Never Again?

The absences are appropriate; they remind how, ten years ago, the U.N. reduced its skeleton peace-keeping force at a time when many believe that just several thousand armed troops could have stopped what would become one of the worst human rights atrocities since the Holocaust. The Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., for its part, is commemorating the anniversary with a "Remembering Rwanda 1994-2004” exhibit.

Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian general in charge of the U.N. forces in Rwanda during the genocide, at the time pleaded for the U.S. and others to send him the needed troops:

"Not all humans are human in the international context. … I'm sure there would have been more reaction if someone had tried to exterminate Rwanda's 300 mountain gorillas…"

Newly released declassified materials offer more proof that the Clinton administration, which claimed ignorance of the extent of atrocities, and which only acted when it was too late, knew perfectly well what was going on. The CIA, for example, briefed Clinton in April of 1994 that the Tutsi rebels were trying to “stop the genocide, which ... is spreading south," while a a State Department briefing to then Secretary of State Warren Christopher mentions "a final solution to eliminate all Tutsis."

Full-scale genocide began following the April 6th downing of Rwanda’s Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane by a missile. Most likely, the crash was orchestrated from within Habyarimana's entourage, by extremists who opposed implemenationa of the U.N.'s planned power-sharing agreement between the majority Hutus and minority Tutsis. The crash was blamed on the Tutsis and used as a pretext for the genocide. Habyarimana's death is still a mystery. France, for example, has pinned the responsibility for the killing on the former Tutsi rebel commander and the current president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame.

The U.N. had advance warning of the planned genocide from a reliable source within the Hutu government and was even warned about impending attacks on the U.N.'s Belgian peace-keepers. The attacks succeed in their aim: following the deaths of ten Belgians, the U.N. severely reduced its force.

Public officials and "genocidal radio" mobilized Hutus kill their Tutu neighbors, not to mention the Hutus brave enough to shelter them. Often, the victims were killed in churches where they sought safety. Machetes were the low-tech weapon of choice. In a terrifying, but very much calculated, manner, neighbor hacked neighbor to death. As Gitera Rwamuhuzi, one of the participants in the genocide describes it:

"We thought that if they had managed to kill the head of state, how were ordinary people supposed to survive? On the morning of 15 April 1994, each one of us woke up knowing what to do and where to go because we had made a plan the previous night. In the morning we woke up and started walking towards the church… You wouldn't be normal if you start butchering people for no reason. We had been attacked by the devil. Even when I dream my body changes in a way I cannot explain. These people were my neighbors."

The pleas for intervention on the part of Dallaire, human rights workers, and other foreigners on the ground made Clinton administration's claims of ignorance preposterous, but it would be long before the public would become aware of Rwanda's tragedy. When the administration eventually spoke out on the issue, it sought to downplay what transpired in Rwanda not as "genocide,"but as "acts of genocide," a legalism as cowardly as it was empty.

In 1998, plagued either by guilt or concern for his legacy, Clinton went to Rwandan and apologized; he promised that "never again"would the world allow Rwanda's fate to be repeated. All the while, Clinton continued to insist that his mistakes, and those of international community, stemmed from their lack of information about Rwanda's tragedy, not -- as was the case -- for their refusal to stop what they knew to be a genocide. As Clinton told Rwandans:

"It may seem strange to you here, especially the many of you who lost members of your family, but all over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate the depth and speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror."

It was unfortunate that Clinton included such a shameless lie, in a much-needed, if belated, apology. Nevertheless, Clinton's apology was well well received. In the run-up to the slaughter, Tutsis believed that the presence of the UN forces in Rwanda meant that they would be protected and some of those who could have fled to neighboring countries, stayed because of what proved to be a false sense of security. Having been abandoned during the genocide, Rwandans weren't expecting much from the international community. As Philip Gourevitch, the author of " We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda," which tells the history of the genocide, says:

"When I heard the apologies, what I was struck by is how generously Rwandan survivors of the genocide received them. And it made it hard to be as cynical as, say, a reporter on the White House beat might be, because I knew these people, after being in Rwanda a lot. And what I realized was how desperate they were for the acknowledgment of their ordeal by the very people who had ignored it, refused to acknowledge it, and essentially made it nonexistent while it was taking place; and that it was awfully late and awfully light or easy at this time to do it."

