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xxiii  Alison Des Forges Remembering a Human Rights Hero kenneth roth I was privileged to work with Alison for nearly two decades. No one matched her dedication, passion, and sense of personal responsibility to the victims of human rights abuse. I will never forget my visit to Rwanda with her two years after the 1994 genocide, when the wounds were still raw and tensions high. Hearing of a new massacre in a remote part of the country, we dropped everything—which was typical for Alison—and drove there to investigate what had happened. We found a few survivors and interviewed them, but as we started to leave we bumped into the military patrol that had probably committed the massacre. Needless to say, the soldiers were not eager for us to be snooping around. During a tense two-hour standoff on a hilltop in the middle of nowhere, Alison calmly and persistently negotiated our exit. The episode was vintage Alison— determined to get at the truth and deeply devoted to the Rwandan victims of atrocities. Alison joined Human Rights Watch as a founding member of our Africa advisory committee, a volunteer board. Before I knew it, she was working full time covering Rwanda, but without a salary. I finally had to insist that she let us pay her, and formally made her a member of our staff. In advance of the genocide, she saw the dark omens and tried to sound the alarm. Her long experience in the country let her see things that others could not. When the genocide began, she worked all-out to stop it. She was on the xxiv R e m e m b e r i n g a H u m a n R i g h t s H e r o phone with friends in Rwanda trying to save them. One was Monique Mujawamariya , a Rwandan human rights activist and a close friend of Alison. Monique was hiding in her attic, on the phone to Alison, as the génocidaires came working their way down her street, hacking people to death. Monique told Alison to take care of her children and hung up the phone. Alison was certain she had been killed, but a couple of days later learned that Monique had successfully hidden herself. To spirit Monique out of the country, Alison then used every connection she had, including President Clinton, whom Alison had introduced Monique to a few months earlier. During the genocide, Alison spent most of the time alerting the world to the horror that was unfolding and trying to mobilize action. It wasn’t easy. Most people in the West knew nothing of Rwanda. Many didn’t even know the difference between Hutu and Tutsi. And after the U.S. government’s debacle in Somalia the year before, few wanted to get involved in another military venture to stop more slaughter in Africa. They were too willing to dismiss the genocide as a manifestation of “ancient tribal hatreds” about which nothing could be done—a cheap excuse for inaction. Alison refuted that false history of convenience. She proved that the killing was organized, calculated, and directed by a small group. As she later showed in her book, the génocidaires at first tested the waters. They were worried about the international reaction, the possible loss of aid on which Rwanda depended. But when the international community seemed not to care, the genocide proceeded at a horrific pace. Alison showed that the world could have stopped the genocide, but to its shame, it did not. During the genocide, Alison met with Anthony Lake, the U.S. National Security Advisor, President Clinton’s chief foreign policy advisor. She pressed him to commit U.S. troops, or allow UN peacekeeping forces to act, or at least to jam the radio stations that were giving instructions to the killers. But Lake and the U.S. government wouldn’t act. He told her to “make more noise,” as if the duty to stop mass murder depended on the whim of public opinion. When the genocide ended, Alison was determined not to forget. She sought to pay respect to the victims by bringing the murderers to justice. She spent months roaming the Rwandan countryside, interviewing survivors, reconstructing events, turning the apparent chaos into a series of impeccably researched events that could form the basis of prosecutions. The result was her eight-hundred-page manuscript for Leave None to Tell the Story, the...

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