Citation
REVIEW ARTICLE
Rwanda revisited: in search for
lessons
HOWARD ADELMAN
DesForges, Alison. Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human
Rights Warch, 1999).789 pp, $35.00, paperback.
Gourevitch, Philip. We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with all our
families: storiesfrom Rwanda (New York: Farar Straus and Giroux, 1998).353 pp, $25.00,
hardback; $15.00, paperback.
Joseph, Richard, ed. State, Conflict, and Democracy in Africa (Boulder, CO: Lynne
Rienner Publishers, 1999). 525 pp, $65.00, hardback; $23.50, paperback.
Klinghoffer, Arthur Jay. The International Dimension of Genocide in Rwanda (New York:
New York University Press, 1998). 219 pp, $40.00, hardback.
Leyton, Elliott with photographs by Greg Locke. Touched by Fire: Doctors Withnut
Borders in a Third Worl"d Crisis (Toronto: Mclelland & Stewart, 1998). 212 pp, $29.99,
hardback.
Moore, Jonathan, ed. Hard Choices: Moral Dilemmas in Humanitarian Intervention
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1998). 315 pp, $65.00, hardback;
$24.95, paperback.
Uvin, Peter. Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwqnda (West Hartford, CT:
Kumarian Press, 1998). 273 pp, $59.00, hardback; $24.95, paperback.
Weiss, Thomas G. Military-Civilian Interactions: Intervening in Humanitarian Crises
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1999). 779 pp, $55.00, hardback;
$18.95, paperback.
In
1994, between April 6 and mid-July, a period of 99 days of mayhem,
approximately 500,000-800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu were slaughtered in
Rwanda in a systematically planned genocide. (Alison des Forges, who provides
the only analysis of numbers, suggests a figure of 507,000. Surprisingly, she
does not take into consideration the counts based on bodies found in burial sites
and estimates of corpses that were thrown into Lake Victoria. The latter
produces a much higher total.) Like the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews, this
genocide was a highly organized and cenfrally directed one. As indicated in the
famous January 11, 1994 cable that the UN Force Commander in the field,
General Romeo Dallaire, sent to UN headquarters four months before the
genocide began in earnest, the genocidists, based on their practice runs, calculated that they could kill 1,000 every twenty minutes. This was the only
genocide since the Holocaust that had occurred on such a scale. But it took place
over three months and not three-and-a-half to four years. Largely executed with
machetes, it was a low-tech affair, not a highly industrialized operation. Further,
there was plenty of information in advance that the genocide was being planned.
What most stands out, however, is that the genocide took place in a poor small
counffy with a United Nations (UN) military force present. That peace force
continued to control the airport in the Rwanda capital of Kigali throughout the
civil war, a war that served as a semi-cover for the genocide.
Why had the genocide occurred? Why had it not been prevented? Why, once
it started, had it not been mitigated? What roll did the outside "good guys" play
in preventing, mitigating or, perhaps, even facilitating the genocide?
These are major questions lurking behind the spate of recent books on the
Rwandan genocide. The UN was created after World War II, in part at least, to
prevent genocides. This was the most easily preventable genocide one can
imagine. There was advance notice. The UN was in military conffol of the key
center-the airport. International law sanctioned intervention in the case of
genocide and, in any case, the UN had already been given a mandate to protect
civilians in Rwanda. Finally, those organizing the genocide were only a relatively small group, at most 400 people in the extended extremist high command.
Those executing the genocide were poorly equipped. General Dallaire, in an
interview with me, suggested that a well-equipped company with armored
personnel carriers and helicopters could have stopped virtually the whole
slaughter if the intervention had occurred at the right point. And even once the
genocide started, a well-equipped military battalion could have done the job.
Why did we stand by and do so little to stop or even mitigate the genocide?
Why did the genocide occur in the first place? Can we learn anything from the
Rwanda slaughter that can advance our knowledge of why genocides take place?
If so, perhaps then future ones can be anticipated and then prevented.
The UN sent troops in July 1994 to protect and save the refugees (including
many of the genocidists) who fled Rwanda when the Hutu extremists were
defeated by the Tutsi-led Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF). When the UN-sanctioned French troops of Op6ration Turquoise landed in June on only several days
notice, it was ten weeks after the genocide had started and after it had almost run
its course. Why had troops not been sent earlier to stop and hamper the
genocide?
