|
Genocide In Rwanda Jack
R Fischel. The
Virginia Quarterly Review. Charlottesville: Winter
2006. Vol. 82, Iss. 1; pg. 263, 13 pg Machete
Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak: A
Report by Jean Hatzfeld. Farrar, Straus
& Giroux, 2005. $24 Journey
into Darkness: Genocide in Rwanda by Thomas P. Odom. Texas A&M University
Press, 2005. $24.95 paper Shake
Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda by Lt. Gen. Roméo Dallaire. Carroll &
Graf, 2004. $30 cloth, $16.95 paper A
Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power.
HarperCollins, 2003. $17.95 paper We
Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories
From Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch. Picador, 1999.
$15 paper It is more than sixty years since the end of World War II,
when the world became aware of the Holocaust, the Third Reich's conscious
decision to murder every Jewish man, woman, and child in German-occupied
Europe. The Nazi state-sponsored murder of six million Jews was subsequently
labeled genocide, a term unknown
before the war, but first used by Raphael Lemkin in
his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe,
Laws of Occupation-Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress,
published in the United States in 1944. A Jewish refugee who fled Warsaw when
Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Lemkin
eventually made his way to the United States, where he taught law at Yale
University, and subsequently contributed to the passage of the United Nations
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in
December 1948. Lemkin had faith that the
implementation of the genocide convention would "never again" allow
a state to murder a people as was the case with Hitler's "Final
Solution." In time, the Holocaust emerged as the paradigm case of
genocide, whereby all future instances of state-directed mass murder would be
measured against the Nazi annihilation of the Jews. In addition to the passage of the genocide convention, the
United Nations General Assembly also created a vehicle for enforcing the law
when it established an International Court of Justice (ICJ), for the purpose
of prosecuting the perpetrators of genocide. It was not until October 1988,
however, that the United States Senate passed the Genocide Convention
Implementation Act, which made genocide punishable in the United States. The
law, however, included a reservation which stipulated that if the United
States was accused of genocide, the president would have to consent before it
would be a party before the International Court of Justice. The practical, if
not legal, consequence of this reservation meant that if the United States
produced evidence that a state was committing genocide, and attempted to
bring the perpetrators before the ICJ, the accused country could assert the
American reservation under the doctrine of reciprocity. The practical result
of this reservation, therefore, was that the United States was effectively
blocked from ever filing charges in the court against states perpetrating
genocide
Legalities aside, as Samantha Power, the executive
director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the John F. Kennedy
School of Government at Harvard University, notes in A Problem from Hell,
abiding by a UN resolution to commit American troops, as part of an
international force to intervene in behalf of the victims of genocide, has
always been a politically unpopular option. Power cites a State Department
official who stated, in responding to mass murder in Burundi, when the ruling
Tutsis hunted down and killed between 100,000 and 150,000 Hutus, "Do you
know of any official whose career had been advanced because he spoke out for
human rights?" Furthermore, the "Realists" in the foreign policy
establishment promoted the policy that the United States have
a vital national interest before committing troops to prevent genocide. Short
of citing the national interest, the use of the American military to protect
helpless victims of genocide has rarely resonated with the American public.
This was the case during the Holocaust, when the United States abandoned
European Jews to Nazi extermination, and it was true in regard to the Clinton
administration's response to the genocide in Rwanda. Philip Gourevitch, now the editor
of The Paris Review, but a journalist when he wrote his riveting account of
the genocide in Rwanda, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed
with Our Families, notes that "the dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly
three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust. It was the most
efficient mass killing since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."
Like the Nazis, who believed in the creation of an Aryan Utopia which
necessitated the destruction of the Jewish people, the Hutu-led government of
Rwanda imagined that by exterminating the Tutsi people they could create a
better world. Both genocides were predicated on pseudo-racial assumptions
that resulted in mass murder.
