Alison Des Forges: Fieldwork

By ELIZABETH RUBIN
The New York Times
December 23, 2009

Alison des Forges fell in love with Rwanda — its people, culture and magical beauty — as a student in the early 1960s. In the ’80s she joined Africa Watch and was one of the first to warn of the coming cataclysm. When, in 1994, the plane of Rwanda’s president was shot down, Alison knew the Hutu-dominated ruling junta was about to transform its anti-Tutsi policies into full-blown genocide. Friends began calling her to describe the militias moving house to house, hacking Tutsi and moderate Hutu families to death. Some of these friends she never heard from again.

Des Forges began knocking on every policymaker’s door to get the U.S., the U.N., the Europeans, to intervene. She sat with National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, who famously told her, “Make more noise.” In other words, until the public cares, the politicians won’t budge. She went to Senator Edward Kennedy to explain how the U.S. could use its airplanes to jam the Hutu Power radio station that was not only inciting the militias to kill but also guiding them to particular families for slaughter. Kennedy passed the idea to the highest ranks of the Pentagon. “We now have the documents showing the chain,” Des Forges said later in the documentary “Confronting Evil.” “But at the Pentagon they decided that $8,000 an hour was too much.” Des Forges gave interviews. She gave lectures. And she wrote the masterpiece she’s perhaps best known for, the 800-page “Leave None to Tell the Story.” There was not a detail or clue she didn’t chase down — even receipts for the machetes that, she discovered, were imported in bulk ahead of the genocide.

When the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda was established, she began shuttling back and forth to the court in Arusha, Tanzania. She was an expert witness. More important, she was a behind-the-scenes strategist for the prosecutors, who often had little knowledge of the region. Des Forges was relentless. She wasn’t being paid. She wanted to ensure the genocidaires were brought to justice.

The Rwandan Patriotic Front, which overthrew the genocidal regime and established the new Rwanda, did not escape her scrutiny. In her book she accused the R.P.F. of thousands of killings and suggested that those responsible should be tried at Arusha as well. At a time when Bill Clinton, Dr. Paul Farmer and the C.E.O. of Starbucks were busy promoting the new Rwanda, Des Forges’s position was, to say the least, unpopular. So unpopular that the Rwandans twice refused to allow her into the country. In a eulogy for Des Forges, the scholar Filip Reyntjens said: “I imagine that perhaps upon hearing that Alison had died, some in circles of power and crime in the Great Lakes region have uncorked a few bottles. Let me tell them: each of those corks is a tribute to Alison.”

She was just five feet tall. She had soft blue eyes and gray hair that her husband cut for her. She traveled with a tiny bag that held her swimsuit, laptop, a change of shirt and photos of her grandchildren. And that was about it.

Des Forges was a mentor to a generation of human rights researchers, activists and scholars. She told them her survival rules: always have gas in your tank; always turn your car around so you have a quick getaway. Protect your sources; interview them in cars so they’re not seen. Pick up hitchhikers; they are fonts of unexpected information.

“She always wanted us to slow down, and she wanted us to talk less and learn to be much better listeners,” Maria Burnett told me from Uganda, where she is a human rights researcher. Don’t be afraid of silence, Des Forges counseled; out of the awkwardness something fruitful will come. Even when interviewing accused torturers, Burnett recalled, “she said I should ask questions and concentrate on a point behind the person’s head and shut up. That in those moments we’d gain insight. And I would say it’s true.”

Burnett recalled Des Forges’s advice: “Care about the whole person. Talk to them about their children. Buy something from their shop. Spend time with people’s babies.” For in the beginning and in the end, Des Forges was all about family and human connectedness. She and her husband, Roger Des Forges, grew up near Schenectady, N.Y., on opposite banks of the Mohawk River. They met at a Model United Nations. She was secretary-general; he was General Assembly president. And so began a romance and a marriage that spanned nearly 50 years and four continents. She went on to Harvard, Roger to Princeton. She studied French history and African history. He began studying China. They both went to Yale for doctoral studies. And they alternated their years of fieldwork. In Rwanda, Roger worked on Chinese archival documents and served as Alison’s driver. In China, Alison learned to cook Chinese food and speak some Chinese and tend to their home life while he did his research. When they had their daughter and son and settled in Buffalo, Alison plunged into mothering and schooling. It was the time of desegregation. She and Roger believed in public education. But they also loved the small Montessori school they sent their son to. So Alison, adapting the Montessori method, created not just a public school but a desegrated magnet school.

In the early ’80s, they moved with their children to Rwanda, then to China, but Buffalo remained their base, and later a place of refuge for Rwandans. They took in and sent to school the children of a man Alison worked with in Rwanda who was killed in the genocide. Their home was a reflection of their lives — academic offices filled with books and documents, and extra bedrooms for guests. “Alison was able to endure these tremendously tragic events in part because she constantly sought ways to find joy in life,” Roger recalled. “Part of that was just being perceptive about what was happening around her and describing it to others. . . . She really needed a quiet base of quiet affection, and that’s what we had.” She was on her way home when the small plane she was in crashed just outside Buffalo.

For Roger it was symbolic that she died as she was returning from a trip to London to pressure Parliament about some extradition cases. Her message was typical Alison: these people may not get fair trials back in Rwanda. So whatever you do, do it with your eyes open and know what harm your actions might cause.

Note:
Elizabeth Rubin, a contributing writer, has reported on human rights in Africa, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Related Materials:
The Lives They Lived, 2009

Confronting Evil: Genocide in Rwanda (Video featuring Alison Des Forges)

Civilian Plane Shoot-Downs and International (In)Justice; From 007 to Rwanda

The alleged mystery surrounding the black box of the Rwandan genocide