One explanation is that we are morally at war ourselves. On one side stand the
morally righteous humanitarians who help refugees but have no control of
military forces. They berate the political powers for failing to do their duty. On
the other side stand the political realists who work for states that confrol military
forces and frequently argue that the only reason intervention is warranted is if
self-interests and/or the balance of power are affected. In fact, the realists often
argue that intervention is part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
There are, of course, philosophers like Michael Walzer (1996) who claim that
the above two options pose a false dichotomy. What is needed is a principled
conception of politics and an application of principle to crises that takes politics
fully into account. Elsewhere, I have dubbed that approach as humanitarian
realism. The "thin" universal morality that unites all humanity has to be
combined with the o'thick" history and culture particular to the various peoples,
including ourselves, that populate this globe and which nations stand ready to
defend. [See Michael Walzer's (1996) Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home
and Abroad.lThe application of such a moral outlook is particularly acute when
it comes to Rwanda, for the Tutsi and the Hutu practice the same religions, have
the same culture, speak the same language and, with the exception of some
members of each group, most are physically indistinguishable. The conflict
between the exffemist Hutu and the rest of the Rwandan population was over the
"thin" morality which supposedly unites all humanity rather than over the
"thick" cultural differences which divide peoples. On the level of "truth" and
'Justice" minimally understoodo most people in Rwanda and in the West shared
the same values. However, on the level of "thick" morality, Rwanda was not a
place where one could find a "refurn of the tribes," an assertion of particular
ethnic, religious and national identity that has become so much a sign of our
times.
However, "the return of the tribes" was the lens through which most of the
media misread the conflict in Rwanda. There was no intractable differences
between the Hutu and Tutsi. Yet this was the context where such a horrific and
preventable genocide took place. The conflict was not between those with
different "thick cultures." On one side stood a small determined group manipulating identities without even significant cultural differences in the name of what
Professor Melissa Orlie (1997) of the University of Illinois has called "unmixed
difference" or "the desire for purity." On the other side of the "thin red line"
stood the rest of us who recognize that purity is a delusion inappropriately
applied from physical hygiene to issues of identity.
Though one might expect a wide variety of interpretations, the books discussed in this essay offer variations on only a few explanations to account for
both the genocide and the failure to intervene in a timely and effective fashion.
One answer is moral bankruptcy. It is taken as self-evident that the genocidists
were morally bankrupt. One does not expect to read that the organization that led
the intervention and its members are also morally bankrupt. But this is precisely
the charge laid by the Canadian Force Commander of the peacekeepers in
Rwanda. General Romeo Dallaire, in his essay, "The End of Innocence: Rwanda
1994" in the Moore collection, saw himself and his UNAMIR forces as
"attempting to balance moral concerns with practical considerations" in the
Walzer spirit (p 85).
The sovereign states who are members of the UN, on the other hand, not only
abandoned the Rwandese, but even abandoned its own emasculated UN forces
to face the tragedy without a mandate, without military equipment to defend
themselves (let alone the Tutsi being slaughtered) and without supplies. The
survival rations were roffen and inedible. What is Dallaire's explanation? The
states suffered from an "inexcusable apathy," "inexcusable by any human
criteria" and "completely beyond comprehension and moral acceptability" (in
Moore, 1998, p 79). In other words, the depth of moral depravity was more in
evidence and more incomprehensible when the freatment of their own troops was
put under the microscope, for even self-interest was not in play. This was already
evident in the radical difference between the complex and desperately critical
crisis that the froops were asked to deal with and the totally inadequate resources
that they were given to accomplish their task. It was also evident in the fact that
"70 percent of my and my principal staff's time was dedicated to an administrative battle with the U.N.'s somewhat constipated logistic and administrative
structure" than with the crisis they were sent over to address (in Moore, 1998,
p 73). Dallaire does not detail that logistic nightmare in his essay, but one
example should suffice. The troops were sent over and never received a budget
to cover expenditures until six months after they were sent and only two days
before the genocide exploded.
Apathy that is morally and cognitively incomprehensible is one interpretation
of the moral failure of the West and the international agency that is supposed to
embody our highest values-the UN. Tom Longman ("State, Civil Society &
Genocide in Rwanda" in the Joseph collection) has a different explanation. It
was not apathy and moral indifference in not stopping the genocide but the
involvement of Western states in building state power that carried out the
genocide. The West allowed the growth of a militant opposition to seize state
power at the expense of the civil society. In his book We wish to inform you that
tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwand.a, Gourevitch
holds the same view. He argues that the genocide was not the result of the chaos
of a collapsed state, but rather that it was the result of the exact oppositemeticulous adminisffation and planning. Not apathy, but a sfrong and activist
state structure without a counterbalancing civil society, all reinforced by Western
economic support-these were the conditions that fertilized the ground for the
genocide.
