|
Re: Re: Re: Rwanda-1994, 800,000 killed. Why/how did this happend?
| quote: | Originally posted by Dilmeet
I know that “Genocide”, a word first coined in 1940s and meaning the annihilation of an entire people, is one of the hallmarks of the twentieth century. History helps explain the reasons for the various genocides and other atrocities that occurred in that century. I just want to know an historical analysis of why this atrocity happened.
I know that imperialism and colonialism had something to do with it. Hutu and Tutsi were rival tribesmen. Tutsi, the minority, were put in control by the British or Belgium, mabe French?? (whoever it was that had practiced imperialism on them).
I believe that when they let Tutsi and the Hutu have they're own country it led the Hutu, the majority that was controlled by the Tutsi, to overthrow their 'type' of government.
I just want to know if my facts are right... I know there is more, you can't just have a 800,000 holocaust because of this... |
I meant to get back to you on this, and I only now stumbled across this thread again. This interview with Philip Gourevitch gives some idea as to the mechanics behind the genocide and the events that precipitated it.
I thoroughly recommend his book "We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families", as well as Samantha Power's "Problem From Hell: America in the Age of Genocide", "Leave None To Tell The Story: Genocide in Rwanda" by Alison des Forges, and "Shake Hands With The Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda" by Gen. Romeo Dallaire, the man in charge of UN troops during the genocide.
Here's the interview with Gourevitch that aired on PBS:
| quote: | He is the author of We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, an in-depth account of the Rwanda genocide. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker and a contributing editor to the Forward. In the aftermath of the genocide he spent over nine months in Rwanda trying to understand how this extraordinary crime had come to pass, how it was organized, how the Western powers had stood by and watched it happen, and how Rwandans are living with its legacy.
What is the most significant thing to understand about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda?
In Rwanda, in the course of 100 days in the spring and early summer of 1994, 800,000 people were put to death in the most unambiguous case of state-sponsored genocide in an attempt to exterminate a category of humanity, a people, since the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews of Europe.
... What distinguishes Rwanda is a clear, programmatic effort to eliminate everybody in the Tutsi minority group because they were Tutsis. The logic was to kill everybody. Not to allow anybody to get away. Not to allow anybody to continue. And the logic, as Rwandans call it, the genocidal logic, was very much akin to that of an ideology very similar to that of the Nazism vis-à-vis the Jews in Europe, which is all of them must be gotten rid of to purify in a sense the people. There's a utopian element in genocide that's perplexing. But it is an effort to create community in the most strict sense of "us versus them," by literally eliminating them and bonding all of us in complicity, in the course of that elimination. The idea was that all Hutus should participate in killing of Tutsis. And there have been cases of mass political murder, there have been cases of massacres and genocidal massacres, but never a country and a society so completely and totally convulsed by an effort at pure, unambiguous genocide since the end of World War II, since the passage of the Genocide Convention by the United Nations in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
Who are Hutus and Tutsis? ... Can you summarize the background to this genocide--the civil war, the cease-fire and the arrival of U.N. peacekeepers?
Rwanda's population essentially consists of two groups, the Hutu majority (roughly 85%), the Tutsi minority (roughly 15%). There's a tiny minority of Pygmies as well. Until the late 19th century, which is to say, until European colonization, Tutsis (the minority) represented the aristocratic upper classes; Hutus were the peasant masses. The Europeans brought with them an idea of race science, by which they took this traditional structure and made it even more extreme and more polarized into an almost apartheid-like system. And ethnic identity cards were issued, and Tutsis were privileged for all things, and Hutus were really made into a very oppressed mass.
In the late '50s, early '60s, at the time that the rumblings towards independence were taking place across Africa, what happened in Rwanda for independence was a Hutu revolution, in the name of majority rule, that reversed the system. It remained an apartheid, polarized ethnic state, except the Hutu majority now was in charge. And you had a Hutu dictatorship running through the '60s, the '70s, the '80s, and into the mid-'90s. Throughout that period, there was systematic political violence used against Tutsi to maintain this Hutu power.
That violence generated a huge outflow since the late '60s of refugees into neighboring states, so that there were hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Tutsis living in exile, in one state or another, on the border of Rwanda, not naturalized in any other country, and wishing to come home. The government of Rwanda refused to re-admit those who'd fled.
And in 1990, a rebel army appeared, somewhat unexpectedly on the scene, took the Rwandan government by surprise, launching an incursion from the north, from Uganda. And a civil war broke out that was waged sporadically on and off through '90, '91, '92, and into '93. In the areas that it was waged, it was essentially a border war with a large chunk of border involved, but it didn't engulf the entire country.
In '93, a cease-fire was arranged: ethnic power sharing, political power sharing, multi-party state, integration of the armies, and the return of the refugees. And the key to all of this, to see that these two antagonistic parties would do what they pledged to do, was that the United Nations peacekeeping force would be brought in--in the fall of 1993 ...
... It was agreed by both sides that it would be deployed to the country and would preside over the peace implementation and transfer of power to this new sharing government. To the Hutu extremists who formed the entourage around the Hutu dictatorship, President Habyarimana, the threat of peace was even greater than the threat of war, because it amounted to a defeat. It meant that they couldn't have a total victory. They faced suddenly the threat of sharing power, which was the one thing on earth that they couldn't stand sharing. It was against that backdrop that the U.N. peacekeeping force began to arrive, and to attempt to preside over the implementation of a peace which the president's men had no intention of allowing him to implement.
What's the distinction to you between civil war and genocide?
In a civil war, you have essentially two combatant forces. Sometimes they are fighting against one another. Sometimes civilians get involved as militia men or so. In a genocide, there is no political objective ... the idea is to eliminate what is perceived as a blood line. It means anybody who carries that blood must be eliminated. So it doesn't matter if you're a baby. In a civil war, a baby is not a serious enemy element. Here, it is, because 60 years from now, that baby could be an adult. Grandmothers on their last legs are considered to be eliminated. Pregnant women. "You must be careful," the Rwandans who were committing the genocide said, "to disembowel them and make sure the fetus in their womb was dead." That's what genocide is about.
