Rwanda Rwanda...

...can anybody hear our cries, can't you hear us calling you...Wyclef Jean sings in "Million Voices" from the movie "Hotel Rwanda".

Over the weekend I got some "education" on the genocide that took place in Rwanda in 1994. A friend gave me the movie "Hotel Rwanda" and a documentary called "Ghosts of Rwanda" with a warning "Hey they are disturbing". I had had some exposure to various civil wars in Africa and the horror of their killing methods. Wilbur Smith in his books describes some of the horrific ways in which people are killed in these African wars. In the mid 90's I also remember the news of the tens of thousands bodies floating over a lake into neighbouring African countries. Anyway, so I watched the movies...

In about hundred days following the assassination of Rawandan President on April 6th 1994 about 800,000 to 1,000,000 Tutsis and Hutus were slaughtered by militant Hutu groups. One of the groups called themselves the Interahamwe ("coming together") and Machetes were used as the main weapon for the ethnic cleansing.

Despite pre warnings sent by both the Red Cross and the UN peacekeepers the world didn't react until it was too late. No one in the world, the UN, the powerful countries, no one reacted. Everyone just sat and watched about a million people being hacked to death.

UN had a decent sized peace keeping force but at the start itself Belgium pulled out most of its troops and the commander of the UN peacekeepers Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire was then left with some 450 ill equipped troops to guard the whole country. He had requested for only about 2000 peacekeepers to handle the situation. 80 countries in the UN were approached but none of them agreed to lend any troops. And to think a few thousand troops could have saved maybe half a million human beings. It was a gut wrenching ordeal to see Dallaire as an individual take full responsibility and say:

"I was the commander and my mission failed and hundreds of thousands of people died and that I can't find any solace in statements like "I did my best". A commander can't use that as a reference in any operation. He succedes or he fails and then he stands by...to be accused of and to be held accountable for...and my mission failed".

The UN tied Dallaire's hands by telling him that he should not take any pre-emptive action and "avoid armed conflict". Before the killings started he had requested Kofi Annan, who was the heading the peace keeping department at that time, for a strike at the arms cache of the militia and was told not to do so saying "you do not have enough data".

The Clinton administration still suffering from the setbacks of peacekeeping at Mogadishu, Somalia also did not do anything to prevent or control this tragedy. (On a quick side note "Black Hawk Down" is an awesome movie about the Mogadishu incident, one of my favorites). The Clinton administration made excuses and played with words like "We don't know yet if this is a Genocide. Genocide has a legal meaning to it and we don't know if we can say that". Only later in 2003 Bill Clinton would accept that "...I will always regret about the Rwandan thing...".

Here are some Wikipedia links:
Rwandan Genocide
Genocide
Genocide in history
Rwanda