Large-Scale Genocide That Took Place in Rwanda in 1994 - Case Study Example

258531 1994 Genocide in Rwanda: Now We Can Say Genocide Introduction In 1994, once again, the world turned its back on human genocide, this time, inRwanda. There were pleas made from citizens of Rwanda to the free world, to the super powers, to help. Instead, the United Nations sent UN troops to escort non-Rwandans out of the country. From the United States, Clinton Administration officials danced around the using the word “genocide.” To do so, would have meant that the Administration was acknowledging its responsibility under the 1948 Geneva Convention Accords on Genocide, which would have obligated the administration to respond on the terms of the 1948 accord by intervening in the genocide that was taking place in Rwanda (Taylor, Christopher, 1999, 4). The Clinton Administration was not about intervening in any foreign event. America, however, was not the only country to stand by and watch what would end with the savage deaths of a million Rwandan, Tutsi, men, women, and children, most of whom were hacked to death by their fellow citizens, Hutu, rebel insurgents. This paper looks at the genocide in Rwanda in an effort to understand why intervention in the genocide did not happen. Certainly under the 1948 Geneva Convention the United States, and other countries, including France, England, and even Rwanda’s former colonizer, Belgium, had the ability and, under the circumstances, the authority to intervene in the mass murders. As pressure continued to be applied on the Clinton Administration, and while thousands more Tutsi Rwandans were fleeting the country, Clinton Administration, Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, finally acknowledged the genocide saying, “If there is any particular magic in calling it genocide, I have no hesitancy in saying that (Peterson, Scott, 2000, 297).” Then why the hesitancy intervening in the genocide as the United States and other countries pledged they would at the 1948 Geneva Convention? That is the question that will be attempted here. The United Nations as a Peace Keeper and a Watcher There is a tendency in the modern world for people to respond to world conflict by saying, “We should go to the United Nations.” As if the United Nations has the answers to world conflict, peace, starvation, and AIDS/HIV. In the past decade, much has been revealed about the United Nations, and many people tend to ignore that there was a Oil For Food scandal that implicated high ranking officials as using the program to enrich themselves, or their relatives, to the detriment of the intended sanctions against Iraq and the brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein. So it comes as no surprise that when Rwanda was calling for help in 1994, when no one responded, one of the harshest critics of the lack of response was a man on the front lines in Rwanda, Romeo Dallaire, who was Commander of UN Forces in Rwanda in 1994. Dallaire, the book tells readers, is a proud man, a general, who never suspected he would become Dallaire, the spectator in the 1994 genocide of Tutsi Rwandans (Dallaire and Beardsley, 2005, 8). If nothing else, Dallaire’s book should put an end to people who say, take it to the United Nations. Dallaire knows first-hand that the United Nations will not intervene in genocide. Three months before the actual violence broke out in Rwanda, Dallaire sent a fax to Kofi Anan, who was in charge of the United Nations Peacekeeping Forces in New York (x). In the message, Dallaire advised Anan that according to a high level Interahamwe informant, which is name of the militant Hutu force responsible for hacking to death a million Rwandans; that Hutu extremists had begun the task of documenting the Tutsi Rwandans for the purposes of carrying out a planned extinction of the Tutsi (x). In other words, three months before the actual violence commenced in Rwanda, and before the government at that time was overthrown, Kofi Anan had every opportunity to take steps to intervene in a planned event. Yet when the violence broke out, the world, and certainly Tutsi Rwandans were caught off guard. Dallaire, in whom a great amount of trust was instilled in as indicated by his position with the United Nations, told Kofi Anan that he had a high level of confidence in the veracity of the informant’s information (x). The lack of preparedness for what was being planned, the lack of effort to circumvent those plans, and the lack of action on the part of the United Nations as the genocide was being carried out is demonstrative of how the United Nations has accomplished more in internal enrichment, than it has in its missions around the world. The United Nations has seemingly taken on the character of a badly run charitable organization, spending a lot of time looking for donations, most of which never seem to make it to the people and countries on behalf of whom the money, supplies, and food is solicited for. This is not to say that none of those things make it to the intended people in need of those supplies. If there was not some show of success in that regard, the donations and money would quickly come to a halt. For those people, however, who continue to give supplies and donations to the United Nations with the idea