Like virtually all the scholars who have studied the Rwandan
genocide,
Longman observed that the problem was not the result of a release of primordial
tribal divisions as a result of a failed or weakened state. Rather, "the genocide
was orgaruzed by state officials and their allies and was carried out using the
instruments of the state" (in Joseph , L999, p 353). The West with their support
of the Habyarimana regime made possible the increased coercive capacity of the
state. And the civil war was not only the cover for the genocide. The civil war
allowed the regime to expand its weaponry and military personnel, to monitor
and more effectively control the population and to organize and carry out
criminal violence with rhetorical resources. (Presumably, this refers to Radio
Milles Collines and the variety of extremist newspapers that led the racist
propaganda campaign against the Tutsi.) The logistics were, in effect, supplied
by Western support. In initiating the civil war, the Rwandese Patriotic Front
(RPF) bears some of the responsibility for the genocide in Longman's view,
particularly since, without the war, Longman believes that Rwanda was headed
towards increased democratization. But that does not mean that demoqatizatton
would have included the repatriation of the refugees who initiated the war.
Peter Uvin (Aidinq Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda,) shares
Longman's view on the role of the West in creating what he dubs "structural
violence." Most of the book is spent documenting that sffuctural violence in
confrast to the image of Rwanda perpeffated by the aid agencies as the ideal
recipient of aid until the late 1980s. Rwanda had been portrayed, certainly by the
Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), as the best user of aid (for
example, relatively little of the Rwandan state funds went to the military) until
the crash of coffee prices in the late 1980s. Gourevitch puts the case succinctly.
In the 1980s,
Rwanda was tranquil-or, like the volcanoes in the northwest, dormant; it had nice roads,
high church attendance, low crime rates and steadily improving standards of public health
and education [though Uvin claims
it
was very unevenly distributed].
If
you were
a
bureaucrat with a foreign-aid budget to unload, and your professional success was to be
measured by your ability not to lie or gloss too much when you filed happy statistical
reports at the end of each fiscal year, Rwanda was the ticket. (p 76)
In the Galtung ffadition, structural violence entails conditions which offer
radically different life chances to different groups because of great inequality,
injustice, discrimination, and exclusion which negatively affect a person's
physical, social and psychological well-being. Those in charge of or attached to
the state sector enjoyed enorrnous privileges. Most of the population were poor,
suffering economic and social exclusion. They lacked information, education, or
access to health services and other basic needs in spite of the macro-indicators
that registered economic growth in the 1980s. Structural violence results in
frustration, anger, ignorance, despair and cynicism because the images of the
good life turn the poor into self-haters without self-respect so they become
vulnerable to manipulation and simplistic ideas. The civil society committed to
moderation, pluralism and tolerance was weak. At the same time, development
aid strengthened the state sector without any effective or persistent countervailing political conditionality placed on that aid or sufficient counterbalancing
efforts to reinforce the civil society or, in the end, adequate provision from the
donor countries for its peacekeepers. In any case that is the argument.
Uvin unites the thesis of Dallaire and Longman, but treats their observations
as symptoms of a deeper problem. On the one hand, the wealthy countries did
not provide either a mandate or sufficient resources to intervene effectively in
the genocide. On the other hand, aid was part of the process creating the
conditions for sfructural violence when that same aid could have been used to
prevent its possibility or to counteract its effectiveness once it became immanent.
As Uvin documents, when conditionality was placed on aid, the Rwandan
government did temporarily change its behavior. Rather than apathy among
donor states, the issue then is one of misplaced support to those who were
themselves under threat of losing their power and privileges and susceptible to
employing scapegoating strategies to deal with stress and lack of self-esteem.
When combined with a lack of external consffaints, a recipe for disaster had
been created.
Thomas Weiss (Military-Civilian Interactions : Intervening in Humanitarian
Crises) largely accepts the Uvin thesis and reinforces it by recalling the earlier
colonial efforts that reified differences between Tutsi and Hutu and created the
basis for the construction of rigid ethnic divisions. Further, Weiss documents the
huge expenditures in aid following the genocide. This economic support stands
in such sharp confrast to the meager effort provided to the peacekeepers and the
misdirected aid prior to the outbreak of civil war. For Weiss, the problem was
not apathy or even a misdirected aid ideology, though the latter sewed the
conditions for the civil war and the ethnic scapegoating. Rather, the focus is on
the peacekeeping and its failure when the warnings of genocide were present or
even once the genocide had commenced. According to Weiss, the tardiness and
meagerness in responding is rooted in domestic pottics: "Allocating and
disbursing billions of dollars of humanitarian aid after violence has erupted is
easier for risk-averse politicians and policymakers than moving precipitously to
commit armed forces early in a conflict cycle" (p 204).
