Alison Des Forges
Every person who died in the Buffalo airplane crash leaves behind grieving friends and family. I was saddened to learn of the loss of one person whom I knew only by reputation: Alison Des Forges, of Human Rights Watch, who had been a leading international figure in calling attention to the Rwandan genocide. This is old news to the world, but I learned it just now.
In 2001, the Atlantic ran Samantha Power's "Bystanders to Genocide." This passage describes Des Forges's reaction when she heard about the event in 1994 that touched off slaughter in Rwanda: the death of president Juvenal Habyarimana in, as it happens, an airplane crash:
America's best-informed Rwanda observer was not a government official but a private citizen, Alison Des Forges, a historian and a board member of Human Rights Watch, who lived in Buffalo, New York. Des Forges had been visiting Rwanda since 1963. She had received a Ph.D. from Yale in African history, specializing in Rwanda, and she could speak the Rwandan language, Kinyarwanda. Half an hour after the plane crash Des Forges got a phone call from a close friend in Kigali, the human-rights activist Monique Mujawamariya. Des Forges had been worried about Mujawamariya for weeks, because the Hutu extremist radio station, Radio Mille Collines, had branded her "a bad patriot who deserves to die." Mujawamariya had sent Human Rights Watch a chilling warning a week earlier: "For the last two weeks, all of Kigali has lived under the threat of an instantaneous, carefully prepared operation to eliminate all those who give trouble to President Habyarimana."
Now Habyarimana was dead, and Mujawamariya knew instantly that the hard-line Hutu would use the crash as a pretext to begin mass killing. "This is it," she told Des Forges on the phone. For the next twenty-four hours Des Forges called her friend's home every half hour. With each conversation Des Forges could hear the gunfire grow louder as the militia drew closer. Finally the gunmen entered Mujawamariya's home. "I don't want you to hear this," Mujawamariya said softly. "Take care of my children." She hung up the phone.
