Fifteen Years After The Genocide, Rwandans Struggle To Heal National Wounds

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• JIM LEHRER:

  Finally tonight, Rwanda, 15 years after the killings, and to Jeffrey Brown.

• JEFFREY BROWN:

  Over the course of a few months, some 100 days in 1994, the African nation of Rwanda descended into a scene of mass tribal killing and became the modern embodiment of genocide. When it was over, nearly a million members of the Tutsi community had been slaughtered, often by their neighbors, members of the Hutu majority.

  Shortly after the killing ended, journalist Philip Gourevitch began traveling to Rwanda to interview survivors and perpetrators. His award-winning book on the subject, "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families," was published in 1998.

  He returned recently and, in an article in the New Yorker magazine, wrote about the remarkable changes he found. Philip Gourevitch, whose latest book is "The Ballad of Abu Ghraib," joins me now.

  Well, Philip, when you first went after the slaughter and amid fear that it would resume, you wrote that Rwanda felt like, quote, "an impossible country." Remind us, first, of the situation back then.

  PHILIP GOUREVITCH, editor, The Paris Review: Well, in addition to the million dead, you had 1.5 million to 2 million people who had fled the country, mostly perpetrators of the slaughter and their followers, and were living on the borders, threatening to come home and complete the massacres and the extermination.

  You had hundreds of thousands displaced internally. The economy had been trashed, the banks emptied, the infrastructure of the company looted and pillaged down to the smallest detail.

  And you had a new government in place that was a former rebel movement, led by now-President Paul Kagame, that was having to improvise in a situation of utter destruction and trying to pull together a country that threatened at all times to be consumed again by violence.