Des Forges was born Alison B. Liebhafsky on August 20, 1942, to Sybil Small and Herman A. Liebhafsky. She married Roger Des Forges, a historian at the State University of New York at Buffalo who specialized in China, in 1964. Des Forges earned her B.A. in history from Radcliffe College in 1964, and her M.A. and a PhD in the same discipline from Yale University in 1966 and 1972. Her master's thesis and doctoral dissertation both addressed the impact of European colonialism on Rwanda. Defeat Is the Only Bad News: Rwanda under Musinga, 1896–1931, her dissertation, was published posthumously in 2011. Describing the politics of the court during the reign of Yuhi Musinga, it shows how divisions among different groups in Rwanda shaped their responses to colonial governments, missionaries and traders. She specialized in the African Great Lakes region and studied the Rwandan genocide. She was also an authority on human rights violations in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Burundi. Des Forges left academia in 1994 in response to the Rwandan genocide, to work full-time on human rights. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1999, and became the senior advisor at Human Rights Watch for the African continent. She died on February 12, 2009, in the air crash of Continental Connection Flight 3407, en route from Newark, New Jersey, to her home in Buffalo, New York.
Witness to Rwandan genocide
Des Forges is thought to have been the most knowledgeable American on the genocide as it was unfolding. She was on the phone to Monique Mujawamariya in Rwanda in April 1994 when Mujawmariya apologised for putting down the phone as she did not want Des Forges to hear her die. Mujawmariya lived, but her reports meant that Des Forges was one of the first outsiders to observe that a full-blown genocide was under way in Rwanda, and afterwards led a team of researchers to establish the facts. She testified 11 times before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and gave evidence about the Rwandan genocide to panels of the French National Assembly, the Belgian Senate, the US Congress, the Organisation of African Unity, and the United Nations. She was the primary author of the 1999 book Leave None to Tell the Story, which The Economist and The New York Times both describe as the definitive account of the Rwandan genocide. In the book, she argued that the genocide was organized by the Hutu-dominated Rwandan government at the time, rather than being a spontaneous outbreak of tribal conflicts.
Legacy
Africanist René Lemarchand states, "That the story of Rwanda is at all known in the United States today owes much to the work of Philip Gourevitch and Alison Des Forges." The Alison Des Forges Award for Extraordinary Activism is named after her; until 2009 it was known as the Human Rights Defenders Award. It is given out by Human Rights Watch.
