War & Peace Quote by Tony Greig

Greig’s line has the breezy cadence of sports commentary, and that’s exactly why it lands with a thud. “Well” sets a casual tone, as if he’s teeing up a match report; “lasted for three months” flattens genocide into a tidy season. The dates are technically anchoring, but they also perform a kind of false precision: when you can bracket atrocity so cleanly, you imply it was bounded, manageable, almost orderly.

The real tell is the sentence’s motor: agency is granted almost exclusively to the victors. “Until the Tutsi army... gained control... and then it stopped.” Violence becomes a switch flipped by a takeover, not a human catastrophe with perpetrators, victims, and international bystanders. The parenthetical “the exiles as it were” adds a shrugging qualification that frames the Rwandan Patriotic Front as an outside force returning to settle matters, which can subtly launder complexity into a narrative of inevitable restoration. “As it were” is a verbal handwave: don’t look too closely, let’s keep moving.

Context matters. Greig, as an athlete-broadcaster, is speaking from a cultural position trained to simplify and summarize, to compress messy reality into digestible arcs. That compression can read as intent to be neutral, but the subtext is a hierarchy of attention: who gets named, who gets motives, who gets reduced to “it.” The tragedy isn’t only the factual truncation; it’s the way the language reenacts a broader failure of witnessing, where Rwanda becomes a brief interruption to the main programming, resolved the moment “control” changes hands.