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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 August 2000 Issue No. 494 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 August 2000 Issue No. 494
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Books Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons 'The world stood by and did nothing'
By Faiza Rady"In memory of the hundreds of thousands of innocent victims of the genocide, we have chosen to call our report Rwanda: The preventable genocide." (The International Panel of Eminent Personalities appointed by the Organisation of African Unity to investigate the 1994 genocide in Rwanda).
In the aftermath of World War II and following revelations of the Nazi genocide of six million Jews, the international community -- represented by the then newly-founded United Nations -- solemnly vowed that they would "never again" stand on the sidelines and allow a reoccurrence of genocide. "Never again," however, proved to be short-lived -- a hollow slogan reverberating across UN convention halls and, at times, mass media headlines.
As the killing fields of the South continued to flourish with impunity over the decades, millions of civilians lost their lives -- while the community of nations represented by the UN stood back and watched (witness the slaughter of more than one million communists by the US--backed Indonesian dictator Suharto in 1965). It appears that nothing much has effectively changed since the days of the Nazi Holocaust. The 1994 genocide in Rwanda provided a poignant testimony to the world's indifference, lurking beneath the surface of politically expedient rhetoric.
The Rwandan tragedy briefly resurfaced in the world news headlines in July, when the International Panel of Eminent Personalities (IPEP), an investigating team commissioned by the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and headed by former Botswana President Sir Ketumile Masire, published their findings on the genocide. Asserting in the strongest terms that the relevant facts about the carefully planned and systematically organised extermination of the ethnic minority, the Tutsi, by the ruling Hutu majority had been fully disclosed over the 1990-94 period preceding the full-blown genocide, the IPEP report holds the international community responsible for allowing the genocide to occur: "There can be not an iota of doubt that the international community knew the following: that something terrible was underway in Rwanda, that serious plans were afoot for even more appalling deeds, that these went far beyond routine thuggery, and that the world nevertheless stood by and did nothing," states the IPEP report, concluding after a two-year investigation that the genocide could have been averted.
"Indisputably," the report continues, "the most important truth that emerges from our investigation is that the Rwandan genocide could have been prevented by those in the international community who had the position and the means to do so. But though they had the means, they lacked the will." The report accuses the world at large, but singles out France, Belgium, the US, the UN, the OAU and the Catholic and Anglican church hierarchies for having failed the Rwandan people.
The report details the abundant information available about government-sponsored Hutu attacks against the Tutsi community in Rwanda. The terror first started after the Uganda-based Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) invaded Rwanda in October 1990. The RPF was established to struggle for the Tutsi's right to return after a Hutu terror campaign forced them into exile between 1959 and 1967.
Denunciations of the gross human rights violations and state-initiated massacres in the 1990-94 period came from groups like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Africa Watch; the mainstream international press including the French daily Le Monde, the American daily The New York Times, the Belgian paper De Standaard; and even the US State Department(see box below). In a report entitled "Leave none to tell the story," Human Rights Watch documents some 30 pages of early warning signs from the five months preceding the explosion on 6 April 1994 of the Rwandan genocide.
In October 1992, De Standard exposed the existence of Hutu death squads and reported bloody killing sprees. Prominent among the murderous militias were the sinister Interahamwe, who grew out of the youth wing of President Juvenal Habyarimana's ruling Le Mouvement Républicain National pour la Démocratie et le Développement (MRNDN). Another Hutu party, the extremist Coalition pour la Défense de la République (CDR), split from the ruling MRNDN -- perhaps with the connivance of Habyarimana and his clique -- to establish a political platform exclusively promoting what came to be known as "Hutu power."
Rwandan refugees and their children fleeing into Zaire in July 1994
(photo: photonews/Gamma)
Established as an appendage to the newly-formed CDR and lending its voice to amplify the creeping hate rhetoric, a private radio station calling itself Radio-Télévision libre des mille collines (RTLM) advocated an escalation of ethnic cleansing. Set up in July 1993 by Félicien Kabuga, a wealthy business man and Habyarimana's in-law, RTLM also went by the name Radio machete because it called on all patriotic Hutu to defend their country against the enemy from "within" and to "kill everybody, even the children" with the deadly weapon that became the symbol of the Rwandan genocide. When the killing began on 6 April, broadcasters urged the killers to "work harder" to ensure that the prepared mass graves would be filled with corpses. Lamentably, during the station's year on the air, none of the Security Council members objected or intervened.
