Just wanted to send you an article on a former classmate of mine at Lincoln Elementary school.
I know I sent you the pictures of the class to include in Lintons web page.
The mistake I make was in spelling Alison's last name, she is standing at the blackboard and is identified when pointed to. My memory of the spelling of her last name was vague and incorrect, in honor of the work and sacrifice she made I was hoping you could correct that error. Her last name is spelled Liebhafsky. I had fond memories of our time in school. Attached is the article from Human Rights Watch.
Thanks Ed Valachovic

Obituary

Alison (Liebhafsky) Des Forges

Human rights activist who predicted the genocide in Rwanda

The scholar and human rights advocate Alison Des Forges, who died aged 66 on the Continental Airlines plane which crashed between New York and Buffalo last week, predicted the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. She was, in the words of one of her colleagues at Human Rights Watch, "the model of an objective, compassionate, dedicated and fearless human rights activist".

She was also one of very few people outside Rwanda who understood what was happening in April that year when the killing started. Ignorance led many politicians and journalists to believe that they were witnessing a spontaneous outburst of ethnic violence, but as a historian who had studied Rwanda for two decades, Alison stated with authority to the US Congress foreign affairs sub-committee on Africa: "The slaughter of the Tutsi in Rwanda is genocide, a planned campaign to eliminate this minority people." The date was 4 May, when the massacres were at their height. As a journalist who happened to be in Rwanda when the genocide started, I soon realised her advice and knowledge were invaluable.

Even as she was alerting the world, she was desperately trying to help Rwandan friends. As the killing continued, after she had failed to persuade him to intervene, President Bill Clinton's national security adviser, Tony Lake, told her to "make more noise". She understood he meant that the constituency of people who cared about Rwanda was so small it had little influence in Washington. Subsequently, painstaking research led her to conclude that governments and the UN "all knew of the preparations for massive slaughter and failed to take the steps needed to prevent it".

In 1999, Human Rights Watch published her Leave None to Tell the Story, a definitive account of the genocide. She chronicled what happened, and why, providing context and historical background. "We will be forever grateful to Dr Des Forges for what she did to raise awareness about the 1994 genocide in our country, and for her service in highlighting the plight of survivors in its aftermath," wrote Jacqueline Murekatete, whose family was killed.

Alison was an expert witness at 11 trials of suspected "genocidaires" at the International Tribunal on Rwanda in Arusha and in countries such as Belgium and Canada. "Her testimony was the glue that made sense of the rest of the witness testimony," wrote Sara Darehshori, an Arusha tribunal prosecutor who later joined her at Human Rights Watch. Alison convinced me to testify, believing that I, too, could help set the historical record straight and serve the cause of justice.

In 1999, Alison received a MacArthur "genius award" of $375,000 which she used to continue "telling the story" of Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo. She contributed to scholarly journals, but her knowledge was all put to the service of human rights. "She would try to save people rather than fill pages with words," said the Belgian scholar of Rwanda Filip Reyntjens.

Alison's research was controversial. While always attributing responsibility for the genocide to the Hutu extremists who held sway in Kigali in 1994, she also documented killings by the Rwandan Patriotic Army, which ended the massacres and then took power. She campaigned for officials in the current Rwandan government to be brought to justice, and researched their continuing abuses in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo. Last year, they banned her from Rwanda. "Her work on the abuses being committed by the Rwandan government today made her something of a skunk at a global garden party," said Carroll Bogert, associate director of Human Rights Watch.

Born Alison Liebhafsky in Schenectady, New York, she first visited Rwanda as a student at Radcliffe College, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from which she graduated in 1964. She gained her PhD in history from Yale University in 1972. In the early 1980s she taught in China, where her husband of 46 years, Roger Des Forges, was researching Chinese history.

She was always generous to journalists, researchers and students trying to find out about the genocide. "It was my great pleasure to meet a kind, elderly professor who answered all the questions I could think of. She even gave me some materials on the genocide, including a street map of the Rwandan capital and a book with her own handwritten notes scrawled in the margins," wrote one 17-year-old doing a school project on Rwanda. Alison's legacy was to inspire others, ensuring there are many left to "tell the story" of Rwanda.

Roger survives her, along with their two children and three grandchildren.

• Alison Des Forges, historian and human rights activist, born 20 August 1942; died 12 February 2009

Go to: [guardian.co.uk]