Elliott Leyton (Touched by Fire: Doctors Without Borders in a Third World
Crisis) also accepts the thesis that genocide is the use of violence by those who
hold power in a modern state to "galvanize its citizens, divert public attention
from the regime's defects, steal the victim's wealth and stafus, and terrorize the
survivors into submission" (p 8). Leyton's book begins where most of the others
left off-the mass return of the refugees from Zaire in 1996 when they are freed
from the clutches of their oppressors-the genocidists-by the Rwandan-backed
rebellion in Zatre. The book includes pictures of the skeletal remains of the
genocide in the Nyarama church. States seemed so unwilling to risk the lives of
armed soldiers to prevent or mitigate the genocide. Leyton's book is a personal
account of doctors and medical personnel of Medecins Sans Frontidres (MSF)
[Doctors Without Borders] who voluntarily accept risks to their health and
well-being, and sometimes their lives. Leyton does not porffay them as heroes
but as individuals motivated by relatively mundane reasons. They needed jobs.
They were bored with just dispensing pills to the secure and overfed. They liked
adventure. According to Martin, a Canadian ten-year veteran of MSF, MSF's
historic and ethical responsibility "is first to bear witness to these genocides and
famines for the world, then to help, and finally to assess more efficient ways of
getting aid to the suffering" (Leyton, 1998,p 51).
Though the book appears to include nothing about prevention and concentrates on the issues of documenting, helping and providing humanitarian assistance, in fact, Martin accepts the Galtung/Uvin thesis that humans deprived of
needs and dignity bear grudges and are bent on revenge. MSF tries to reduce the
need for vengeance. Though of various backgrounds and skills, and pushed by
a variety of different motives, what seems to unite MSFers is that they are free
spirits, impatient with bureaucracies as they build their own in order to be
effective. As Leyton observes, "MSF is hierarchical" and is "run along military
lines" in spite of the sincere effort to be consensual and participatory (p 136).
Repelled by the impersonalism of modernity, for Leyton, MSF volunteers are
searching for disalienation
:
Membership [in MSF] liberates them as human beings, allows them to explore fully their
potential as they seize the opportunity to act. With that liberation comes a profound
conviction of purity of what they do, of the moral superiority of their agency and
themselves-a belief so powerful, a satisfaction so intense, that it sustains them through
whatever they must do. To witness atrocity and fear, to teat vile diseases, to heal terrible
wounds, to dig the latrine or deliver clean water are all part of a process in which they
confront reality and construct their identities. In acting thus with such purpose and moral
clarity, all other dilemmas dissolve. To act without ambivalence or regret, to cut through
the mindlessness of conventional life. to revel in what one does is for them the onlv wav
to become whole. (p 72)
As distasteful as I found the idea, I could not help reading this and thinking
about the search for purity and meaningfulness of the genocidists. They, too, had
a sense of moral superiority and were willing to take great risks and face
atrocities-ones they, of course, committed, however. They too had a sense of
purpose and moral clarity in their own terms. But the MSFers were dedicated to
doing god, mending the world, while the genocidists were intent on committing
evil and destroying others. What line differentiated the two groups? What unites
them?
Gourevitch has an answer. Or, at least, the Hufu, Paul, has one, and his
explanation reads as if Gourevitch endorses it. The genocidal leadership understood that in order to move a huge number of weak people to do wrong, it is
necessary to appeal to their desire for sffength-and the gray force that really
drives people is power. Hatred and power are both, in their different ways,
passions. The difference is that hatred is purely negative, while power is
essentially positive; you surrender to hatred, but you aspire to power. In Rwanda,
the orgy of misbegotten power that led to the genocide was carried out in the
name of Hutuness, and when Paul, a Hutu, set out to defy the killers, he did so
by appealing to their passion for power: " 'they' were the ones who had chosen
to take life away and he grasped that that meant they could also choose to extend
the gift of retaining it" (Gourevitch, 1998, p 129). A simple answer. Power is
creative. Power is misbegotten when it is motivated by hatred and then used
destructively.
