silence concerns about rights,” said The Washington Post. “In the run-up to the election we saw unprecedented reporting on Rwanda exposing the repression and abuses inside the country. We’ve never really seen that before,” says Carina Tertsakian, a researcher at Human Rights Watch who was thrown out of Rwanda in the months before the vote.
Worse was to come in October 2010, when a UN report looking back at a decade of horrors committed by various armed groups in Congo from 1993 onward revived accusations of war crimes and ethnic massacres against Kagame’s forces. The report was the result of a ‘mapping exercise’ to assess the extent of infringements of humanitarian law in the Congo. It found that tens of thousands of Hutu civilians and fighters alike were hunted and killed in a series of massacres following Rwanda’s 1996 invasion, perpetrated by Kagame’s and Kabila’s forces. In its most incendiary passage, the report’s authors said the attacks, “if proven before a competent court, could be characterized as crimes of genocide.”
Many observers—including some human rights activists—say the counter-genocide allegation goes too far. Gourevitch was certainly quick to slam the report, in a posting on his New Yorker blog that closely resembled the Rwandan government’s own response, quoting Rwandan officials, questioning the standards of proof and sourcing, and suggesting—as Rwandan officials also did— that the initial leak was designed to detract attention from the UN’s own failings in protecting civilians in the Congo. Gourevitch’s review of Linda Polman’s book, The Crisis Caravan, followed in October, in which he reminded New Yorker readers that, “fugitive Rwandan genocidaires were succored…by international humanitarians in border camps in eastern Congo, so that they have been able to continue their campaigns of extermination and rape to this day.”
In Gourevitch’s view, responsibility for the massacres that followed the break-up of the camps by the Rwandan army is laid at the feet of the humanitarian organizations, not the Rwandan government. “The Goma camps figure as the ultimate example of corrupted humanitarianism—of humanitarianism in the service of extreme inhumanity…. That there would be another war because of the camps was obvious long before the war came,” he wrote. The tens of thousands of Hutu deaths that the UN Mapping Report chronicles were, then, “the ultimate price of the camps.”
Yet events in Rwanda are precipitating an overdue reassessment that sees Kagame in a more complex—and accurate—way, than the dominant narrative long nourished by Gourevitch’s work. “The change is down to this concatenation of events: the Nkunda report in 2008, the elections, and then the Mapping Report,” says Jason Stearns, a former coordinator of the UN Group of Experts and author of a forthcoming book about Congo, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters. “To keep reporting the old success story of how far Rwanda has come since the genocide is to ignore these things.”
In fact, it is worth asking how Kagame stayed so clean for so long in the eyes of the Western media. “The media establishment in the West is not invested in Africa and hasn’t ever really expended the energy in coming to grips with Africa, or thinking seriously about Africa,” says Howard French, a former New York Times correspondent and author of A Continent for the Taking, who, like Gourevitch, reported on the aftermath of the Rwanda genocide. “There is a compulsion to simplify at a radical level, to seek easily identifiable good guys and bad guys.”
In the post-genocide context, Kagame became the hero personified—Hutus, the lumpen villains. Faced with the evil of genocide this tendency was natural, as was the attempt by foreign reporters, including Gourevitch, to find a comparison, something to help the reader make sense of the unfamiliar. The Holocaust offered a similar tale of mass murder. “One of the most important things that Gourevitch did was to liken the Rwandan experience to the Israeli experience, to the Holocaust,” says French, who teaches journalism at Columbia and has written for CJR. “There is almost no better way to tap into the public imagination and produce a more predictable moral compass than to mention the Holocaust.” In his book, French criticizes Gourevitch’s “emotionally over-powering but deeply flawed analogies with Israel and with European Jewry and the Holocaust,” and argues that the comparison influenced American policy in the Clinton era.
Gourevitch has made the link to the Jewish Holocaust in a number of stories but most explicitly in his New Yorker article in 2000. “The analogy that’s sometimes made between Rwanda’s aggressive defense policy and that of Israel—another small country with a vivid memory of genocide which has endured persistent threats of annihilation from its neighbors—is inexact but not unfounded,” he wrote.