Tell me more about the differences.
In early April of 1994, much of the reporting said, "The civil war has been renewed in Rwanda." But a civil war involves two or more armies fighting one another--a rebel army and a government army. And it means that soldiers fight soldiers. The objective is to defeat the other party. Quite often, because these are wars that are civil wars, they involved civilian populations being attacked.
But a genocide is a completely different thing. You often ignore the enemy army to go after the people that you have decided to call the enemy. So you've decided that the Tutsis are the enemy. And that means that instead of going to the front to fight the enemy, you go to a Tutsi's home to kill his children and his old mother, because the idea is to eliminate a blood line.
And furthermore, when one talks about civil war, one's talking about the internal affairs of a state, how foreign policy people look at such a thing. When one talks about civil war, foreign policy people will say, "Well, that's the internal affair of a foreign state. We don't get involved in other people's civil wars." But we've pledged to get involved in genocides, of course. So when you call it a civil war, it's a way quite often of ignoring that, in fact, what's happening is a systematic attempt to eliminate this blood line, an act of genocide, and one concerted and organized to involve the entire population.
In this case, was it a breakdown of a civil war, a breakdown of a cease-fire?
There's no question that after Habyarimana's plane was shot down and the genocidal massacres began in Rwanda, the civil war was also renewed. It was an act of war against the people of Rwanda by the now acting government of Rwanda, the genocidal government. Immediately, the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) returned to the field of battle and started its war again. And it was clear that that would happen.
So, of course, you had two things happening at once. You had a civil war and you had a genocide--much, I should say, as in World War II. You had World War II and you had the Holocaust, two separate events. And as we know, the two efforts often are odds with one another. So that trains that might supply the Eastern front during World War II were used instead to carry Jews to their deaths in Auschwitz. And troops who might have been fighting the RPF to win a civil war were instead diverted to oversee the slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda.
Who was the interahamwe?
The interahamwe was a militia group recruited in the name of civil self defense, the idea being that the population should be prepared to defend itself against the enemy. This was a way of popularizing the war, making the war an affair of you and me. Every Hutu must consider himself attacked by every Tutsi, rather than thinking that the state was being attacked by a rebel army. So the interahamwe was recruited. Primarily there was a lot of unemployment in Rwanda in the early '90s. These were sort of village youth who [had] gone to the cities looking for work, couldn't find work, were recruited to this kind of youth culture of militia movements. And the interahamwe literally means "those who attack together." And it was through the interahamwe that a large part of the younger Rwandan Hutu males were recruited into the genocidal logic, the genocidal propaganda and into the movement of killing.
Who was the informant who sent the January 11th fax warning of the genocide?
The informant who essentially laid out for the United Nations force commander what was being planned in Rwanda, that an extermination was being planned of Tutsis, was a man who had first been a member of President Habyarimana's security staff (in other words, he was a top ranking military security official) and had now been hired through the president's political party (which was essentially indistinguishable from the apparatus of the state) to run an interahamwe militia training program for the city of Kigali, training Hutu combatants to kill Tutsi. And he tells in his information very clearly, that he thinks that his men could kill 1,000 Tutsis in 20 minutes.
What was so remarkable about this fax?
What makes this fax utterly remarkable is that it describes a program planned in the highest echelons of the state, in the president's court, to eliminate a part of his population. It uses the word "extermination." The fax says that the informant believes it is for their extermination. If you go around the U.N. and you say, "What's extraordinary about that fax?" they say, "We got a lot of faxes." If you ask them how many faxes they believe they've [received], say, in the last 50 years, since genocide became defined as a crime, that talk about a plan in the head of state's chambers to exterminate his people, I think that they can't really count them. They can't think of any. The answer is, this is extraordinary. It's utterly extraordinary language: the precision, the detail, the confidence in the tone of the fax. That the U.N. field commander trusts his informant is unmistakable.
It's really important to remember, the fax is not headed "Request to Take Action." It's headed "Request for Protection for Informant." The force commander presumes that it was okay to take action. And he says, "Look, my mission, my rules are to go out there and to seize these illegal arms caches. (Kigali was supposed to be a weapons-free zone under the U.N. mandate.) I'm going to go out and seize these arms caches. I know they're there. I believe my informant. What I want to know is how to protect him. This man has come forward at tremendous risk to himself. (He believed that his informant [was] at risk.) Tell me how to do that." And the U.N. said, "We don't know how."
Another thing that makes this a truly extraordinary fax is that everything in it came true. Now, U.N. people, in their own defense, at peacekeeping headquarters (now the secretary-general's office) will tell you, "Well, hindsight isn't a fair way of looking at this." Well, but all judgment of history has to be made in hindsight. And the fact is, here was a force commander saying he trusted the man. The man told a lot. What the man told proved to be entirely true, which is what the force commander thought. His judgment was confirmed. And instead, the informant was lost, so we never got to hear more from him. Because once he was denied protection, good-bye.
It's astonishing in this fax, too, that there is a threat to the peacekeepers. The fax announces a plan to shoot Belgian peacekeepers. That should really be special in U.N. headquarters because as we know in this day and age, one of the greatest fears of anybody who thinks about engaging in peacekeeping forces is having body bags come back ... and here's an announcement that: Guess what? The people that are planning to exterminate part of their population are also planning to set the thing in motion by shooting the mostly European mainstay of the peacekeeping force. That alone should make it an extraordinary fax even if one doesn't care about the extermination of Rwandans.
How did the U.N. respond to this fax?