that some of it getting to the people in need is better than none, have a good heart, but it is not the point. There must be something done to ensure that people in need get the intended supplies and money, and that people who stand as targets of genocide receive protection. If not protection, at least Kofi Anan could have given advance notice to the Tutsi to run for their lives. For many people, the United Nations has become a symbol not what we want the world to be, but a symbol of what is wrong with the world today. Linda Melvin (2000) talks about the genocide in terms of the sight of little girls who lay dead from machete wounds to their heads, and a little boy with a shot to his head who did not cry in the face of death (1). The good news is that presidential candidate Barak Obama, who today stands as president-elect of the United States, told David Letterman, three months before super Tuesday 2008 elections, that Bill Clinton was doing much good in Rwanda today – of course, Obama did not address the 1994 genocide. Obama told Letterman that Clinton was working with businesses in Rwanda to improve its economy – an economy which, today, stands at about one million less consumers than there were in 1994. Obama did, however, tell Letterman that we have to approach the world differently today, and that we must stop throwing money into the hands of corrupt leaders who stash the money in “Swiss bank accounts,” where it never is used for the people for whom it was intended to help (Letterman, October, 2008).1 Colonial and Post Colonial Rwanda Bill Clinton and Kofi Anan are not the only ones who must receive credit for taking no steps to prevent or intervene in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Also complicit, are the Belgians, the former European colonizers in Rwanda. According to the colonial literature, the distinction between the Rwandan Tutsi and Hutu is: “According to the colonial anthropology of the nineteenth century the Hutu are part of the Bantu people, who moved out from Cameroon, eastward to Kenya and southward to the Cape, populating approximately one-third of Africa’s surface space. Whereas the Hutu, like many Bantu peoples, are mostly agriculturists, the Tutsi (Batutsi)-who, according to colonial ideology, originated from northeast Africa (or are a Nilo-Cushitic group)-were previously mostly cattle breeders (Scherrer, Christian, 2002, 17).” Scherrer says that according to “European racial theories,” the Tutsi had a social seniority over the Hutu (17). It was this social hierarchal of authority and benefit, mostly during the colonial period, that served as the basis for tension between Tutsi and Hutu factions in Rwanda (17). This hierarchal order, Scherrer says, existed before colonial times, but it was perpetuated by the Belgians who made distinctions of “service” or employability between the Tutsi and Hutu (21). “After they gained control of the region as part of the Treaty of Versailles in 1918, the Belgians imposed a policy of divide-and-rule as they had done throughout the vast territories of the Congo. Acting on the racial theory of the time, the Belgians exalted the Tutsis as Caucasians who had migrated south. One colonial official was so determined to establish absolute differences amongst Rwandas casually mixed peoples that he argued that the Tutsis had come to Rwanda from outer space (Gourevitch 1996:30). Beginning in the 1930s, all Rwandans were registered as Tutsi (15%), Hutu (84%), or Twa (1%), thereby transforming the racial classification problem into a bureaucratic one. The division of Rwandans into unequal ethnic groups was thus carried out as a direct reflection of European race science. Rendering Rwanda into a homogenous nation of one "ethnicity" was in one sense the acting out of that logic (Mirzoeff, Nicolas, 36).” If, however, there is any credit that should be given for efforts to save people during the 1994 genocide, that credit should go to the Belgian owners of the Mille Collines Hotel in Rwanda (Peterson, Scott, 2000, 300). The hotel was an international hotel where tourists stayed, and where could be found important Rwandans and UN officials from time to time for meetings, or social gatherings (300). It was the place where, when the violence broke out, thousands of people, including Tutsi and Hutu, took refuge from the violence (300). Belgian business owners exerted influence over the Rwandans, working through the French, and, because of their intervention and the pressures put on the international community, the residents of the hotel were escorted out of the hotel and taken to safe haven refugee camps outside of Rwanda (300). Apart from the Hutu and other factions vying for power in Rwanda, the intervention of the management on behalf of the hotel’s guests, staff, and refugees, the loyalty shown to these people by the owners of the hotel, was the only loyalty to Rwanda as a country that can be found during the event. In the Aftermath of Genocide It is common knowledge that once refugee camps were set up for those lucky enough to have escaped the Interahawnwe, the international community did respond with supplies and food, and, when cholera broke out, medical care (301). “Spurred by the heart-rending footage-remember that there was virtually no “live