| Among the victims of Continental Flight 3407 was Alison Des Forges, one of the foremost human rights investigators and experts on Rwanda, Burundi, Congo and the history of Africa in general. She was probably best known as the principal author of the landmark Human Rights Watch report on the Rwandan genocide, Leave None to Tell the Story.
Des Forges was a resident of Buffalo, a native of Schenectady, educated at Harvard and Yale as a historian, and she received a MacArthur "genius grant" in 1999, which was also the year that her four years of research on the Rwandan genocide was published for Human Rights Watch. Her work on Rwanda was perhaps less well known than that of Philip Gourevitch or Samantha Power, but it is arguably the definitive chronology and analysis of one of the great horrors of the 20th century. |
Human Rights Watch has issued a statement which describes the special nature of her contributions to our understanding of man's inhumanity to man:
Clear-eyed and even-handed, Des Forges made herself unpopular in Rwanda by insisting that the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front forces, which defeated the genocidal regime, should also be held to account for their crimes, including the murder of 30,000 people during and just after the genocide. The Rwandan government banned her from the country in 2008 after Human Rights Watch published an extensive analysis of judicial reform there, drawing attention to problems of inappropriate prosecution and external influence on the judiciary that resulted in trials and verdicts that in several cases failed to conform to facts of the cases.
"She never forgot about the crimes committed by the Rwandan government's forces, and that was unpopular, especially in the United States and in Britain," said Roth. "She was really a thorn in everyone's side, and that's a testament to her integrity and sense of principle and commitment to the truth."
Leave None to Tell the Story is such an important work that HRW has continued to make it available in its entirety online. The 15th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide will be observed this spring and hopefully (although under such sad circumstances) more people will read this report. It is a book of relentless specifics that will haunt you and comes as close as any examination ever has to describing the mechanics of genocide -- the rabies of the human race. (I drew on it heavily for a 2004 project called 100 Days of Rwanda).
Even up until her death, Des Forges was still speaking out on human rights issues in Africa -- she was last quoted by the media just last week. Her passing is a true tragedy because while the suffering due to human rights violations in that part of Africa is not yet over, she won't be there to speak out any more. |
