Rwanda

"Yes, there’s an organisation called African Rights that I admire, run by a woman called Rakiya Omar. She is Somalian by background and she had worked for Human Rights Watch and had had a falling out with them about their policy on the American operations in Somalia – which of course just preceded the Rwandan genocide. And she started her own organisation with Alex de Waal, who is perhaps better known as a writer about Darfur. And she really made it her mission, in the immediate aftermath of the genocide, to start documenting the experiences of survivors. She recorded the experiences of everybody she could talk to, but typically she focused on survivors. And, while other human rights organisations have largely devoted themselves to holding the post-genocide government to account for its treatment of accused perpetrators of genocide, and for its various shortcomings, African Rights has kept its eye on the injustices suffered by the victims of the genocide – not just at the time, but in the aftermath of the massacres. Rakiya Omar wrote one of the first books that came out after the genocide, and it’s almost entirely an oral history. It’s a huge fat book and everyone just calls it ‘the yellow book’. Death, Despair and Defiance was a tremendous documentation effort."