Essentially, the response of the peacekeeping headquarters in New York at the U.N. headquarters was to treat this fax as a routine bureaucratic matter. It set off no special alarm bells that rang loudly. It was not disseminated. One sometimes can imagine if that fax appeared on the front page of all the world's major newspapers, on the TV and so forth. In other words, a lot of influence could have been exerted by leaking this fax and drawing attention to this crisis. No. It was treated as a routine bureaucratic matter. And the idea was: Let's just stick with the rules. We're not obliged to do anything in response to such information. What our mandate rules (and the U.N. loves to fall back on mandate rules) are, we should tell the president that there's a cease-fire violation been reported. And so the U.N. commanders were instructed to go to the president and tell him that they had this information about illegal arms caches and about rumors of a program to commit massacres, and to say, "Gee, this is against the rules of the cease-fire that we're here to enforce."
The absurdity of this is that essentially what they were doing is, they were being charged to go to the president and tell him that he had a leak in his own court, where the planning of a genocide was taking place, and to say, "By the way, we've been tipped off." Well, that would make the informant's position even more precarious than ever before. It would alert the president rather than punish him. It would just tell him, "Be careful." It's a little bit like the way we would say to Saddam, "We're coming to inspect. You get two weeks to move your stuff." And so the president was alerted to this ...
Why did they tell them not to go after the gun caches, and to tell the president ...
The interahamwe was a militia being run by the president's political party. It was being run by his cronies, by his business partners, by his colonels and generals. He was not always at the very command top of it, but he was totally involved in the circle of people who were planning these massacres, and who were plotting to scrap the peace process and seize power through massacres and through a war against the Tutsis rather than a war against the real military enemy.
So here's this president. And what does U.N. headquarters tell its commanders to do? Go tell him that we've been tipped off about this. Now, on one level I suppose the argument is: That's how these missions work. They treat a government as a government until it's overthrown. That's who they have to deal with. They deal in diplomatic terms. On the other hand, what it really constitutes is telling somebody who is plotting a massive crime against humanity that he should be more careful; he should watch his flank; he's got a leak in his operation. That's really what the information would compute as, in President Habyarimana's head. Make life precarious for the informant, guarantee that no more information will come to the U.N. through those channels ...
What happened to the president's plane, and what did that spark?
Throughout the so-called peace implementation period, President Habyarimana was under tremendous pressure from the extremists not to implement the peace process. He dragged his feet. He resisted. He did everything within his power to avoid it. On early April of 1994, he was called by regional presidents to various meetings. "Come on, you've got to get with the program and implement this peace deal. It's causing problems." He was flying back on April 6, 1994, from these meetings. He flies into Kigali, and as his plane descends towards the airport, it's hit by one or two surface-to-air missiles, bursts into flames, and crashes (almost mythically) into his own backyard of his palace.
Now, immediately the Hutu power extremist radio, starts blaming the rebels (the Rwandese Patriotic Front) for this. There has since been endless speculation about who did what. What's most clear is that the circumstantial evidence points to the fact that it was actually the extremists in the president's own entourage, who had often predicted that if he didn't comply with them and complied instead with the peace deal, he would be meeting his maker. They staged a coup within half an hour. Essentially, the government now became a government of unabashed Hutu extremists. It became a military coup, which installed a new sort of puppet government. And within the course of that night (the night of April 6th), the program of massacres that had been planned began to get implemented, first killing political oppositionists rather than singling out Tutsis by ethnicity. It was really focusing on those people who might cause the most political trouble. And members of the presidential guard were recruited and sent forth with lists as assassins. Massacres began to take place. And essentially what you saw is, the propaganda that went forth was, "They, the Tutsis, the rebels, have killed our president." So he was sacrificed, almost. It was the rhetoric of "Our beloved president was killed by them," when in fact everything indicates that they either killed him or certainly exploited his death within moments.
At that point, what role did national radio play?
Almost immediately after the peace deal was signed in August of 1993, and the U.N. force was commissioned, many of the people around the president and in the Hutu power leadership established a second radio station. Up until then, Rwanda had had one radio station, Radio Rwanda. Now they established a second major radio station with a powerful signal, called RTLM (Radio-Television Libre Milles Collines). And this became the genocidal radio. It was a radio dedicated entirely to entertainment and genocidal propaganda. And it was highly entertaining. It had pop music. It was very much in keeping with the kind of youth movement spirit of the militia movement. And people loved this radio station. It was very popular. And it mounted this increasingly virulent, exclusionary and exterminatory rhetoric in the period during the so-called peace implementation. Following the president's death, it became almost Genocide Central. It was through there that people were instructed at times, "Go out there and kill. You must do your work. People are needed over in this commune." Sometimes they actually had disc jockeys who would say, "So-and-so has just fled. He is said to be moving down such-and-such street." And they would literally hunt an individual who was targeted in the street. And people would listen to this on the radio. It was apparently quite dramatic. And it was a rallying tool that was used in a tremendous way to mobilize the population.
... To understand how powerful radio was, or how powerful the message was, it's interesting to contrast [to] neighboring Burundi, [which] has the same ethnic mix as Rwanda. The president of Burundi was a passenger on President Habyarimana's plane, and was also killed on the night of April 6th. But in that country, the U.N. leaders there helped organize the political leaders to plead on the radio for calm. So a message of calm was sent out, and people responded to that. Here, a message to lather up the population to kill was sent out, and the people responded to that.
What happened to the Belgian soldiers, and why? Was it intentional?
Throughout the period that UNAMIR had been in the country, the Hutu power propagandists (both on radio but especially in print, where it was easier for them to carry on because you had to read Rwandan) were saying, "You know, this U.N. force is in the way if trouble begins. If we want to go about our business, what are we going to do about this U.N. force?" And they'd been looking around, and they said, "You know, these U.N. blue helmets, they don't seem to have a lot of fighting strength. They tend to run away when the fighting begins." This was clearly declared in a number of articles that one can trace. And one of the things that had been also said in the famous fax of January 11th that was sent to peacekeeping headquarters is: When the president is attacked, so too we will attack a bunch of Belgian blue helmets who make up the mainstay of the U.N. contingent, and with the aim of forcing the Belgians, by killing some of them, to be afraid and turn tail and run away. And the whole force will then be withdrawn. It was clearly a plan.
