Letter to the Globe and Mail about the Rwandan Genocide (Summer, 2000)
Your editorial on Rwanda's genocide ("Whose Genocide was it?" overlooks several pertinent facts about the international response. The piece draws heavily on a distinction between bystanders and perpetrators of the genocide and leans heavily on it in apportioning blame. It is true, of course, that the Hutu Power groups who carried out the massacres are the most obviously, and most deeply, culpable actors in the genocide. But in apportioning blame it is also important that the U.S. and France, among many other countries, are signatories of the 1948 'Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,' the terms of which oblige the contracting parties "to undertake to prevent and to punish" any attempt to destroy an ethnic group, such as the Tutsis. The reluctance on the part of the U.S. in particular to use the word 'genocide' stemmed from a clear-headed recognition that honestly describing events would oblige them to intervene under the terms of the Convention. The international community was composed not merely of spectators, but rather of spectators who had long ago bound themselves to intervene in precisely the circumstances which transpired in Rwanda.
The line between sins of omission and those of commission drawn by your argument is further blurred by the fact that the U.S., in particular, sought to undermine any effort by others to intervene in events as they unfolded. France also played a particularly ignoble role in defending its own sphere of influence in the region. The diplomatic response to events was energetic in its own way, as various actors on the security council strove to keep any military response to a minimum. Is it a sin of omission or one of commission to dramatically cut the number of U.N. observers in Rwanda immediately prior to the killings?
Finally, you argue that if outside forces had in fact intervened and prevented the genocide, it would have been regarded as the worst sort of neocolonialism by Rwandans themselves and as too steep a price by the parents of killed Western troops. I cannot speak for the parents of the hypothetical dead, but the testimony of soldiers who were present as events unfolded, and who were prevented by their superiors from acting, suggests that many thought the risks worth taking. Romeo Dallaire is indeed a haunted man now, but it is not because he has since come to appreciate the danger he was in.
As for the citizens of Rwanda, the genocide was preceded by a period of fierce rhetoric in their media and on their radios which foretold events in no uncertain terms. So it is hardly likely that Tutsis or moderate Hutus would have objected to an outside intervention at the outset of the killings. But the deeper flaw in your argument is the assumption that an outside force would have intervened at the outset of the slaughter, or not at all. If in fact we need a threshold of actual massacre to be convinced that a genocide is occurring, 800 000 dead still seems too high. After the first 200 000 people are hacked to death by machete, may we not credibly intervene?
Chris Young
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