We wish to inform you ....

Seeing as how Yat is now doing book reviews and spreading his literary wealth .... I thought it would probably be acceptable to give a quick mention to a truly astonishing book that i have just finished ...

On April 6, 1994, Rwanda's then Hutu dictator, Juvénal Habyarimana, was assassinated whilst returning to Kigali.

It has still never been actually proved who killed him - but what is clear is that a clique of military men were readily on hand to put into action a plan they had been hatching of "Hutu Power" .... an extremist ideology called as its ultimate goal for the extermination of every Tutsi in Rwanda.

For those of you who haven't yet seen Hotel Rwanda .... within hours of Habyarimana's death, many Hutus (including militias such as the infamous Interhamwe, policemen, ordinary citizens, even clergy) began indiscriminately murdering their Tutsi neighbors.

Over the next 100 days, between 800,000 and 1 million Tutsis and Hutu oppositionists were killed, most by machete, rape and unspeakable torture ..... while the international community stood idly by .... and, in some cases, acted in a manner that allowed the Hutu génocidaires to conduct their bloody work with even more ferocity and expediency. Once that had finished (not by international forces but by Tutsi forces fighting back) .... the ugly saga then continued through refugee camps, trials and more western obfucscating .... culminating in the creation of the new Democratic Republic of Congo and yet more bloody conflicts that still simmer on ...

What were we doing in 1994? What was the top story over that period? The collapse of apartheid perhaps .... or the end of the Balkans war maybe? No .... we and the world's media were all glued to the trial of OJ Simpson ....

The author Philip Gourevitch (who writes for the New Yorker) investigates the events before, during and after the genocide .... and is scathing in his debunking of myths and pathetic excuses .... the book leaves you inconsolable as every institution you want to believe in today is shown to have participated in the mess or purposefully turned a blind eye .....

However he saves his harshest criticisms for the UN (especially the then head for the Rwandan mission - a certain Kofi Annan) .... for the French - who quite shamelessly supported Hutu Power with arms and diplomatic clout throughout the genocide (apparently Mitterand's son was an arms dealer who certainly did very well out of the whole episode) ..... and the Clinton administration (particularly Madeleine Albright, then the U.S. ambassador to the U.N.) who adopted a catastrophic post-Somalia hands-off policy toward Africa ..... and seemed to engage in a bizarre semantic ducking-and-diving around the word "genocide." (remind you of any current event?!)

If any of you have ever been to the Holocaust memorial in Washington DC or anywhere around the world ... there is one stock phrase .... "Never again" ....

What tripe.

Again and again is perhaps more like it. In Darfur, we are witnessing a genocide again .... and again we are witnessing ourselves witnessing it whilst doing little to stop it. Just as Rwanda made a bleak mockery of the lessons of Bosnia and the Balkans - Darfur is making a bleak mockery of the lessons of Rwanda.

I'm quite ashamed to admit that I have read this book so late ... it should be essential reading for anyone working in Africa ... and frankly for anyone at all interested in our world today .... it is the sort of book that makes you despair for better things and makes you contemplate your wrists with your razor .... but it also perhaps one of the most powerful and truthful books that i have ever read ... and I urge you all to do the same ....