Also Aboard Flight 3407: Alison Des Forges, Expert on Genocide

February 14th, 2009

Via: New York Times:

Alison L. Des Forges, a historian who documented the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and was an authority on human rights abuses in Central Africa, was a passenger on Continental Airlines Flight 3407 when it crashed near Buffalo on Thursday night, killing all 49 people on board. She was 66.

The death was announced by Human Rights Watch, the New York-based advocacy group where Dr. Des Forges, who lived in Buffalo, served as senior adviser for its Africa division.

Dr. Des Forges spent four years interviewing organizers and victims of the Rwandan genocide, in which she estimated that at least 500,000 people died. She testified before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, based in Arusha, Tanzania, and at trials in Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Canada. She also appeared on expert panels convened by the United Nations and what is now the African Union, as well as the French and Belgian legislatures and the United States Congress.

The MacArthur Foundation recognized her work with a $375,000 “genius” grant in 1999. Her book “Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda,” published that year, has been called a definitive account of the genocide.

“Her death is a devastating blow,” Kenneth Roth, the president of Human Rights Watch, wrote in an e-mail message Friday to the organization’s board of directors. “She epitomized the human rights activist — principled, dispassionate, committed to the truth and to using that truth to protect ordinary people.”

Mahmood Mamdani, a professor of government and anthropology at Columbia and the author of a 2001 book, “When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and Genocide in Rwanda,” called her “the leading person who sought to document the events leading up to the Rwandan genocide, so that future generations would have the material on hand to draw the appropriate lessons from it.”

He added, “This was her first commitment. Her second was to identify those responsible for atrocities, no matter what their political affiliation, and to see that justice was done. She was so committed that no amount of political correctness, or displeasure on the part of the authorities, deterred her from this task.”

Scott Straus, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the author of a 2006 book, “The Order of Genocide: Race, Power and War in Rwanda,” called Dr. Des Forges’s book “a turning point in the documentation and understanding of what happened in the Rwandan genocide.”

In 2001, after a Belgian court sentenced four Rwandans, two of them Roman Catholic nuns, to long prison terms for their roles in the genocide, Dr. Des Forges said she was deeply impressed by the proceedings — the first in which a jury of ordinary citizens was asked to sit in judgment of war crimes in another nation.

“People maybe don’t even realize just how revolutionary this jury trial, so far from the events, really is,” she told The New York Times then. The Belgian trial, she said, “has been done with a great deal more depth than those in Rwanda.”

Dr. Des Forges was also an authority on human rights violations in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire.

Before the genocide, Dr. Des Forges was part of a group convened by Human Rights Watch and other organizations that examined rights abuses, including killings and attacks and kidnappings of civilians, in Rwanda from 1990 to 1993.

“She was a volunteer, and eventually the executive director forced her to take a salary,” said Emma Daly, communications director at Human Rights Watch.

After the genocide began in April 1994, Dr. Des Forges helped persuade diplomats in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, to move several Rwandans to safety, including a human rights advocate, Monique Mujawamariya.

While a central focus of her work was documenting the crimes of the Hutu-led government that organized the three-month-long genocide, Dr. Des Forges later leveled strong criticism of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the Tutsi-dominated regime led by Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s president, which has been in power since the genocide. Dr. Des Forges was among critics who accused that regime of massacring thousands of Rwandan civilians in 1994, of killing civilians and refugees in the eastern Congo in 1996 and 1997 and of making repeated military interventions in the Congo.

Alison B. Liebhafsky was born on Aug. 20, 1942, in Schenectady, N.Y., the daughter of Herman A. Liebhafsky, a chemist, and Sybil Small. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1964, and received a master’s degree in 1966 and a doctorate in 1972, both in history, from Yale. Her master’s thesis focused on the impact of European colonization on Rwanda’s social system, and her doctoral dissertation was about Yuhi Musinga, the mwami, or ruler, of Rwanda from 1896 to 1931, during which Germany, and later Belgium, colonized Rwanda. She was fluent in French.

Dr. Des Forges is survived by her husband, Roger V. Des Forges, a historian of China who teaches at the State University of New York at Buffalo; a brother, Douglas Small Liebhafsky; a sister-in-law, Wendy Gimbel; a daughter, Jessie Des Forges; a son, Alexander Des Forges; and three grandchildren.

One Response to “Also Aboard Flight 3407: Alison Des Forges, Expert on Genocide”

  1. Ann says:

    I’m not much of the tinfoil hat type (though I’m suspicious of just about everything) but this smells to high heaven.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.