Well, on the morning of April 7, 1994, after the assassination of President Habyarimana, as death squads and assassin groups were fanning out through the capital, hunting political oppositionists, they came to the prime minister's house. She was one of the main oppositionists that they were after. While they were there, ten Belgian blue helmets arrived to say, "Hey, what's going on," and to offer protection. Well, not only did they fail to protect her, but they were then taken captive by the military of the new genocidal government. They were taken back to a military base, and in the course of several hours they were tortured, murdered and mutilated. It was a shocking event. And as soon as they were released, within the week, sure enough, as the assassins had planned, the Belgians lost their appetite for this mission, and the force began to crumble.
What were the Hutus' intention by killing the blue helmets?
Remember that at the end of 1993 in Somalia, 18 American Rangers on a peacekeeping mission in Mogadishu had been killed, and their bodies dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, televised around the world. And the Clinton administration, which had come into office talking about a brave new era of peacekeeping and global intervention and policing, lost its appetite for peacekeeping very fast.
Well, the Rwandans who were planning a genocide, the Hutu extremists around the president, studied this sort of event very closely. They said, "Look, they come in here telling us what to do, these peacekeepers. They come in here with a good line of talk, but they don't have the strength to fight, and they can't stand body bags." They studied this. It was in their newspapers. It was in their plans. And they said, "If we kill some of them, they'll go away." That was in the fax that was sent to U.N. headquarters. It was predicted that they were planning to kill some Belgians. And sure enough, on the morning after the president's assassination, they killed these blue helmets. And it's clear from the script that they wrote in advance that what they wanted (the Hutu power leaders whose military killed these blue helmets) was to scare away the U.N. mission on the brink of the genocide.
What was the Clinton's administration's policy? How was it implemented through Madeline Albright?
Pretty much as soon as the ten Belgian blue helmets had been killed, the debate became: Should we beef up the U.N. force, or should we cut it back? The Clinton administration--and one should always remember that in the United Nations Security Council, the United States is essentially the 800-pound gorilla that sits where it wants and can bend others to its will. It's the great power. The Clinton administration's policy was, "Let's withdraw altogether. Let's get out of Rwanda. Leave it to its fate." The United States ambassador to the United Nations at that time was then Madeline Albright. And it was she who was in the wretched position of having to represent this position to the Security Council, and who did so very effectively.
Iqbal Riza [U.N.] said, "Certainly in the first few days, neither the people on the ground or we here knew that this was a planned genocide. We knew that fighting had resumed, and we all viewed it as a breakdown of the cease-fire." How would you respond to that? What did they know at U.N.?
It's clear that by the time that President Habyarimana was assassinated, there was plenty of information floating around U.N. headquarters to the effect that his entourage, the people around him, were eager to commit massacres against the Tutsis. There had been massacres--practice massacres, one could call them--throughout the '90s. They had continued. There were a lot of political assassinations in the months of early 1994. There was a lot of trouble. One had to effectively tune that out. One had to willfully ignore a lot of information in order to think that when the president's plane was shot down and violence returned to Kigali, that that violence was simply a resumption of the same old civil war, rather than a new order of political massacres. If nothing else, the purges on the first night and the first morning (during which, of course, the Belgians were killed), were of a thoroughness and extremity that had not been seen before. And those were not enemy forces.
So it's extraordinary at the least, that those who were charged with maintaining the Rwanda mission at the U.N. can now plead that they didn't recognize what was going on. Certainly, the wish that it was only a cease-fire violation, rather than the wish to see clearly how starkly it was in fact the fulfillment of all the predictions of extermination. It was that wish not to notice, I think, that prevailed.
They didn't put two and two together?
Riza basically told me when I spoke to him that, "Look, after the debacle of peacekeeping for Americans in Somalia, we here at peacekeeping headquarters knew that there was no major appetite to get involved in such missions," particularly ... in Africa. That was the climate. When I said, "Well, but did you share the information? Did you push it? Did you aggressively pursue this," the attitude was, "Well, we knew that they didn't want to do it." So there was almost an attitude of collapse. There was an attitude of "Why bother?" There was not a very aggressive point of view there ... it's essentially the plea that we didn't realize it was a genocide; therefore, we didn't respond to it as one. It's pretty appalling that it wasn't recognized.
One of the things that's so astonishing when one comes to this now and looks at this with any care, is how profoundly it was scripted ... when I say "profoundly," I mean how thoroughly it was scripted, how thoroughly it was announced, how thoroughly it was a genocide foretold, how thoroughly the signs were on the surface. They were on the radio. They were in the newspapers. You could buy them at any street corner. You could hear them at any rally. You didn't have to go looking. This was not a top secret program that was coming forward. It was something that was really quite conspicuously announced.
Characterize the speed, the brutality and the scope of what was happening.
You can't overstate how rapidly this unfolded. It didn't happen in Rwanda that all at once, everywhere in Rwanda, there was a vast uprising or spontaneous outburst of killing. It was plotted. It was planned. It moved. You can actually see how it radiated out from Kigali through careful manipulation and planning.
And at the same time, it did so very rapidly. We're talking about 800,000 people murdered in the course of 100 days. That's 8,000 murders a day. I find that on average that's five murders a minute. The speed and the graphic brutality, the fact that this was conducted largely with machetes ... people were battered to death, were hacked to death, were stabbed to death, hand to hand, across the country, on this kind of industrial scale. I think that the extraordinary horror of that, and the immensity and speed of this violence, did to some extent short-circuit responses. On the other hand, one might have said that the immense speed and graphic horror would have created a sense of urgency. Instead, it seems to have created a sense of shutdown.
The expatriate rescue: What happened?
