Guest Commentary: Remember Rwanda 4/07/04

I viewed a documentary on the 1994 Rwandan genocide recently that filmed an ordinary Hutu male hacking almost lethargically downward into the body of a Tutsi with his machete, which was blackened by dried blood. Why it seemed lethargic to me is pretty clear in retrospect. Because that one Hutu male had probably butchered hundreds of Tutsis in less than 100 days from April 7 to mid-June in 1994. This genocide happened only ten years ago today.

  The Hutu's casual motions made this brutal act seem almost boring or common-place, which is really the disturbing part. Indiscriminate murder had become commonplace in Rwanda in 1994, and even in the decades prior to the 1994 genocide as well. Approximately 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered in a mere three months in the spring and early summer of that year, while the rest of the world stood by and brazenly shut their eyes to unconscionable mass murder on a truly epic scale. A concerted, international effort was not even made to investigate the situation fully until the genocide, launched by key figures in the Hutu-dominated government after the Rwandan and Burundi president were killed in a plane crash (their plane had been shot down), was smoothly underway.

  The western world understood perfectly the horrific bloodshed that occurs during large-scale outbreaks of ethnic violence, yet the respective governments--namely the United States, Great Britain, Belgium and France--simply leaned back in their rocking chairs and blissfully ignored the desperate pleas of Tutsi villagers to Belgian UN peacekeepers, who were ordered by the Belgian government and the UN to abandon whole villages of unarmed, innocent Tutsis to their brutal end at the hands of machete-wielding Hutus, roaming the Rwandan streets in a drug-induced, bloodthirsty frenzy, like a scene from the most repugnant horror movie you've ever seen. The following is an account of the genocide from a Tutsi child survivor named Jean Boscoe:

  "We were a large family at home; my immediate family and some relatives. When the genocide started, I was only six years old. The killers came and first killed my parents and an uncle. Another uncle of mine threw me over the hedge into the neighbor's yard and that is how I survived the first encounter with the killers. I heard my parents scream as they were hacked down with machetes and small hoes commonly known as 'udufuni.' Someone told my maternal grandmother that I was alive and she came... . She had no other family since everyone in her family had been killed in the genocide."

  Murder on this scale is incomprehensible to most, especially after the example of the Holocaust. Does it take three strokes or four strokes with a blood-soaked machete to kill a human being? One kill, then a second and a third and a hundredth, and on, and on, and on? Three seconds per stroke, then three months of ubiquitous, ceaseless slaughter? One inevitably asks WHY so many people found it so easy to murder so many others. It's not easy for most people to think about murdering anybody, let alone hundreds of people.

  Indeed, the mass murder in Rwanda seems particularly heinous to those who lack awareness of the underlying ethnic hatred, which the Hutu-dominated government used to provoke the genocide. This ethnic hatred, which pitted the majority Hutu tribe in Rwanda against the minority Tutsi tribe, was planted and sown by the Belgian colonial government during its occupation from 1916 until 1961 for its own advantage. When the Belgians pulled out in 1962, they left nothing but a legacy of hatred between Tutsis and Hutus. Worried constantly that the Tutsis were planning a hostile government takeover, Hutu leaders pursued a policy of social and political discrimination against the Tutsis after the Belgians departed, limiting their access to education and government through the implementation of strict ethnic quotas. Finally, in 1994, the dominant Hutu leaders determined to retain government control once and for all: by systematically exterminating the entire Tutsi minority.

  The efficiency and organization of largely uneducated Hutus was stunning in its horror and unparalleled in its execution. Millions of machetes and clubs--toss in some grenades and bullets donated by the French--wielded by two million Hutus bent on Tutsi slaughter, is a situation that many believed could never happen again after the horror of the Holocaust. During the initial UN sessions in 1945 after the conclusion of World War II, government leaders vowed that genocide would never happen again if their respective countries could possibly prevent it. But it did happen again, almost fifty years later! And the fact of the matter is, it can still happen today!

  Yet blaming western government leaders, such as the Belgians or the French, for the Rwandan genocide does nothing positive for the cause of preventing genocide in the future. Although Rwanda turned into a killing field faster than Nazi Germany in its Holocaust hey-day, the Kosovo intervention in 1999 and the Sierra Leone intervention, which culminated in July of 1999 with the signing of the Lomé Peace Agreement, have demonstrated that western governments are much more prepared to address intra-state conflict than they were in 1994. However, international efforts at curbing violent intra-state conflict still have much room for improvement in, and among other things, both response time and coordination of efforts between the actors involved. So what can we do, as students, to prevent genocide from occurring again? Well, for starters, come to the Rwandan genocide memorial today at 1 p.m., which will take place on the Chapel Quad. Awareness of what's going on in countries like Rwanda is a crucial starting point for taking action. Involvement in a human rights organization, such as Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch, could be a second step. vThese organizations monitor human rights in poor countries which lack a government unable or unwilling to enforce human rights protection for its citizens. Substantive action may involve simply writing a letter to a government violating human rights or telling others about genocide and what happened in Rwanda. Genocide can be prevented in the future, but people must know about it--and really grasp its true horror--before we can begin to feel safe from the possibility of genocide happening once again.