action” footage of the genocide itself-Americans also finally demanded action. The US spearheaded the international aid effort with a $500 million commitment to bring water, airdrop food, and deliver 20 million rehydration sachets and other relief supplies. Many thought that they were helping victims of the genocide, and the Clinton administration may have believed this, too. Certainly, after doing nothing during the killing-or even less than nothing-“Operation Sustain Hope” salved many consciences (301).” Bill Clinton has, since the end of his second term as President of the United States, said that his only regret – and there should actually be many – is that he did not intervene in Rwanda. The United States, as a democratic society, as emancipators of the victims of the holocaust prison camps, and as participants in the 1948 Geneva Convention owed it to Rwandans to intervene, and to do whatever was necessary to prevent the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. There was a post-genocide scramble done over Rwanda. The United States, the United Nations, and other European powers of the world did not want to look complicit in the massacre of Tutsi men, women, and children. Linda Malvern, however, in her book, “A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwandas Genocide,” is not shy about assigning blame. She points to the role of France, South Africa, Egypt, and China for providing everything from arms, to machetes (China), to rocket launchers without discrimination as to what those weapons were to be used for, or by whom (5). One would think that with the experience of South Africa in overcoming the violence and racism of hatred in apartheid South Africa, that South Africa would be the last country to be named as complicit in the massacre of a million Rwandans. That any one of these countries provided weapons to insurgents whose intention it was to commit genocide, to eradicate a cultural group from the face of the planet, is not acceptable. There was, however, in the aftermath little that could be done, except to provide aid and to try to sort through how it happened that the world stood by, again, and allowed this kind of murder to go on. If nothing else, it is an indication that there is a lack of oversight by the citizens of the world when it comes to what the United Nations is, or is not doing on behalf its member states. There must be oversight at the United Nations, and it must not be allowed to continue operating as a financial funnel to corruption and back room deals for self enrichment by its leaders. In the aftermath of the massacres, the United States claimed that it had actually revised its criteria for intervening in the crisis of another nation, even when intervention meant the commencement of violence and genocide. “The Rwandan genocide can also be understood as a displacement of the politics of Final Solution into the culture of globalization, for what has been endlessly described as a meaningless ethnic slaughter was rather an attempt to impose what one must call "globalized National Socialism"--accepting the paradox as part of the crisis--as a solution to the crisis of late colonial authority in a global cultural economy. (2) After being excluded from the colonial administration, the Hutu were suddenly given power by the departing Belgian authorities in 1959, not coincidentally the year of the first anti-Tutsi violence. In the thirty-five years that followed, the Hutu created a one-party state that was often sustained by attacks on the Tutsi, who had been the preferred group in the colonial era right until the last moment (Mirzoeff, 36).” No country’s foreign policy should exempt it from its humanitarian responsibility of intervening to prevent genocide. Indeed, the opposite should be required of all foreign policies. Never again, was the cry in 1948 that led to the Geneva Accords wherein the powers of the world agreed that they would not stand by and allow genocide to happen again – but they did. Works Cited Burkhalter, Holly J. "The Question of Genocide the Clinton Administration and Rwanda." World Policy Journal 11.4 (1994): 44-54. Questia. 6 Dec. 2008 . Dallaire, Romeo. Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda, Arrow, 2005. Jones, Bruce D. Peacemaking in Rwanda: The Dynamics of Failure. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001. Questia. 6 Dec. 2008 . Lang, Anthony. "Global Governance and Genocide in Rwanda." Ethics & International Affairs 16.1 (2002): 143+. Questia. 6 Dec. 2008 . Melvern, Linda. A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwandas Genocide. Zed Book, 2000. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. "Invisible Again: Rwanda and Representation after Genocide." African Arts 38.3 (2005): 36+. Questia. 6 Dec. 2008 . Peterson, Scott. Me against My Brother: At War in Somalia, Sudan, and Rwanda : a Journalist Reports from the Battlefields of Africa. New York: Routledge, 2000. Questia. 6 Dec. 2008 . Scherrer, Christian P. Genocide and Crisis in Central Africa : Conflict Roots, Mass Violence, and Regional War /. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002. Questia. 6 Dec. 2008 . Taylor, Christopher C. Sacrifice as Terror : The Rwandan Genocide of 1994 /. New York: Berg, 1999. Questia. 6 Dec. 2008 . Read More