[This book] stands out as perhaps the most ambitious attempt yet to tell the dim story of Rwanda and the region’s deeply intertwined tragedies for a general audience. Wrong’s account unfolds on two separate planes. The first is an capable history of the region. Most readers know little about East Central Africa’s past other than the Rwandan genocide, whose intensity and scale, Wrong notes, rank it among the greatest horrors of the 20th century. But as she makes abundantly clear, that tragedy was but one piece in an interlocking puzzle of ethnic atrocities and military gambits in the region … The second strand of Do Not Disturb is a mixture of Wrong’s highly personal remembrance of the former Rwanda spy chief, Patrick Karegeya, and her dogged investigative reporting on a variety of apparently Rwandan state-sponsored hit jobs, foremost among them Karegeya’s murder in South Africa, where he was first drugged and then garroted … There is a taut, cinematic quality to Wrong’s account of Karegeya’s killing, and a mournful, hurt tone as well — mournful because Karegeya, a skilled, seductive handler of Western reporters, had been a key source for Wrong while he was in government. The hurt that infuses her story is more subtle, but ultimately more significant. It derives from her acknowledgment that she and so many other reporters who covered East Central Africa after the 1994 genocide allowed themselves to be manipulated too easily and too long by their Rwandan sources.
