Never again?

As I walked behind the church, I heard a crunch beneath my feet. When I looked down, I was standing on a human vertebra.

Inside, the rubble strewn floor of the church just outside of Kigali, Rwanda was a grizzly tapestry of bones, smashed skulls and shredded clothing. Some of the machetes used to hack limbs and heads off of the nearly one million Tutsis murdered during the 1994 Rwandan genocide by the "Hutu Power" still remained. I felt sick.

"When they said 'never again' after the Holocaust, was it meant for some people and not for others?" asked Apollon Kabahizi during the Rwandan genocide. I wondered the same thing.

Last March I visited Auschwitz, a major Nazi extermination camp during the Holocaust. From 1939 to 1945, the Nazis destroyed eleven million Jews and other minorities. As bitter winds blew through the snow-covered camps and filled the cavernous gas chambers, I shuddered. How could humans do this to each other?

But World War II was long ago. After the war, the whole world said, "Never again." I took comfort in thinking that nothing so horrible could happen again.

Then in June I visited the infamous Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. Two million Cambodians perished from 1975 to 1979. Today cows calmly graze around the small signs emblazoned "mass grave," but each rain brings new fragments of bones and clothing to the surface.

More than one quarter of Cambodia's population was wiped out, but I was ashamed of how little of this history I had known. What had happened to the fervent cries of "Never again?"

And now here I was in Rwanda, staring at the mass graves of people killed during my lifetime. Once again, it had happened. Our promises had been completely meaningless. In the 100 days of killing, the outside world knew exactly what was going on and did almost nothing.

But perhaps more importantly, genocide can be stopped long before the killing begins. Genocide is never a surprise. Exterminating whole races requires careful, extensive planning, mobilization and organization. There are always warning signs; that is when the world can stop extremist forces from ever gaining the power and control to unleash such evil.

Further, how do such inhuman regimes ever gain power in the first place? In Germany, Cambodia and Rwanda, extremists exploited tremendous economic inequality, convincing entirely sane populations that their only way out of desperate poverty was mass murder. Normal people were convinced that only killing could lead to empowerment.

The developed world is donating billions of dollars a year to struggling, unstable nations all over the world. Where is this money going? Is it being distributed equitably to improve the lives of the poorest of the poor, or is it lining the pockets of a tiny wealthy elite? What is being done to make sure everyone has a voice in government and that those in power serve their entire constituency?

Unless we address these structural inequities, forget about "Never Again." It sounds nice, but genocide has happened again and again and it will continue to occur.

The United States is doing a lot of posturing in Sudan, but there has been no decisive action, forceful or otherwise, to stop the killings. Stand up and demand action-this can change.

But it is not just about the killing. If nothing is done to challenge the unjust political and economic structures that precipitate genocide, further violence is inevitable. A band-aid cannot stop massive hemorrhaging. We must look deeper to stop the problem before it starts.

If we do not, the next mass graves will be on our watch.

David Fiocco is a Trinity junior and is studying abroad in Uganda this semester. His column normally runs every other Tuesday.