Nearly 800 pages about the why, wherefore and how of the 20th Century's quickest, most personal and - possibly - least understood genocide. Obviously, it is not a fun read. But neither is it (surprisingly) particularly heart-wrenching, on a gut emotional level. Considering what is being discussed, this work almost astonishingly scientific. When one reads about the butchering of close to a million people within the span of 100 days, carried out in broad daylight in the very communities where the victims lived, oftentimes by those next to whom they'd lived for years, almost always with an arms cocktail that included rifles, grenades, machetes, nail-studded clubs, spears, bows and arrows, and even more basic implements like bicycle handlebars - when any thinking, rational human being contemplates this reality, it tends to boggle the mind. Even numerically: it is the literal equivalent (in the number of victims) of three (3) September 11ths every single day for over three months. In a country of 8 million people. Proportionally, given the population of the United States at the time, that would mean 23 million deaths in the US. Geographically, over a territory roughly the size of Vermont. How does one find enough imagination to conjure up such images and then even begin to make sense of them?

Well, this work breaks down the science of it, with separate sections for how the genocide developed at the national and at the local levels, what the international community was (not) doing at the time, and how it finally came to an end. It also has a fairly good summary section on what the political, social, economic, agricultural, ideological and other pertinent factors were in the few years preceding the genocide. As mentioned, it is not a particularly exciting read (I think all told it took me 2 years to wade my way through it cover to cover), but it is absolutely necessary.

Because in the case of Rwanda, much of the press at the time (and an embarrassing amount since) tended to chalk up the unimaginable violence to things like "an explosion of centuries-old tribal hatreds," "uncontrolled, rogue Hutu militias," or vaguely racist notions about an innate propensity for violent self-destruction within African societies. This book shows - beyond a shadow of a doubt - that the genocide was an extremely well-ordered, long dreamed of plan by an elite power structure that loved bureaucratic structure almost as dearly as it hated its essentialized, racist notion of the Tutsi other. That there were ample warning signs of the impending tragedy before it occurred, mountains of evidence once it started that reached the highest levels of Western power, and extremely rational calculations about how to expand and finalize the slaughter once the genocidal regime understood the lack of willpower on the part of the West to intervene.

There is, of course, a paradox here, and one that I have never found the means to resolve. Those three months in Rwanda in 1994 are both completely incomprehensible at the most human level, and yet they can be fully, scientifically, thoroughly explained. I'm not sure there is any way to reconcile those two facts, but for the most complete example of the latter, this Human Rights Watch report is really the beginning and the end.