René Lemarchand, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Florida and author of The Dynamics Of Violence In Central Africa, agrees that the identification of the Rwanda genocide with the Holocaust is a powerful tool, as is Gourevitch’s talent as a writer. “To read Gourevitch is to read a really splendid piece of reporting. Unfortunately it is an extremely lopsided view of both [Kagame] and the events that brought him to power,” he says. The portrayal of Kagame, he says, “doesn’t stand up to the facts that are slowly percolating up to the surface.”
Gourevitch, of course, sees things differently. On the phone from New York, he energetically defends his depiction of Kagame against the accusation of bias levelled by critics like Lemarchand. “When I wrote about Kagame in my book, I introduced him with the most detailed description of an RPF atrocity that I had ever seen published,” he says, referring to the killing of thousands of Hutus by Kagame’s soldiers at Kibeho in 1994. “What I was trying to say is you have got to understand that this leadership came to power in bloody circumstances, that they were ruthless, they were not angels. They were confronted with appalling choices and they remained prepared to use appalling force in the name of securing, stabilizing, and re-organizing the country—and that this was how they looked at Congo from the start as well. I wanted to make it clear that this was what you had to reckon with in trying to make a judgment.”
Tertsakian at Human Rights Watch is not convinced, arguing that while Gourevitch may report Kagame’s atrocities and oppression, these acts are always subsequently justified, leading her to describe some of his writing as biased in favor of the Rwandan government. “It is not appropriate to draw an equivalence between the killings carried out by the RPF and the genocide. But the genocide should not be used as a justification for minimizing or excusing what the RPF did, and for the continuing repression in Rwanda today,” she says. Human Rights Watch and others often describe this continuing domestic repression as a “climate of fear” in the country.
Gourevitch responds:
So CJR, having produced a piece whose sole purpose is to discredit me and my work, attached a note to it, concurring in an apology to me by its author, Tristan McConnell. To me that translates into plain English as saying the reporter can’t be trusted. Why? Because when McConnell interviewed me last September, he did not tell me it was for a piece about me. He said it was for something else—“about the changing media perception of Paul Kagame…how attitudes toward Kagame have changed over the years.” McConnell represented the project the same way to the only other journalist he quotes who reported from Rwanda in the 1990s, Chris McGreal of The Guardian—and he used McGreal falsely in the piece, setting him up as if he were in opposition to me, and as if I disagree with what he says. Yes, I saw the killings of Hutus in the Congo by Rwandan army forces in 1996 and 1997 as a “worrying sign”—and yes, I believed, as most journalists who knew the situation in Eastern Congo firsthand at the time did, that the camps (and the mounting campaigns of terror that Hutu Power fighters from the camps were waging against Rwanda, and against Tutsis in the eastern Congo—a factor McConnell ignores) justified the invasion. The invasion, not the massacres. But McConnell never asked me about any of this. He never asked me about anything I’ve written, and never asked me to answer any criticisms. He pretends in the piece that I was “energetically” defending myself against accusations and then changing my mind, when I was, in fact, volunteering my longstanding approach to covering Kagame and Rwanda. No wonder the future of journalism is endlessly debated at journalism schools if this is how they do it at the best of them.
CJR calls itself a “watchdog and friend to the press,” and yet CJR wants you to believe that pretty much the entire international press corps in Central Africa took dictation from me for the past decade and a half. What a preposterous insult to so many journalists who risked their lives in the region. In reality, their work often inspired me.
Maybe I should really be thanking CJR and McConnell for recognizing my omnipotent domination of the media, and of the foreign policies of several great Western powers. After all, my subordination of all other points of view on Rwanda and the Congo wars to a facile fairytale—that Paul Kagame is “benign,” and that the story of post-genocide Rwanda is “beguiling”—has never before been fully appreciated.
