This was an extremely engaging and reader-friendly text. One of the greatest contributors to this was the usage of numerous interviews and personal accounts from those involved in the documented events. These personalized the tragedy and underlined the human suffering involved. It humanized the incomprehensible statistics associated with the genocide to create a larger impact for the reader.
Furthermore, the amount of background provided was also extremely helpful to understanding the events that transpired. The causes were thoroughly outlined, explaining the colonial roots of current Hutu-Tutsi relations. The information helped demonstrate the Rwandan genocide was not a sporadic event, but the result of a carful calculations and a pattern of violence observed since Rwandan independence.
I also appreciated the coverage of the aftermath and recovery following the Rwandan genocide. What coverage and information I previously had been exposed to simply stopped following RPF advancements that ended the genocide. But the story continued, and Gourevitch covers it in all of its complexity. His coverage of the camps and the moral dilemmas associated with them was particularly engaging. Many shades of gray were observed within this crisis. Perpetrators of the genocide were intermingled with innocent civilians, and often used their position to use civilians as potential hostages. Perhaps most intriguing was the international response. While very little was done to alleviate the genocide itself, a great deal of aid was being sent to these camps, who often housed those who orchestrated the atrocities. Aid being sent to relieve human suffering (even of guilty parties) would not be as large of an issue if it was accompanied by concrete acts to separate and prosecute the perpetrators. But in isolation, these acts brought a greater sense of injustice to the crisis. Gourevitch displays a potential bias by underlining these ironies and largely presenting the side of Kagame (which provided a very pro-RPF view). However, this still provides an important perspective that acts as a counterbalance to the traditional coverage of the time (which often merely portrayed the camps as a humanitarian crisis).