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April 6, 2004
On circles of hell, and the politics within them.
It took ten years for the west to finally acknowledge its part in the greatest, and most atrocious, failure of humanity in the modern era, and one of the worst blots on any history we could ever write. We're finally far enough away from Rwanda, in space and time, to throw out the mea culpas, and acknowledge just what horrors human can do unto human, with machete and with blind eye. It's safer at this distance.
David Corn, The Nation's Washington editor and notedly vehement critic of Bush, sets up Rwanda as Clinton's greatest failure. When apologising to the surviving people of Rwanda (in a visit to its airport in 1998), he claimed that America, and the world, did not fully know or appreciate the extent of the atrocity. That, a cop-out on an African airstrip with Air Force One's engines still running, is, for Corn, the biggest lie the impeached president ever told. We know now that the Americans, prior to the start of the genocide, requested a total withdrawal of troops, before agreeing to merely a heavy reduction. Americans, they said, were at unnecessary risk. Somalia was still filthy in memory, Black Hawks and the pits of hell. Africa could safely burn to the ground and beneath before they would go back there again.
Kofi Annan has taken personal responsibility, accepting that he could and should have done more as then head of UN peacekeeping forces. "The international community is guilty of sins of omission," he said. "The international community failed Rwanda and that must leave us always with a sense of bitter regret." He said the same thing five years ago after the UN's initial internal inquiry (one which was mostly refreshingly honest). He also said "[o]f all my aims as Secretary-General, there is none to which I feel more deeply committed than that of enabling the United Nations never again to fail in protecting a civilian population from genocide or mass slaughter."
Most of the bitter regret in the last ten years has been carried publically on the shoulders of Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian commander of UN forces in Rwanda at the time. I've read some harrowing interviews with the man, destroyed by international inaction and willing ignorance of the pleas for assistance he sent when the first rumblings of weapons stockpiling and warfare were emerging. This is not an unusual quote:
Not one country on Earth came to stop this thing. The Western world provided me with nothing. I asked for satellite photos so I could see where the mass movement of people were occurring. They were herding people before they killed them. But I got nothing. In 100 days, 800,000 people were killed, 300,000 of them children. That's not counting 500,000 that got hacked a few times, maybe had a leg chopped off, but survived. There were more people killed, wounded, displaced or refugeed in 100 days in Rwanda than there were in the whole eight or nine years of the Yugoslav campaign. And the West poured 60,000 troops into the Balkans [to stop the] ethnic cleansing [there].
This Amnesty article documents the full travesty of military and geopolitical bureaucracy (along with delighful factoids such as the mission having only one satellite telephone):
As bodies filled the streets and rivers, the general, backed by a U.N. mandate that didn't even allow him to disarm the militias, pleaded with his U.N. superiors for additional troops, ammunition, and the authority to seize Hutu arms caches. In an assessment that military experts now accept as realistic, Dallaire argued that with 5,000 well-equipped soldiers and a free hand to fight Hutu power, he could bring the genocide to a rapid halt.
The U.N. turned him down. He asked the U.S. to block the Hutu radio transmissions. The Clinton administration refused to do even that. Gun-shy after a humiliating retreat from Somalia, Washington saw nothing to gain from another intervention in Africa, and the Defense Department, according to a memo, assessed the cost of jamming the Hutu hate broadcasts at $8,500 per flight-hour.
With a few thousand troops (mainly Bhangladeshi and Ghanaian), orders to withdraw that came directly from Boutros Ghali, and millions screaming in terror, the UN forces did what little they could, but what they could was nothing against a final solution, sanctioned by government and tribe. Dallaire, convinced his personal weaknesses were the reason his mission was going to hell, suffered a total breakdown and was, years later, found drunk on a park bench in Canada and out of the military. What he only later realised was he was witnessing firsthand the moment that the United Nations became irrelevant, not through politics and not through progress, but through racism and the atrocity of indifference. It had failed in its charter, it had little reason to exist.
In the ten years since, that irrelevance has spread like a cancer--powerful nations ignore it and weak nations to distrust it. Rich ones buy it, poor ones borrow. Heard this one before?
WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small...
The United Nations has called for a minute's silence today (April 7) to remember the 800,000 who died. A minute's silence will not prevent another Rwanda. The Canadian foreign minister admits that his nation and others lack the political will to put in place measures to react against genocide. But today is a day to reflect. One might suggest that, for most every one of us, that usually involves holding up a mirror.
We all know the equations, about how little we care about 16,000 Indians in Bhopal, and how much more we care about a couple of thousand Americans. Or even a couple. And how a nation mourns a cricketer more than even that. When you stack any of it against Rwanda, how can it be possible to reconcile just how many people died with just how little you've even thought of it in the ensuing years? (This you is an accusatory second-person self, by the way, don't be offended, I know you've got a room full of Remember Rwanda posters). That's what I'll be wondering, in the minute's silence I'll forget to have.
Posted by patrick at April 6, 2004 11:29 PM
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