But then why did the genocidists engage in hatred. And why did Western
states contribute to a system that fostered such hatred and then did virtually
nothing when that misbegotten power was used to destroy a million people?
Peter Uvin claims to offer a deeper answer. The genocidists are victims of the
process of modernity from the perspective of a neo-Marxist critique. If the
genocidists are the victims of modernity, the humanitarians are the saviors.
According to Leyton, MSFers are in search of liberation from the mindlessness
of modernity, performing righteous penance for racist imperialism in a world run
on fear and greed and a tissue of lies. While genocidists act on the basis of
resentment, MSFers combine their own self-serving desires and the needs of
those in their care. But then their satisfaction is totally dependent on a horrific
world and, unconsciously, to obtain any satisfaction, it would mean they had a
vested interest in perpetuating misery. An obscene thought?
Leyton's book is a parti prus work for the dedicated and committed humanitarians of MSF. They deserve to be applauded. James Orbinski, an MSF
Canadian physician who is also lauded by Gourevitch, deserves great praise. But
the dedicated medical and other personnel who serve with MSF do not need the
silly asides on the nature of the world derived from a simplistic leftist view of
the current state that Leyton provides. The combination suggests that the author
is using MSF sacrifice and dedication to advance his own purist vision and the
sense of ecstasy he obtains with such moral clarity.
I have the same sense in reading Philip Gourevitch's interviews with the
survivors of the genocide, though his account is by far the best written of the
books under discussion. He is a moralist though his moral purity is not found in
the humanitarians in MSF, but in Paul Kagame, the real leader of the RPF and
current Vice-President of Rwanda. Widely and justly praised for capturing the
horror of the genocide in Rwanda through the voices of the survivors, Gourevitch also provides an intellectual horror show in his own right. Though he does
recognrze the simplicity and moral absoluteness of the genocidists, he seems to
be totally oblivious to his own simplifications and puritanism. If MSFers are
intent on giving witness and healing, Gourevitch focuses on the witnessing
largely by letting the victims speak.
Further, unlike the moral purists who speak with a pre-modern voice,
Gourevitch speaks with a post-modern one. He sees Rwandan history as
successive struggles for power, and the successful parties are able to force others
to adopt their version of reality. In fact, this is Gourevitch's definition of
freedom. Freedom belongs in the imagination. "We are, each of us, functions of
how we imagine ourselves and of how others imagine us" (Gourevitch, 1998, p
71). Insofar as others project an image onto us, we are entrapped by their
projections. We are free only insofar as we have freedom to imagine ourselves.
As Gourevitch advises gratuitously , "... if others have so often made your life
their business-made your life into a question, really, and made that question
their business-then perhaps you will want to guard the memory of those times
when you were freer to imagine yourself as the only times that are truly and
inviolably your own" (p 71). But since this schema provides no basis for
differentiating truths from lies, the issue is not the lies of the state, but the
narrative the state projects.
But if freedom is merely the function of how we imagine ourselves, then the
genocidal leaders are most free when they imagine the Tutsi are all out to murder
them and they see themselves engaged in a rite of purification. Similarly, when
the UN Secretariat imagines itself to be governed by reluctant and unsupportive
states, then apologist UN officials can assert of the famous January 11 cable that,
"We get hyperbole in many reports ... If we had gone to the Security Council
three months after Somalia, I can assure you no government would have said,
'Yes, here are our boys for an offensive action in Rwanda' " (Gourevitch, 1998,
p 106). Gourevitch feels no reportorial responsibility to check whether the cable
waso in fact, treated by the UN Secretariat as just another hyperbolic report.
Evidence (see Adelman and Suhrki, Early Warning and Conflict Management:
The Genocide in Rwanda, Copenhagen: DANIDA, 1996) had already been
published that the UN did not regard this as just another false alarm before
Gourevitch wrote his series of New Yorker articles which constitute the book.
Elaboration on this evidence can be found in Alison DesForges' book for Human
Rights Watch, Leave None To TelI The Story: Genocide in Rwanda. More
specifically, Iqbal Riza, on behalf of Kofi Annan, the head of The United
Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations (UNDPKO), immediately cabled Dallaire denying him permission to initiate the operation to seize the arms
caches and informing Dallaire that UN protection could not be offered to the
high-level informant. Further, UN headquarters was informed the next day of the
demarche issued by UN Special Representative to Rwanda, Jacques-Roger
Booh-Booh, and General Dallaire to Habyarimana. Headquarters was also told
of the briefing given to and the response of the French, Belgian and American
ambassadors. This was not an ordinary cable. Everyone at the highest levels
were involved. The Belgian ambassador put pressure on UN headquarters to
reverse the decision. The French, however, opposed this, and, after a great deal
of communication back and forth, the Secretary-General himself weighed in on
the matter (itself proof that this was not just another ordinary cable). Boutros
Boutros-Ghali reaffirmed the refusal to confirm the location of the arms caches
concerned, as he was, about possible political repercussions. Does this sound like
the information was treated as simply another possibly hyperbolic statement?