When this started, of course, there were embassies in Rwanda. There were some aid missions still there. In early 1994, Peace Corps was beginning to get started again in Rwanda. You had French, Belgian and European nuns and missionaries and so forth, spread out throughout the land. There were a number of white Westerners, American or European people living in Rwanda in various professional and private capacities. The immediate response of the world was, "We will, of course, intervene to evacuate our nationals." This is standard procedure. And so you had a rather massive influx of commando forces from Europe and also some Americans, flying into the airport, fanning out in jeeps and so forth to rescue missionaries, priests, doctors, aid workers, diplomats, and their children, and to take them out of the country--which created some really terrible moments where people were forced to leave behind those Rwandans who worked for them. Didn't matter if you were the loyal, steadiest employee of the American embassy in Kigali. If you were a Rwandan, see you later. And so the European-American world air-lifted itself out and left Rwanda again to its fate.
Anyidoho, who was the Ghanaian commander on the ground, said, "We had enough troops ... we just missed a fleeting opportunity." What was missed? What opportunity was there when these troops were on the ground?
You look at all those troops going in to get the foreigners out, and you can't help thinking, well, that's a lot of troops, if they wished to do something. These are commandos. These are pretty crack troops. These are guys who are prepared to go in there and do what it takes to extract one deputy at an embassy. Couldn't they have done a lot?
It's clear that throughout the Rwandan story and throughout basically any story of non-intervention around the world, what's lacking isn't the military wherewithal. It's extraordinary, the military capacities of America and its European allies. What's lacking is any sense of interest in so doing. And Rwanda lay outside the strategic interests of America. Part of what makes Rwanda extraordinarily a case study almost in the dramatic question of, "When do we and when don't we choose to act," is that we chose not to. One can't argue that there was geo-strategic, economic, or other political interests to motivate us. So this is almost like a petri dish case. And America just didn't want to. It's really a story of not wanting. You hear the phrase "political will." Simply translated: I don't want to.
]color=orange]Explain the scene when the Security Council vote is taken, and Rwanda is one of the member states, and everybody seems deferential to each other. What's wrong?[/color]
Diplomacy is a cold business. Diplomats will be polite to each other at all costs. Remember, people were very cordial to Hitler. People had been very cordial to Stalin ... Remember that at the United Nations throughout the late 1970s and all of the 1980s, the United States helped Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge maintain Cambodia's seat at the United Nations. This was Cold War politics. They didn't want the Vietnamese occupiers of Cambodia to be there. We were polite to them. They'd just killed two million of their people. They'd been our enemy 20 years before.
So here, in a complete fluke, in 1994, little Rwanda gets one of these rotating seats on the Security Council, and the Rwandan genocidal government has a representative on the Security Council as the world sits down to debate its fate. You have France, the main patron of the Rwandese government, which also exercises power on the Security Council with some of its other partner states. Djibouti happened to be on the Security Council. And Djibouti is also a complete part of the neo-colonial French sphere of influence. So you have everybody being very polite to one another. Now, people don't say, "Your government's committing genocide, and you shut up and sit down now." No. Everybody gets a vote, and they go about this all very politely, as if it were a routine matter, to some extent. Perhaps that's what keeps the U.N. going, but it's also what makes the U.N. singularly an ineffective place to take urgent action.
I think, when we talk about intervention, it's worth remembering that if the United States wants to intervene somewhere, if the United States wants to go bomb Baghdad, we do so ... like that, without asking permission all over the place at the U.N. When we want to build a coalition, we go to the U.N. The U.N. also is where people go when they want a cover for inaction. "We'll all go there and we'll all discuss it" means, "It's not very important to any of us."
What could or should the world do, even without military intervention?
There are two basic choices that confront the world, the international community, or the world powers confronted with such a situation as one had in Rwanda. Either you intervene aggressively, or you don't.
Now, within the category of "you don't," which was the one that was chosen, that doesn't mean that there's nothing else that can be done. For one thing, if you declare very clearly that you aren't going to, in advance, you don't create the false promise of protection that was created in Rwanda. Many Rwandans have told me that they made their plans, as they saw the situation worsening in early 1994, they decided to stay and take their chances in Rwanda because they also saw these blue helmets. So that's the first step is, you don't make false promises of protection if you're not really going to see them through.
The second thing is, once you've decided not to intervene, there's still a lot of pressure that can be exerted. For instance, you can put a lot of diplomatic pressure, economic pressure. You can delegitimize the government that is committing these massacres. You can make it very clear that you see it as what it is, and that you will do everything within your power to decommission these people. Rwanda maintained an embassy in Washington throughout the genocide. We didn't threaten to shut that embassy down until the genocide was shut down. There's a lot of pressure. One says, "No aid. You're no longer a legitimate government. We believe the reports that we are hearing, that you are a government that is criminal." So a lot of effort could be made beyond direct military action, to at least destabilize that government's sense of its surety as a member of the international community. But instead, everything was done to continue to embrace it as a member.
Even if the world decided not to intervene militarily, it still has options.
It's pretty clear that nothing short of the use of force would stop the tremendous force that was mobilized to commit the Rwandan genocide. And yet, even after the international community had decided (the Western powers) not to intervene and use that force, that didn't mean that they were without further options for putting pressure on the government: economic pressure, diplomatic pressure, moral pressure, to speak out and to be quite active in a way that wasn't done either. There wasn't a sense of really trying to exclude the government of Rwanda that was responsible for mobilizing this genocide from the community of nations. Instead, it was [continually] included.
From the Clinton administration's standpoint and the State Department briefings, what was the dilemma they faced in not calling this a genocide?