French President François Mitterand's administration ignored the mounting evidence while it continued to supply the Rwandan Armed Forces (RAF) with arms actively used in "ethnic cleansing" operations. During the war, Rwanda had become a major buyer of French arms -- among African countries it ranked fourth in purchases. A Francophone country, Rwanda was a client state belonging to France's zone of influence in Africa. National reconciliation and power-sharing between the Hutu and the Tutsi, as prescribed by the 1993 Arusha Accords which established a cease-fire between the RAF and the RPF could potentially have altered this clientele relationship. Miterrand, however, feared the loss of Rwandan business to the "Anglo-Saxons"(Americans) because of the Tutsi ties with Uganda, a US client state. As a result, France viewed the Tutsi as a threat and conveniently overlooked "Hutu power."
Paralleling the widespread, racist media campaign, Habyarimana's ruling MRND and its CDR affiliate worked overtime to set up the infrastructure for genocide. The CDR organised their own murderous militia, the infamous Impuzamugambi; the RAF worked with a shadowy para-military gang, the Akazu; and the secret service managed the "zero network," death squads that included both civilian and military assassins. The existence of the death squads in Rwanda posed no visible moral dilemma to the Clinton administration. Despite a US State Department report on death squad operations in February 1994, the US still refused to denounce the Habyarimana regime.
While various death squads built links and coordinated their "work" with each other, they received a seemingly unending supply of weapons from the army, whose operations were generously financed by the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Like the major powers, the loan agencies had sufficient information about the ongoing slaughters. "The military built-up leading to the genocide was financed by foreign debt with the full knowledge of the World Bank and the IMF," states the report.
Despite indisputable evidence of ongoing ethnic cleansing, member nations of the UN Security Council -- France and the US in particular -- insisted that the massacres of the Tutsi were part of another inopportune civil war in Africa and continued to deny the fact that genocide was in the making. Yet, time and again state-sponsored "Hutu power" clearly expressed its intention to exterminate all Tutsi, specifically women and children so as to eradicate future generations. State terrorism in Rwanda had all the characteristics that distinguish genocide from ordinary terror or mass murder, argues the report, defining the violence as "deliberate, planned, organised, sophisticated and coordinated...The instigators of genocide had at their disposal control of the levers of government, highly motivated soldiers and militia, the means to kill vast numbers of people and tight control of the media," explains the report.
If the signals were so clear, what then motivated northern countries to dismiss all evidence signaling that genocide was in the making over the 1990-94 period? And worse yet, what motivated them to persist in their refusal to acknowledge that full-fledged genocide was taking place beginning in April 1994, and during many of the 100 days that followed?
Not only did France and the US consistently refuse to define the genocide as such at the Security Council, but they also blocked all attempts to grant UNAMIR, the UN peace-keeping mission in Rwanda, the mandate to intervene and save civilian lives -- with one notable exception. UNAMIR was allowed to use force in order to guarantee and safeguard the evacuation of all foreign mission personnel from Rwanda after 6 April. Adding insult to injury, Madeleine Albright -- then US ambassador to the UN -- succeeded in reducing UNAMIR forces to the token level of 270 people and restricted its mandate to one for "mediation" and "humanitarian aid." While thousands of Rwandans were being daily massacred, Albright, suggested that a "small, skeletal operation be left in Kigali to show the will of the international community."
Judging from the evidence, the report concludes that Rwandan lives were not worth much to Security Council members. In the words of one analyst: "Rwanda was marginal to any apparent economic or political concerns known to anyone but the French. If Egypt or Pakistan collapses, it would be a catastrophe. But Rwanda can be dispensed with."
A poor, marginal and politically insignificant African country, Rwanda's tragedy was ignored then -- as it probably would be ignored now. "Anybody who believes the words 'never again' is deluding themselves dangerously about future holocausts," said writer Philip Gourevitch, whose 1996 book We Regret to Inform You That Tomorrow You Will Be Killed With Your Families chronicled events leading up to and surrounding the genocide in Rwanda.
But perhaps nobody expressed the Northern powers' lethal indifference in more chilling terms than US Republican presidential candidate George W Bush. When asked if he would commit US troops to another Rwanda. Bush replied : "We should not send our troops to stop ethnic cleansing and genocide outside our strategic interests. I would not send the United States troops into Rwanda."
Related stories:
The bitter fruits of colonialism
Rwanda: what the world knew