Does this not suggest that, at the very least, an investigative reporter has a
responsibility to investigate such claims and not take them at face value?
But Gourevitch is not a researcher. He is just an interviewer and storyteller.
Otherwise, he would have known that when Iqbal Riza suggested that the cable
was seen as an expression of hyperbole, it was not, in fact, viewed as such at
o'Its
the time. Gourevitch notes, without comment, that Riza looked surprised.
astonishing-an amazing document" (Gourevitch, 1998, p 106). But the UN
Secretariat had recognized the cable for the astonishing document that it was
from the beginning. After the genocide, they had engaged in a cover-up. And
Riza's feigned surprise was possibly part of the same cover-up.
Thus, though Gourevitch is a great storyteller, he is a poor investigative
journalist. And when he offers interpretations of historical events, he is self-contradictory and confused. For example, Gourevitch tells the following story. In
May of 1994, there was a threat by a military intelligence officer of the
genocidal regime to kill all the Tutsi and moderate Hutu who had taken
sanctuary in the Hotel Milles Collines. The hotel manager called on all his
contacts to lobby with the regime. Those taking sanctuary in the hotel were not
killed. Why not? Gourevitch's explanation is that the United Nations Assistance
Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR) facilitated a deal between the RPF, who held
government prisoners, and the government. There was a trade-off. The RPF
would spare their prisoners if no one in the hotel was killed. In other words, two
coercive powers faced each other and made a bargain facilitated by UNAMIR.
The laffer, according to Gourevitch, had not saved the refugees as widely
reported at the time; rather, "they were saved by the RPF's threat to kill the
others" (Gourevitch, 1998, p I43).
I do not know what all the factors were that saved those who had taken refuge
in Hotel Milles Collines. I do know that Gourevitch presents his answer with
total self-assurance and without evidence. And the fact that this realist, powerpolitics account seems to conffadict his major theme not only does not faze him,
he seems to be utterly oblivious to that fact. He has little interest in separating
out fiction from truth. In fact, his post-modernist outlook makes such discrimination largely irrelevant. And his explanations, and the moral blame he disfributes so easily based on those simplistic explanations, are as much a mixture
of fiction as fruth. For example, Gourevitch says that, "The desertion of Rwanda
by the UN force was Hutu Power's greatest diplomatic victory to date, and it can
be credited almost single-handedly to the United States" (p 150). It is certainly
frue that the US wanted to avoid another Somalia and was wary of becoming
involved in the midst of a civil war. The US also deliberately chose to call the
massacres "genocide-like." However, the French journalists were keen to portray
France as the key accomplice of the genocidists. Further, if the Belgians had not
decided to withdraw their troops in response to the mutilation and killing of ten
peacekeepers, if they had not lobbied that everyone else should withdraw, the
crisis over UNAMIR would not have been up for discussion. If the UN
Secretariat had properly informed the Security Council of the warnings of the
planned genocide, preemptive steps might possibly have been taken.
The reality is that there were many actors and all played their respective parts
in the disaster. But tellers of fables are prone to love a genre which focuses on
the irresponsible cops (in this case, the USA), the simple hero who takes direct
action (Paul Kagame) and a horrific villain-the genocidists. Further, the reading
of the Genocide Convention as enabling rather than legally obligating intervention is not 'oan inventive new reading" by the USA, but is one of the standard
interpretations. It is peculiar how the person who believes that freedom is merely
a product of how we imagine ourselves is so quick to see everyone else's views
that disagrees with his own as being not only a product of their imaginations, but
a totally unwaffanted one.
Gourevitch does not restrict this treatment to the USA, even if he holds the
US to be virtually singularly responsible for the genocidist successes. He
engages in the same sort of judgment when it comes to France. When he
discusses Op6ration Turquoise, the French intervention in July of 1994, he says
that, "wherever they went, the French forces supported and preserved the same
local political leaders who had presided over the genocide," regarding the RPF
as their enemy and the Hutu genocidists as the legitimate power (p 158). The
fact that the foremost authority on French action in Rwanda, Glrard Prunier,
provides a quite different account, is of no interest to Gourevitch, even though
he credits Prunier in his acknowledgements.