The Genocide Convention basically stood as the one document, the international law about genocide. And what it said was, if there's a genocide, the people who have agreed to this convention (which is the United States included) have to act to stop genocide when it's happening. In other words, if it's a genocide, you must act. It was a straight equation. The Clinton administration didn't want to act, which meant that it couldn't call it a genocide, because if it acknowledged that it was a genocide, it's clear from its own statements that its reading was: It had to do something. And eventually what happened was, the Clinton administration came up with a new reading of the Genocide Convention, which basically said, "Well, it doesn't oblige us to act. It permits us to act. It creates a framework in which we can act," which is nonsense, of course. Who needs permission to act? You don't need an international law about genocide to say, "It's okay to try to stop this." You have one that says, "No, we pledge to try to stop this." So they came up with this spin that basically spayed the convention, spayed the pledge. That's what it was about.
Characterize the political calculations made by the Clinton administration at the time.
Well, if you think about the political calculus of that moment from the White House's point of view. If they completely did the wrong thing in Rwanda, was there ever going to be a bill to pay for it, politically? Probably not. I think that they recognized that it was unlikely to cost them politically. And even if it would cost them morally, there would be few people around tabulating that cost and reminding them ... they basically figured it wouldn't stick. It didn't matter.
What would be the cost at home?
After Somalia, it's really clear that the Clinton administration was terrified of body bags. What they didn't want was dead American troops on television, in an intervention whose strategic necessity, whose essence to the national security was not obvious. In other words, what they were saying is: "Yeah, there may be a Genocide Convention, but that's not really what we're responding to. That's not what drives us. We have a downside politically, which is the risk of getting drawn into something where we don't even know what we're doing there." ... After Somalia, the Clinton administration's attitude towards international peacekeeping, international interventions, even in much more strategically vital areas of concern (like, say, Central Europe, Bosnia), was strictly "head in the sand" ... The Genocide Convention was not what was motivating [them]. The Genocide Convention was merely a rhetorical problem for them.
It feels like there was a diplomatic equivalent of the Powell doctrine going on: Only go into a situation where you know you can win. Don't take risks, regardless of moral obligation.
Think about it. April 1993, President Clinton standing in front of the Holocaust Museum saying, "This should be insurance against any insanity that lurks ahead." He appears to be making a pledge that we will not stand for such crimes against humanity, such crimes of genocide, to take place on the face of this earth ... at the very least, he seems to be saying that.
A year later, he actually is saying, "We must learn when it's time to say, no." That was the response to Rwanda. Clearly, the pledge to prevent genocide was hollow. What mattered, at this point, was the obvious political calculus of: We don't want to get involved. We don't want to lose people. We don't know what we're going to go in there for--never mind the moral imperative, never mind the shame of humanity, never mind a sense of common humanity. We have political calculations to make. We're not going to risk any lives on that one ... not our problem.
]color=orange]Presidential Directive 25: How did it come to be? Was it in response to Somalia?[/color]
Yes ... after the Somalia debacle, the White House had actually commissioned a policy review. And a document was produced called Presidential Decision Directive 25, which was basically a checklist: These are the things that we should review when we consider intervention. If we encounter any of these factors (and it was a very, very long list of possible political factors), we should not intervene. So it was really a checklist of reasons not to intervene, is essentially what it boiled down to.
This document was sort of in its final draft forms as the Rwandan slaughter began. And it was circulating. People at the U.N. say that Madeline Albright was carrying it around there. It was certainly circulating on Capitol Hill. It was circulating out of the White House. It was the Clinton administration document. And what you hear about that is, the most striking thing in it is that it says, "Not only should we decide when we don't want to intervene, but when we don't, we should exert what pressure we can on others also not to intervene." In other words, "We can't be seen to be sitting it out." This, then, is the closest thing we have to a highly articulated policy position, defining the responses that we saw in the course of Rwanda.
In the administration's view, what did PDD25 represent?
... The administration seems to have looked at Presidential Decision Directive 25 essentially as a template for policy making. They tend these days to downplay its significance. It never became a doctrine, shall we say, of American foreign policy. But it's clearly the backdrop. It's clearly the closest thing we have to a freshly published and clearly articulated policy of non-intervention and obstructing or resisting or pressuring others not to intervene as well.
Madeline Albright explains PDD25 to Congress: "These policies have increased discipline in the Security Council's decision-making procedure. The resolution is driven not by a desire simply to do something, but to do the smart thing," ... What is she trying to say to them?
There was some outrage in Congress about the fact that this mass slaughter by a government of its people was taking place, and that America was caught in the position of doing nothing. So the Clinton administration's job was to try to persuade Congress that, in fact, doing nothing was somehow or other doing the right thing. It's a tough argument to make. Quite often, the language that's used at that time is, "Let's not be emotional. Let's be lucid. Let's be clear. Let's have a policy that's firm and rational. Discipline." Well, it's not clear that this was the smartest thing to have done. It's not clear that it was the stupidest thing to have done. What's clear is that the administration, itself, was deeply conflicted.
And what's striking throughout all of this is how deeply conflicted and defensive the explanations of inaction are. It's not a confident assertion of policy: "The right thing to do is to stay out of this for now." No. What you have is: "We're staying out, but here's why, we're okay, we didn't mean to do any harm. I'm sorry that all these people are being killed, but let's not be too emotional about that." There's a clear sense of shame that presides over this. And that's what's interesting to me. You can have strong strategic arguments about whether or not, in retrospect, it could have been a successful intervention. But what we know now is, it didn't happen. And from the beginning, when it wasn't happening to now, there's an abiding sense of shame.
When she says, "If we do not keep commitments in line with capabilities, we'll only further undermine U.N. credibility and support," what is she saying?
Seems to me that what the administration is trying to say is, "We couldn't do this properly. We couldn't mobilize a substantial enough force, significantly enough to do this properly. And it's better not to." Now, it's important that when there was a call-up for troops, when Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali was then asking member states to volunteer troops, nobody did. And this, to some degree, delighted the Clinton administration because it could at least say, "See? There is no force. It's not like we're resisting a force that exists. We're saying it doesn't exist, so let's not pretend." That's what I think is being said here. But it's also important to remember that there was no eagerness on our part to lead or the assembling of such a force.
