How could this happen?

In the course of a few months in 1994, nearly a million Rwandans were killed, and the U.S., Europe, and international community basically ignored it.

This is a powerful book about genocide--not a light topic, obviously, but an important one. How did this genocide happen? Well, there is no one answer, but the author, Philip Gourevitch, provides an excellent account of the rising tension in Rwanda and allows the reader to draw their own conclusions.

Before reading this book, I knew so little about Africa and the effects of European colonialism. Now I want to know a lot more. For instance, the terms "Hutu" and "Tutsi" had little tribal meaning to people living in Rwanda until Belgian colonizers showed up and started identifying the population--the taller, more "European" looking being called Tutsi, the shorter and more "African" called Hutu.

And it's shocking that the international community did nothing--except perhaps protect the murderers in U.N. sponsored camps. In addition, the
U. S. government had just bailed out of Somalia and was doing its best to dodge the situation by calling it a "civil war".

The best part of the book is its description of the aftermath. Unlike the Holocaust in Nazi Germany which caused a diaspora among Jews and Germans, the organizers and victims of Rwanda's genocide have now resettled back into their old villages next door to each other. It is unbelievable to imagine living down the street from the man who killed everyone in your family, but that's what day-to-day life in Rwanda has become.

I recommend this book to everyone as an important lesson in how little we as a global community have learned from the Holocaust. I think that the author could have streamlined some of his personal accounts of Rwanda, but overall it's a very readable book.