Ghosts of Rwanda

Ghosts of Rwanda

“Never Again!”

What do these words really signify?

I pondered this question again after viewing the 2004 Frontline documentary “Ghosts of Rwanda,” an important yet disturbing film about the horrific 1994 genocide in that African nation.

Initially, “Never Again!” was a necessary response to Adolph Hitler’s Holocaust against the Jews of Europe during WWII, in which some six million perished. Morally repulsed by what Hitler and the Nazis had done, and shamed by their own abject failure in halting that genocide, the postwar victors gathered soon after war’s end to insure such gratuitous violence would never be repeated in a civilized world.

In 1948, the United Nations adopted a “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” The first three of its nineteen articles read as follows (see www.hrweb.org/legal/genocide ):

Article 1
The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.

Article 2
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Article 3
The following acts shall be punishable:
(a) Genocide;
(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
(d) Attempt to commit genocide;
(e) Complicity in genocide.

Seems clear enough, doesn’t it? And yet the world community has been strangely silent on the topic of genocide, even when confronted time and again with the evidence of its existence!
A short list of some of the better known instances of genocide in our own lifetime would include the following:

Cambodia where, between 1975 and 1979, hard-core Communists known as the Khmer Rouge killed off some 2 million people (about 25% of the population of Cambodia) in a perverse attempt to create an agricultural utopia. The killings came largely to an end only after Vietnam invaded and drove the Khmer Rouge into exile (provoked by Khmer Rouge attacks into Vietnamese territory).
East Timor where, in 1975, oil-producing and anti-communists U.S. ally Indonesia invaded this former Portuguese colony that threatened independence and killed between 100,000 and 200,000 civilians in the process.
Iraq where, in 1987, Saddam Hussein launched forty-odd chemical attacks on Kurdish villages within his country, massacring an estimated 70,000 to 100,000 civilians.
Bosnia where, following the break-up of Yugoslavia after the Cold War in 1992, Orthodox Christian Serbs sought to cleanse their new Republic of Slovenia of any non-Serbs. In particular, the Serbs targeted Bosnian Muslims, herding many into make-shift concentration camps and placing the city of Sarajevo under siege. Estimates are that 200,000 died.

None of the above cases that arguably qualify as genocide under the terms of the U.N. Convention were completely hidden or unknown at the time they occurred. In fact, details of each and every crisis appeared in the popular press at the time. And yet what was the world’s response? More particularly, in a late 20th Century largely dominated by a sole superpower, what was the United States’ response?

Not surprisingly, very little. With bitter memories of the failed war in Vietnam still fresh in the national consciousness, the United States government in 1979 refused to recognize the government that replaced the Khmer Rouge in 1979, and, in fact, fought strenuously to guarantee that the U.N. seated the Khmer Rouge as Cambodia’s legitimate government. The U.S. government even provided a Khmer Rouge-led coalition with covert aid to fight the Vietnamese-installed regime beginning in 1982. As late as 1990, the U.S. still officially refused to term what the Khmer Rouge had done in Cambodia “genocide” (See Samantha Power, A Problem From Hell, Harper Perennial 2007, pp. 149-154). Meanwhile, a strong desire to avoid embarrassing an important Cold War ally caused the U.S to look the other way when Indonesia invaded East Timor. Lingering anger over Iran’s Shiite Revolution in 1979 found the U.S. providing Saddam Hussein’s Iraq with chemicals, logistical intelligence, and other aid in 1987 as part of Iraq’s long and bloody war with neighboring Iran. Finally, in the case of Bosnia, while the Clinton Administration did authorize the use of airstrikes against some Serb military targets, the U.S. adamantly refused to allow troops on the ground, citing insufficient U.S. interests in Bosnia and a purported “five hundred year-long” history of enmity between the Christians and Muslims there (as if that unsupported assertion alone negated the need to take action to save lives).

Today, the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum lists four locations of grave concern:
1. Chechneya (in Russia)
2. Darfur (in the Sudan)
3. Congo
4. South/Nuba Mountains (in the Sudan)

The USHMM also recently began monitoring the situation in Kenya, following growing ethnic conflict after a disputed presidential election there.

Rwanda, however, was easily the worst in a long line of largely ignored and forgotten genocides. In April 1994, extremists among Rwanda’s Hutu majority launched an organized extermination campaign against the country’s Tutsi minority. Within a three month period – JUST 100 DAYS! – an estimated 800,000 people were brutally murdered, and hundreds of thousands of women were forcibly raped. It was largely a low-tech slaughter, done with wooden clubs and machetes. The genocide ended only when a Tutsi-led rebel group, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, marched on the capital of Kigali and defeated the extremist government there. Meanwhile, the world ignored all reports emanating from Rwanda and stood by while the killings proceeded.

“Never again!” We return to those simple, yet commanding words …

As you watch the documentary “Ghosts of Rwanda” (and you should!), pay close attention to the various actors (both domestic and external) in the sad drama that was Rwanda in 1994. Had “Never again!” the command become “Never again?” the question, what might the various actors have said in reply?

Note in the film how uncomfortably the U.S., the U.N., and the Western world in general dodged and weaved and then danced gingerly around the use of the term genocide to describe what was happening in Rwanda, knowing that to utter the dreaded “G-word” would obligate them to respond, yet cognizant that they’d no real interests in Rwanda worth defending. Rather than pour Western troops into Rwanda, the U.S. pressured the U.N. to withdraw nearly all the lightly-armed peacekeepers already there, and ordered the relative handful remaining not to intervene. Watch President Bill Clinton callously stress the need to pursue a non-existent “political option in Rwanda” during the crisis, while refusing to call it genocide even when confronted with the evidence during a personal visit to Rwanda with Hillary after the crisis.

More laudably, note also the actions of the handful of true humanitarians who remained behind in Rwanda at great personal risk to do whatever they could to save innocent lives:

1. General Dallaire, the Canadian commander of U.N. peacekeeping troops, who warned of the coming genocide, begged his superiors to do something to stop the killings once they’d begun, and finally refused to leave so that he could bear witness to the gratuitous slaughter.
2. Captain Mbaye, a Senegalese officer with the U.N. force, who protected refugees at the abandoned international hotel later featured in the commercial film “Hotel Rwanda.”
3. Carl Wilkins, a Christian aid worker who put his family on an evacuation convoy, but stayed behind as the last American in Kigali. Amidst the massacre, Wilkins managed to single-handedly save an entire orphanage and its occupants from the slaughter.
4. Gromo Alex, a veteran U.N. aid worker who knowingly arrived in Kigali after the genocide began, hoping to keep a handful of “safe havens” supplied with food and other necessities.
5. The Red Cross, which refused to evacuate with the other foreigners and maintained its hospitals and clinics while under constant threat of violence, savings tens of thousands.

To the last, each and every one of them insists to this day that the Rwandan genocide could have been suppressed, if not avoided outright, if only the international community had intervened even minimally.

So finally, ask what “Never again!” means to you, and how, after watching a documentary on an avoidable tragedy like Rwanda’s, you can continue to ignore ongoing genocide in places like Darfur.

Peace!
Historian