But Gourevitch has not written an academic book. It should not be read for
adequate explanations and judgments. They are the distractions for those who
have a detailed knowledge of the genocide. Instead it should be read for
providing the best taste and feel and horror of the genocide from a very
humanistic and sensitive perspective.
Klinghoffer (The International Dimension of Genocide in Rwanda) has written
a tightly written and extremely well footnoted account of the international role
in the genocide, but, unfortunately, it too is marred by a plethora of errors. Some
are trite. For example, Bruce Jones, though completing his PhD at the London
School of Economics, is a Canadian and not a British specialist. The almost one
million "refugees" displaced by the civil war prior to signing the Arusha
Accords are not refugees at all but internally displaced. The famous Dallaire
cable was dated llth not 10th January. Some errors, however, are much more
serious.
His account of
UNAMIR is flawed in a number of respects. First, the evidence
does not support any claim that Boutros Boutros-Ghali was "determined to
strengthen UNAMIR" except after the end of April (Klinghoffer, 1998, p 51).
Though the statement appears at the appropriate time, there is no qualification
that this was a reversal of an earlier position. Further, in the infroductory chapter,
Klinghoffer openly states that Boutros-Ghali worked persistently in New York
to orgartrze collective action. This is demonstrably false, though Bouftos-Ghali
and the documents he had the UN issue would want one to draw precisely this
conclusion.
Earlier, Klinghoffer stated that UNAMIR, since its mandate did not extend to
protecting civilians, "kept a low profile as the violence escalated" (p 44).First,
UNAMIR did have a mandate from the parties to the peace agreement to protect
civilians, but the UN determined that the mandate would only be carried out with
the cooperation of the gendarme and Rwandan military forces, who happened at
the time to be confrolled by the genocidists. The lack of a mandate was not the
reason for not protecting civilians. Rather UN headquarters determined that the
UNAMIR forces could not take an initiative in protecting civilians, though
soldiers did so actively at great risk and continued to provide passive protection
at several large locales, including the stadium in Kigali. The reasons were many.
This interpretation of the mandate was the result of other factors and not the
explanation for the limited action. Trying to initiate a cease-fire may have been
stupid and futile, but it was not maintaining a low profile. Organizing the
protection and exodus of the ex-pats in Rwanda perhaps should not have been
its primary task. But UNAMIR was not maintaining a low profile. Regrouping
and maintaining control of the airport was not maintaining a low profile.
UNAMIR did not confine its troops to barracks after the death of the Belgian
peacekeepers.
of the problem with Klinghoffer's account is that it
suffers from
terseness. It is written as if the book is a series of notes strung together. But the
errors aside, it does sfring the key items together in an easily read account that
is well documented in its footnotes. It echoes the unanimous view of all these
Part
books that the genocide was a systematically organized effort to eliminate the
Tutsi population in Rwanda by Hutu extremists. The international complicity in
the genocide is seen to result from the Belgian colonial legacy, foreign
manipulation of the economy and, Klinghoffer adds, the population pressure and
"triage," the use of elimination techniques to respond to population pressures.
But if Klinghoffer had read Homer-Dixon's (1995) study-Homer-Dixon is one
of the major proponents of the population and ecological pressure thesis as a
prime cause of conflicts in Africa-he would have seen that even the staunchest
proponent of the thesis found that the evidence in the Rwanda case did not
support such an interpretation. Nevertheless, in spite of my differences with
some of the factors cited, Klinghoffer does try to explain the many and varied
factors that interacted to help bring about the conditions that fostered the
genocide.
What are we left with in the end? The genocide was caused by immoral Hutu
extremists. The genocide was caused by a system that built in structural
violence. The genocidists were driven by hatred and revenge in a misbegotten
use of power. The major Western powers failed to intervene because they were
complicit, to different degrees, in building the genocidal regime. Unwilling to
sacrifice their troops to save others, according to General Dallaire, the dominant
powers were quite willing to put troops in harms way to give the appearance of
action without the will or the moral fiber to do anything effectively.