Then I should thank also the former New York Times-man turned Columbia journalism professor, Howard French, who has labored for years to bestow the respectability of his credentials on the legend of my awesome reach as a Tutsi-loving, Jewish-influence peddler, and master player of the Holocaust card. French’s writing about me reads like a template for CJR’s piece: agenda-driven, systematically dishonest in method and in substance. And now French has been appointed to CJR’s Board of Overseers, where he’s charged with helping to guide the magazine’s editorial strategy. What a shame that CJR didn’t disclose this cozy relationship, which was established before the article appeared.
Now, CJR—on the defensive and after the fact—has invited me to respond. But what can you say about a piece that is such a porridge of innuendo and insinuation, misrepresentations and deliberate distortions? Its claim that controversy boils around me is conspicuously unsubstantiated. McConnell says I allowed Kagame, in 1997, to dismiss reports of massacres by his troops in Congo, when in fact I quote Kagame admitting such killings more than he ever had before. He says I was a booster of Meles Zenawi, about whom I’ve never written a single word, and of Laurent Kabila, about whom I never wrote a kind word. He says I count “justice” among Kagame’s many achievements, but in the article in question, I actually say that Kagame “clearly favors political expediency over justice.”
In the past decade, I have published just one new reported article from Rwanda, yet McConnell says my depiction of Kagame is unchanged since the 1990s. Reviewers back then, however, did not think Kagame was the hero of my book—many barely mentioned him at all—but rather they singled out the Hutu hotelier, Paul Rusesabagina (never a friend of Kagame, and for many years now, a sworn foe), or the Hutu school girls who let themselves be killed rather than separate themselves from their Tutsi classmates who were about to be massacred. Many recognized that the West’s abandonment of Rwanda during the genocide is a central theme of my work, and raises a set of issues that can strongly influence how one understand Kagame’s role as the dominant figure in the past two decades of post-colonial Central African history, but McConnell ignores all this.
McConnell says that in my response on the New Yorker blog to a recent UN report alleging, after adamantly proclaiming itself not definitive, that Kagame’s forces might (and also might not have) committed genocide in Congo in the late 1990s, I was too close to the response of the Rwandan government. In fact, the story was that the Rwandans and the UN Secretariat were denying rumors that Kagame had threatened to pull his troops from the Darfur peacekeeping mission, which Rwanda commands, unless the genocide charge was dropped—and I had the letter from Kagame’s foreign minister to the UN secretary general in which that threat was made. So I did what any journalist would do: I posted the letter. How was that spinning for the Rwandans? It put them on the spot. That letter was soon the lead story on the BBC.
I could go on answering McConnell, line by line, but you get the point: to fact-check this piece is to watch it dissolve. And what’s McConnell’s big overall idea? He quotes David Anderson of Oxford (a scholar of late colonial Kenya, not known as an authority on Rwanda), asserting incredibly that Kagame is treated “with kid gloves” by the American and British press. McConnell, however, never lets us hear from the legions of Kagame-mad journalists whom we keep hearing about. Instead, he quotes a few critics of my work, who speak in broad generalities, and all say basically the same thing: that unless your purpose in writing about Kagame is to delegitimize him, you are shilling for him. Such polarizing, academic absolutism is antithetical to good journalism. It privileges pre-judgment over investigation. It is not an argument against bias, but for a politically correct bias.
The only person McConnell quotes who makes a concrete accusation against me is Howard French with his insidious insistence, reprised almost verbatim from his book, that “one of the most important things Gourevitch did was to liken the Rwandan experience to the Israeli experience, to the Holocaust.” French calls this an “emotionally overpowering” move, and “deeply flawed,” and McConnell falls in line, saying that “the comparison influenced American policy in the Clinton era.”
Analogies with the Holocaust and Israel and the Jews are not, in fact, an important part of my Rwanda writings—but it beats me why French thinks that this is such a damning criticism. The crime of genocide was defined in law in 1948 in response to the Holocaust, and carries an inescapable association with the Nazi war against the Jews. If anything, one might argue that the comparison didn’t exert enough influence on the Clinton administration, which did nothing to stop the extermination of Tutsis in 1994 and, in fact, went out of its way to obstruct preventive action by others.
