Alison Des Forges

Late in the evening on February 12, 2009, a plane crashed outside of Buffalo, New York.  50 people were killed.  Later, blame was cast on the inexperience of the pilot, and subsequent investigation revealed inadequate training, low pay, and long shifts which produced exhausted pilots.  I am a frequent surfer of current news, and I came across the story not long after it was reported.  But as I read on, I saw that I knew someone on the plane.  When I say knew, I mean it was someone with whom I had had minimal contact related to a work project.  But the contact, although minimal, was inspiring and memorable, and when I heard of her death, I felt a tremendous sadness.  As did thousands–if not hundreds of thousands–of people around the world, many of whom lived in or once lived in Rwanda, a country which Alison Des Forges dedicated much of her life to assisting.

When I met her, over the phone, and over email, I was working on an amicus curiae brief for the International Criminal Tribunal of Rwanda, a pro bono project for Human Rights Watch.  Alison had written the reports which we used for the factual basis for our arguments in our briefs.  I had a vague idea that she was the foremost expert on Rwanda in the country, but I was–typical new associate in big law firm–most concerned with our impending deadline, and wanting Alison to hurry up and send the new reports so we could file the brief, a task which went through fax machines and slow email servers in Tanzania, Rwanda, Turkey, England, and Buffalo, New York.  She finally got us the reports and we wrote the brief.  A few days later, I received an email from her:

This is beautiful, just plain beautiful!  Thank you so very much. . .  I will ensure that it is delivered to the court next week. You have really made a great contribution to this effort at assuring fairer justice for this accused (and others) and I am sure that it will have its impact.

This was a legal brief, but clearly for her part of the bigger picture.  Her commitment and excitement were evident in the email, as were her knowledge of the legal and political field we were entering (I can’t reproduce it more fully here due to that pesky attorney-client privilege).

I feel honored to have had a few minutes with this amazing woman.  In today’s New York Times, she’s listed as one of the honorees in The Lives They Lived, 2009.  This is what Elizabeth Rubin says about her:

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.

Read the rest here.  And there were many other tributes.  Here are just a few:

Alison was the rock within the Africa team, a fount of knowledge, but also a tremendous source of guidance and support to all of us,” said Georgette Gagnon, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “She was almost a mother to us all, unfailingly wise and reasonable, absolutely honest yet diplomatic. She never seemed to get stressed out, in spite of the extreme violence and horror she had to deal with daily. Alison felt the best way to make things better was to be relentlessly professional and scrupulously fair. She didn’t sensationalize; her style was to let the victims speak for themselves.

Human Rights Watch Mourns the Loss of Alison Des Forges.

She was tirelessly generous in offering me contacts and advice, down to tips on pronouncing polysyllabic Rwandan names. She spent a few hours hunting down documents for me in her home office, in Buffalo, which, from her description, was a deeply cluttered trove of invaluable records—one that should now be collected and housed somewhere for the use of others who want to follow her efforts. Apparently, anything Des Forges did that was connected with Rwanda, she did with all her might. And she managed to do it without the self-righteous territoriality that is the occupational vice of human-rights experts. Her attachment to the country and its people seemed neither saintly nor professional, but entirely human.

George Packer, writing in the New Yorker.  So many others weighed in as well.

• Jeff Sharlet, in the Revealer.
• Michael J. Kavanagh, in Slate.
• Read her book, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda.  She won the MacArthur Genius award for it.

As for me, I don’t have anything profound to say.  I was touched by a great person, briefly, and now she’s gone. If there is a single truth to the human condition, it is our mortality, and the fact that we should be living our lives as if today was our last day.  Alison Les Forges did that.  The world misses you.