Rwanda did not really become a pressing concern for the international community until after the Tutsi rebels drove out the Hutu junta, after the worst of the slaughter was over with. Many of the perpetrators of genocide fled – both organizers and executors, to neighboring Congo. Ironically, the international sympathy was initially directed at these Hutu refugee camps, not at the hundreds of thousands of Tutsis these refugees were guilty of murdering. As Gourevitch says:

"…what was being established was this rump genocidal state. What was being established was a replication of the Hutu power regime in camps sponsored by the U.N. And the world poured in money. It poured in support. It poured in humanitarian aid. The world basically completely coddled these camps, presided over by the killers."

Kagame's regime, with good reason, was not fond of these U.N. humanitarian efforts, and as the Economist points out, "was justified in invading Congo to disperse the génocidaires who were using the place as a base for attacks on Rwanda, but it surely did not have to kill 200,000 people in the process." Rwanda's current stability is partly the result of Kagame's authoritarian rule. Kagame dismisses international criticisms of human rights abuses in Rwanda's prisons as hypocritical, and is a skeptic of the U.N.'s International Criminal Court Tribunal for Rwanda. The U.N. had instructed the court to wrap up its work in the next ten years. Among its achievements, as the tribunal's Web site boasts, are the following:

"Completed trials of several of those arrested, including Jean Kambanda, the former Prime Minister, Jean-Paul Akayesu, and other political and military leaders. Kambanda, the first Head of Government to be convicted for such crimes, has been sentenced to life imprisonment. The Akayesu judgement and the Kambanda sentencing were the first- ever by an international court for the crime of genocide."

If the tribunal's record at extraditing and sentencing the master-minds of the genocide is checkered at best, Rwanda's courts have a different problem: the nation's prisons are filled with tens of thousands of people who took part in the genocide. Many will be released because there are no resources to properly prosecute the cases, the state can't afford to maintain such a large prison population if the sentencing is carried out, and because the civilian participation in the killings was so widespread. As the Boston Globe points out:

"About 500 people have been sentenced to death, but 75,000 remain in prison; as many as 40,000 of them may be released in the coming weeks. They will move back into communities alongside the survivors of the killings and the rapes…Those newly released prisoners still will face trial under a citizen-based judicial system called "Gacaca," during which many victims will testify.”

Inevitably, the question of what, if anything, the West has learned from the tragic consequence of its non-intervention in Rwanda is being asked. The Economist argues that since the Rwandan Genocide, the West has been more willing to intervene in crises based on strictly humanitarian grounds and has established international criminal tribunals to try genocidal crimes:

"Then, the West's reluctance to get involved was largely a consequence of America's shambolic intervention in Somalia the previous year. Since then, the response to all remotely similar emergencies has been guided by a desire not to allow a repeat of Rwanda. Some of the results have been encouraging. NATO eventually checked Serb aggression in the Balkans, though only after the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. British troops ended Sierra Leone's terrible civil war. Last year, in Congo's Ituri region, UN peacekeepers found themselves in a position with ominous echoes of Rwanda in April 1994: outnumbered, lightly armed and unable to prevent horrific tribal killings. Instead of cutting and running, Europe sent a French-led force to restore order, with some success.”

Though moral outrage played a part in the West's intervention in the Balkans, the NATO bombings were not so much dictated by the lessons of Rwanda as by the desire to stabilize Europe's "back-yard." True, support for international intervention on purely humanitarian grounds is gaining wider acceptance, that support is neither strong nor universal. The idea does not have many fans in the United States. And with U.S. troops and aid committed to the much more "strategically " important region of the Middle East, it's unlikely that Africa's famines, civil wars, and AIDS crises will become top foreign policy priorities any time soon. This week's absence of Western leaders at Rwanda's commemorations is one more confirmation of its indifference to Rwanda's -- and Africa's -- tragedies.