Tristan responds:
I would point readers who want to draw their own conclusions to two of Gourevitch’s New Yorker articles that bookend his Rwanda reporting thus far: “After The Genocide” (1995) and “The Life After” (2009). The latter is analyzed in some detail in my article and clearly illustrates my argument that Gourevitch’s narrative does not reflect recent events and revelations.
Contrary to Gourevitch’s claims, “The Vanishing” (1997) contains plenty of kind words about Laurent Kabila, including the description of Congolese liberation hero Patrice Lumumba as his “mentor.”
I know that Gourevitch has not written about Meles Zenawi (a basic search on the New Yorker website reveals this), but what I wrote is that, at the time, he fell for the then-popular concept of the “New African leadership” which included Zenawi.
Gourevitch’s complaint that my piece wasn’t sufficiently fact-checked is nothing more than rhetoric and wishful thinking. Nor is this article a lone voice, rather, it makes explicit what many discuss in private, surely one of the aims of worthwhile journalism.
I spoke to leading Africanist professors such as David Anderson at Oxford and Rene Lemarchand at Florida to explore the intriguing distance between media and academic views of Kagame and his regime. For the same reason, I interviewed human-rights advocates and experts on Congo.
Although Chris McGreal of The Guardian was one of the only journalists whose quotes made the final edit, I interviewed others who had reported the Congo massacres at the time. The difference is that in Gourevitch’s writing, there is something akin to an acceptance of these atrocities because of the weight of the earlier ones committed during the genocide.
The February 1, 2011 page carries the last formal round: Gourevitch’s letter, McConnell’s reply, a late addition from Howard French, and the editors’ note. Nothing between those principals has reopened it since, and the piece stands on CJR’s site unretracted. What the record shows from that final round: the editors conceded one point, that a subject should be told up front when a piece will focus on his work, and apologized for that, while standing behind the article as thoroughly reported and fact-checked, and denying Gourevitch’s charge that French, newly seated on CJR’s Board of Overseers, steered the piece, since the board did not exist when the article was assigned. An editors’ note also discloses that Gourevitch’s first two sentences were changed after a negotiation over an edit for accuracy. McConnell apologized in private for the discourtesy of not saying how focused on Gourevitch the story would be, and said that for the rest there was no apology to be made. French escalated, dating his break with Gourevitch to the 1997 “Stonewall Kabila” piece, which he read as arguing against holding the Kabila government to account for the Hutu massacres. The March/April 2011 letters page reprinted the exchange and closed the file.
So the update is not in the dispute. It is in the scoreboard, and the fifteen years since have moved it toward McConnell’s side of the argument. The Rusesabagina rendition and imprisonment came in 2020. Then the Congo war returned at scale: the Rwandan military and M23 seized Goma in a January 2025 offensive, the Security Council unanimously demanded that the Rwanda Defence Forces stop supporting the group and withdraw from Congolese territory without preconditions, and a Human Rights Watch report released in June 2026 found that Rwanda’s military presence and direction of M23 operations meet the legal threshold for belligerent occupation, with Rwandan officials potentially criminally liable for abuses at M23 training camps. Peace deals brokered through Doha and elsewhere have not held, with at least 7,000 killed in 2025 alone. The “kid gloves” era that McConnell described is over as a fact about the press; Kagame coverage hardened across the board after Goma fell.
Gourevitch’s side of the ledger since 2011 is thinner. In his rebuttal he noted he had published one new reported Rwanda article in the preceding decade, the 2009 piece McConnell analyzed. He wrote anniversary pieces in 2014 and gave the JusticeInfo interviews in 2024, and his position there is the one you know, reconstruction real, aftermath harder to write than the event. The sharpest datable update is the book. In April 2014 the follow-up, You Hide That You Hate Me and I Hide That I Know, was announced for publication the next year. FSG now lists May 1, 2028. Fourteen years of slippage since that announcement, across the Rusesabagina case and a second Rwandan war in Congo, is the closest thing to an answer the dispute has received, and it is not the answer his 2011 letter promised. If the book lands in 2028 and reckons with Goma, the dispute reopens on his terms. If it lands without that reckoning, McConnell’s piece becomes its first review.