I
happen
to find the range of explanations limited and too simplistic in
general. The reasons were more complex than even Klinghoffer suggests, and he
includes some factors that have little merit as explanatory ones. Nevertheless,
Uvin has written the bestdocumented account of the economic factors behind
the genocide. Gourevitch has written a most moving and compelling account of
the feel and effects of the genocide. Klinghoffer has synthesized a large body of
material in a very concise way but one mar.d by too many errors of fact and
interpretation. The volunteers of MSF deserve a beffer wriffen analysis of the
context of their self-sacrifice and dedication, though Leyton's praise is well-deserved. And the chapters in other books make their own valuable contributions.
The problem is that not one of them is adequate in explaining and accounting
for both the genocide and the impotence of those who could so readily have
saved the day.
The best, longest and least simplistic book is saved for dessert: Alison
DesForges' Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda. One of "a small
number of foreigners [who] did fight passionately to stop the slaughter,"
DesForges, modest beyond belief about her own role (her own name does not
even appear on the cover of the book), proves that intellect can complement
passion (p 77I).
DesForges provides one of the briefest and best histories of the emergence of
Hutu and Tutsi as distinct groups. The bureaucrattzation of differences, the
solidarity of the oppressed and the opportunism of an elite combined to turn
those differences into radical divisions. She describes in meticulous detail how
Bugosora ouffoxed the internal opposition within the army and the political
establishment to pull off both the coup and the genocide. Though the RPF has
to be credited with saving most of the Tutsi who survived, DesForges goes into
great detail regarding the role of the RPF in committing atrocities of its
own-from 25,000 to 40,000. If Dallaire did not spell out the UN logistic
nightmare, DesForges does. And DesForges is the first to document how the
head of the Canadian Armed Forces, General Baril, then at UN headquarters,
continually undermined his fellow Canadian, General Dallaire. However, DesForges does claim, erroneously I believe, that the UN representative accepted
Bagosora's efforts to install his puppet exffemists as the legitimate government
following the coup. Her evidence indicates only that he failed to report on the
extent and organized nature of the genocide underway.
Unlike Gourevitch, DesForges checks her facts and rccognizes that the
January 11 cable was put in a black file (actually, a box) because it was
rccognized as important. She confirms the accuracy of Gourevitch's account of
how the Tutsi were saved in the Hotel Milles Collines, but she leaves out the
heroic genre for framing the tale. Her explanations are subtle and complex. Her
emphasis is on the West's failure to stop the genocide once that state power was
seized to be used for genocidal purposes-an outcome far more contingent and
uncertain than suggested by the other accounts. For DesForges agrees with
Dallaire, and explains in excruciating detail the reasons that the genocide could
have been stopped with ease in the first two weeks after it had commenced.
Unlike Gourevitch, DesForges not only distributes the responsibility for failing
to prevent or mitigate the genocide, but explains the different motives for the
various failures. Belgium was concerned with extricating its peacekeepers with
a minimum of dishonor. The US was unwilling to commit resources in a country
without strategic interest. France concentrated on protecting its clients and
Francophonie. The UN leadership was preoccupied with not being blamed for
another failure.
DesForges presents reams of evidence to suggest that the specter of the Tutsi
as an absolute menace requiring eradication was a strategic technique rather than
a given psychological state binding Hutu leaders and followers. Far more
organizational skill and effort were required to execute the genocide than simply
repeated appeals. In fact, state machinery, the use of the media for propaganda
purposes, intimidation and coercion of dissidents or those who tried to stand
aside, all were used brilliantly and efficaciously. Yet only a significant but small
portion of the population, in the end, were induced or forced into killing their
co-nationals. And they did so for many more reasons than Leyton suggestednot only power and pillage, but virulent hatred, real fear, ambition, and to save
their own skins or for more mundane reasons-they wanted to avoid the fines
levied for non-participation.
Why had the genocide not been prevented or mitigated? Many reasons
combined and came together, but none of the reasons excused those who had a
role. DesForges would have the bystanders as well as the perpetrators brought
before a commission of truth if not a court of justice. She has been the strongest
and now establishes herself as the most articulate force in advancing the effort
to bring understanding as well as justice to the Rwanda genocide.
The extent to which these books will contribute to the creation of a moral
framework which will allow a more immediate and less-confused response to
future crises remains to be seen. What is clear is its dire need.
Bibliography
Homer-Dixon, T. and Percival, V. (1995) Environmental Scarcity and Violent Conflict: The Case of Rwanda
(Toronto: University College, University of Toronto Press).
Orlie, M. (1997) Living Ethically, Acting Politically (Ithaca, NY: Comell University Press).
Walzer, M. (1996) Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (South Bend, IN: University of
Notre Dame Press).