Why on May 17th did the Security Council decide to increase the U.N. force?
By May 17th, it was no longer possible to pretend that there wasn't a genocide taking place in Rwanda. There was no getting around it. What was happening with immense speed, on an immense scale, was the slaughter of the Tutsi population of Rwanda, by then, by the hundreds of thousands. It was pretty well understood that at least half a million people had been killed by then. At that point, people began to realize, "We're never going to be able to defend having withdrawn. Maybe we ought to think about going back in. We can't bring back the 500,000 or more dead, but we can at least perhaps attempt to bring an end to this slaughter, and not allow this genocide to be completed." I think it was genuine shame that drove the decision to revisit this.
And shame, of course, tends to have an element behind it, usually in political terms of public pressure. There was press reporting. There were people clucking their tongues in front of their television sets and their radio sets. There were editorials. There were congressmen who were beginning to scratch their heads and say, "What's happening? How are we allowing this to go on?" There was an increasing sense around the world that this would not stand. Why aren't we there?
How did the genocide end?
The genocide was brought to a halt by Rwandans, by the rebel Rwandese Patriotic Front. The world left Rwanda to its genocide. Rwandans committed it, and other Rwandans stopped it. And when the RPF ultimately swept across Rwanda, took control of Kigali, and established a new government in mid-July, the genocidal regime (its military and its militias) took with it large parts of the population who were following it, and led them over the border into exile. As early as late April, 250,000 went over the border into Tanzania. In July, one saw one million and a half going over the border into the Zaire (now the Congo). These were the most rapid mass exoduses in modern history. And essentially what you saw was the establishment of these massive U.N. camps to accommodate these people just across the borders from Rwanda.
But beneath the U.N. flag, what happened was that you really had a rump Rwandan state run by the genocidal military and political apparatus, that had left intact, gone into exile, taken its troops with it, and continued to maintain its claim on political life in Rwanda.
Who was in these camps?
The population in these camps was an incredible mix of innocents and killers. People who were civilians didn't automatically mean that you weren't a killer. Then of course you had the militias, who had blood all over their hands, most of them. And then you had the military. And then you had the political leadership. You had whole villages and civil administrations reproducing themselves. And the camps really replicated the structure of the genocidal state, as well as its composition. So you really had a terrifying reality in these camps.
How did the West respond to the setting up of these camps?
People saw a mass refugee exodus. Suddenly you could get this on TV. They were fleeing across the borders. There was no longer mass killing. It was no longer entirely dangerous. And you had this sense, "Wait. We've been told there was a genocide, and now we're seeing a mass outflow of refugees. Genocide plus refugees must equal refugees from genocide." And one's heart was wrenched.
The reality, of course, was that these were the perpetrators of the genocide and those whom they had cajoled, almost sometimes as hostages, into following them into exile; and that 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.
What is the Western response to the bodies flowing down river?
It became harder and harder for the Clinton administration to maintain its position (a) that this wasn't a genocide, and (b) that the right thing to do was nothing, as images began to appear. There were relatively few because it wasn't a very safe place to operate. But then you had the bodies floating down the rivers.
I remember, I was at the Holocaust Museum in early May of 1995. Happened to be in Washington, visiting the museum. And I bought a local paper, and on the cover was a photograph of these bodies swirling in the river and it said they were victims of the genocide in Rwanda. The word was used there. And meanwhile I'm seeing museum workers going to work with these lapel buttons on that say, "Remember, and never again."
Eventually, the embarrassment of the administration was such that they said, "Well, we are doing something about what's going on in Rwanda." And they announced that they were involved in an international health initiative in Uganda, all the way downstream, where the bodies were flowing. They had started a health initiative to clean the bodies up off the beach. That's what we did.
Why was it easier to respond to the camps than to the genocide itself?
The camps offered an image of Africa and of African conflict that I think is more suitable to the way the administration wanted to see these things, which is suddenly we could say it's a humanitarian crisis. A genocide is a political crime. A civil war is a political conflict. It's actually, there are things being fought over. In a genocide, you actually have a serious crime being committed before you. Here you have a humanitarian crisis, and you can do humanitarian aid and humanitarian intervention, all of which sounds benign. It's non-military. It sounds only like you are helping to save these poor people from themselves. That's essentially what it sounds like. And that appealed tremendously. You could also say, "Look, we're not doing nothing." You can make a gesture of concern without undertaking much risk.
Describe the season of apologies: Annan, Albright, Clinton going to Africa to apologize. What's that about?
It was pretty striking in early '97, when Madeline Albright, now Secretary of State, visited Africa and one of the centerpieces of it--to be issuing what amounted to an apology for the United States' inaction and failure to respond to the Rwandan genocide appropriately, failure to use the word "genocide" to describe what was happening, and then to act accordingly. And also to apologize and to say that it was wrong to have supported humanitarian aid camps that served as bases for the perpetrators, the killers of genocide. And she visited Kigali at that time, and set the tone for the trip that Clinton then took several months later, where he also went to Kigali and issued a real breast-beating apology.
And I think it's easy to say, "Well, that's nice and fine. Sorry about your million dead, but we didn't mean it. We see that we were wrong now." It's easy to basically take a somewhat cynical tone about the whole apology. I think that it was crucial at that point. What's striking are two things. The Clinton administration, at that point, was under no pressure about Rwanda. Nobody was jumping up and down and saying, "This is a terrible shame. You must rectify this blot." It was an initiative they took. It was an initiative that I think was somewhat heartfelt, because I think they recognized that it was a genuine shame on their record. What they did is, they set the record straight. Rwanda is a land where history is still contested. Rwanda is a place with a question of what really happened. Was it a genocide or wasn't it? If the world didn't call it a genocide, that essentially is an advantage for those who committed the crime. So they set the record straight. And in that, in acknowledging their own failure, there was a value.
On the other hand, they promised greater vigilance in the future. President Clinton basically said, "We won't allow such things to happen again. We must never allow such things to happen again, because the more we allow such things to happen again, the more likely they are to happen." I don't think that one can possibly look at that and feel more secure. That promise rings terribly hollow, because the action of not acting when it mattered in 1994, essentially makes those words moot until proper action is taken when it's needed.
Did any of them take personal responsibility?
None of these apologies is particularly personal. None of it is "I was on the watch and I failed." And they tend to say, "We, the world, failed. We, the international community, failed." And I think really what it's a reminder of is that there is no sense of accountability, and through that then, of responsibility that adheres to the so-called international community, or international responses, anyway. Yes, we could have done more. We should have done better. It's a shame, what we didn't do.
What did you think when you heard the apologies?
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. And yet it mattered tremendously, because life goes on. And having one's reality acknowledged, it's never too late.
What does it mean for people to applaud Clinton for simply saying the word "genocide?"
Rwandans recognize that the genocide was the product of a regime of lies, a regime that had presided over the country for 30 years, and in every way had been politically and morally dishonest, deceptive, and false. And that the very fabric of Rwandan reality had been twisted, as one sees in totalitarian orders so often, into a Kafka-y world where things were not called by their proper names. And as a result, Rwandan genocide survivors and Rwandans after the genocide have been really remarkably outspoken in describing their own experience, and in reasserting their history against this regime of lies. To have that acknowledged, to have the president of the most powerful country on earth visit their country and say to them, "At the time, we too participated in the lie that what was happening, wasn't happening; and at least now we will acknowledge that it happened," it gives them a more coherent universe to go forward in.
What did it all mean in the end?
Shortly after World War II, Primo Levi (the great writer who had been in Auschwitz) wrote his book about being in Auschwitz and described how, while they were there, the people in Auschwitz often said, "At least the one thing we can say is, this will never happen to us again." In the late '80s, he wrote an essay in which he said, "The one thing was certain, is that it can happen again, anywhere." I think Rwanda proved him terribly right. And seeing those two quotes next to each other, from the same man, and being reminded how in a sense the wish never to have to be confronted again by such an atrocity and such a crime, that followed the Holocaust, should in fact come at century's end to bring us to a place where it seems increasingly familiar, increasingly within the realm of possibility, and that the pledges to act against it seem increasingly to have been abandoned, I think it really leaves us in a state of great uncertainty. And it calls into question how true our wishes are about a genuinely binding sense of common humanity.
How do you understand it was possible that it happened?
When you go deep into the history of Rwanda, past and present, and you really explore how the society functioned and what was at stake for people, you can begin to understand the mechanisms by which the genocidal state manipulated so much of the population and mobilized it to become murderers. And yet ultimately you can add all those factors up, and it doesn't explain something essential. There's a mystery here that people did this. At the same time, I would go further and I would say: But it happens. We keep seeing that it happens. People will be manipulable in this way. Political power will find ways to harness enough wickedness that we will see these kinds of mass slaughters. We've seen them too often now to pretend that they are anomalous.
How could it have happened? On a certain level, I've always approached the question, how could it have happened, by putting it a little aside and saying: It did. It's the fact from which we begin. It's the fact which makes us look into it. We'll never fully get it unless we ourselves ... accept a genocidal mentality. You can look at its [mechanisms]. You can study it. But why so many people chose to kill their neighbors? It was an utterly gratuitous crime.
What does the Rwandan genocide say to the promise of the Genocide Convention?
Encoded in the Genocide Convention was essentially a promise to the world that the interests of humanity were so great that they should override smaller ideas of national interest, and create an idea of international human community so powerful that one could count on an international response to stop genocide, should it ever begin. That's simply no longer the case. That's been rubbed out. The Clinton administration policy during the Rwandan genocide and since has been to essentially delete the prevention clause, the spirit of action to stop genocide, from the promise that we had after the war. That's a big change. I think that's a very big change. I think it leaves us all less safe.
Relate the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. Is Rwanda the most clear-cut example since WWII?
Since World War II, since the Nazi extermination of European Jewry, Rwanda is the most clear cut, most unambiguous, by the law, definition case of genocide. Genocide by intent, and genocide by reality. What was intended was a genocide. What was achieved was a genocide. ...
What is motivating U.S. policy?
We talk about Rwanda as a failure of US policy: a failure to intervene, a failure to recognize what was going on, and a failure to take action to stop genocide. But if you look at the Clinton administration's approach to it throughout the entire period, what you really see is that it was actually a success of a policy not to intervene. It wasn't a failure to act. The decision was not to act. And at that, we succeeded greatly. It may sound cynical. It may sound sarcastic to say that. But it actually is important to understand this, because not acting was the policy. It wasn't a inadvertent thing. We didn't want to. We did what we didn't want to do. And we then end up in a world where it's clear that what matters is not some consistent policy, "Oh yes, faced with genocide, we will take action," but, "Oh no, we are in a position to say we don't want to, and to refuse." And that's how policy is going to be made.
Is there a lesson or something to be said about going from the promise of the Genocide Convention to the pragmatism of our policy in Rwanda?
In December of 1998, we had the 50th anniversary of the Genocide Convention. And there were a lot of commemorative events, anniversary events that basically talked about : Where does it stand now? It didn't seem to me that it was really an occasion for a 50th birthday party. It seemed to me more of an occasion for an obituary and a wake, because the lesson the Rwanda leaves us with is that at least the part of the Genocide Convention that seemed to promise that the world was going to put its common humanity above all, and stand at least for stopping genocide when an unambiguous case of it appeared, had proven-- it was ... stricken from the document. It was stricken from the record. It was stricken from the international code. And that what we're left with is the idea of "never again." It may be a true wish, but it's a false promise. |
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/front...gourevitch.html
___________________
|
Rwanda-1994, 800,000 killed. Why/how did this happend?
oh, and opus!