Although there are those who argue that the Hutus are
Bantu and the Tutsis a Nilotic people, Gourevitch insists there is little documentary evidence
to support this belief. More importantly, both people spoke the same language,
followed the same religion, intermarried, and shared a common existence
without making distinctions along the line of ethnicity,
that is until the Europeans arrived in Central Africa. Much as Houston Stewart Chamberlain served as an
ideological link between nineteenth-century racist theory and Nazi
anti-Semitism, John Manning Speke, an Englishman, fostered a theory that more
than a hundred years later would contribute to genocide in Rwanda. It was
Speke who in 1863 set forth the Hamitic myth which
claimed that all culture and civilization in Central Africa had been
introduced by the taller, sharp-featured people whom he claimed were a
Caucasoid tribe of Ethiopian origin, descended from King David. In Rwanda,
the Tutsis were so identified, a superior race to the inferior Hutu Negroids. The Hutus, it was believed, were descendant
from the biblical Ham. According to the Bible, Noah learned that his youngest
son, Ham, had seen him naked, and subsequently told his brothers, Shem and
Japheth, what he had observed. Noah responded by cursing Ham's son, Canaan,
and his progeny with the ill-fated words, "A slave of slaves shall he be
to his brothers." This biblical curse, which was used to justify the
enslavement of Africans in the American colonies, was also applied to the
Hutus, whom the Europeans designated to serve the Tutsis. Gourevitch
notes that: Few living Rwandans have heard of John Manning Speke, but
most know the essence of his wild fantasy-that the Africans who best
resembled the tribes of Europe were inherently endowed with mastery-and
whether they accept or reject it, few Rwandans would deny that the Hamitic myth is one of the essential ideas by which they
understand who they are in the world. Despite the Hutu monopoly on power which followed Rwanda's
independence in 1962, the Hamitic myth became the
basis of state ideology. Gourevitch states that the
myth was so deeply ingrained that an "almost mystical sense of
inferiority persisted among Rwanda's Hutu elite." In November 1992, for
example, the Hutu ideologue, Leon Mugesera called
on Hutus to send the Tutsis back to Ethiopia. When the Belgians replaced the Germans as the colonial
masters in Rwanda after World War I, they elevated the Tutsi to positions of
power over the majority Hutu population. The Belgians bestowed this authority
on the Tutsis because of stereotypes about Rwandans which framed a picture of
the Tutsi as a race of warrior kings, surrounded by the subordinate race of
Hutu peasants. During the genocide which commenced in April 1994, the
European legacy, which synthesized the Hamitic myth
with the perceived distinctive physical characteristics between both groups,
came home to roost when the bodily appearance of the Tutsi became a death
sentence. The archetype Hutu physiology was mainly stocky and round-faced,
dark-skinned, flat nosed, with thick lips and a square jaw. The Tutsis were
lanky and long-faced, lightskinned, with narrow
noses and narrow chins. Because of frequent intermarriage, however, over time
there were numerous exceptions to the physical stereotypes of both groups. The modern history of Rwanda began in 1921 when it and
Burundi, formerly part of German East Africa, were placed under a League of
Nations mandate which was awarded to Belgium. Although a minority of the
population under the Belgians, the Tutsis became a privileged class, and
asserted their political and social superiority over the majority Hutu
population. In 1931, Belgium introduced identity cards which specified the
ethnic group of the bearer, a policy that continued until 1994. The
introduction of the identity cards marked a symbolic turning point in the
subsequent history of Rwanda. As Gourevitch writes,
"whatever Hutu and Tutsi identity may have meant in the pre-colonial
state, the Belgians had made 'ethnicity' the defining feature of Rwandan
existence." The Belgians had introduced the race card and subsequently, Gourevitch informs us, every schoolchild was reared in
the doctrine of racial superiority and inferiority, which led to a steady
erosion of a common national identity. In its place there arose a culture of
mutually exclusionary discourse based on competing claims of entitlement and
injury. Rwanda became a UN trust territory in 1946 and was administered as a
Belgian colony, but when the last Tutsi king, Mutara
Rudahigwa, died in 1959, his death was followed by
massacres perpetrated by Hutu peasants against their Tutsi overlords, leading
to the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis. Soon after Rwanda declared
its independence in 1962, the Hutu-led Rwandan army carried out the first
wide-spread massacre of Tutsis, and continued to periodically launch assaults
against them for the next decade. In 1978, Juvenal Habyarimana,
a Hutu, was elected President of Rwanda. Under his leadership, the
persecution of Tutsis continued until 1990, when the Tutsi-led Rwandan
Patriotic Front (RPF) was organized from Tutsi militias operating in
Tanzania, Uganda, Burundi, and Zaire, thus igniting a civil war which
resulted in Tutsi victories in different parts of Rwanda. President Habyarimana responded by stoking the anger of the Hutu
population towards the Tutsis, and, in the months preceding the genocide,
promoted the incendiary slogan of "Hutu Power." This battle cry
became the motto of the intemhamwe, a cadre of
young Hutu extremist gangs created by the government to foster violence
against Rwanda's Tutsi population. The fighting between both the Tutsis and
the Hutus eventually culminated in negotiations between the RPF and the Habyarimana government. The subsequent Arusha Peace Agreement in Tanzania (August 1993), which
ended the civil war, commenced a peace process with the objective of creating
a political voice for the Tutsis in Rwanda. Hardliners in the Hutu
leadership, however, opposed the Arusha accords,
which precipitated Habyarimana's assassination on
April 6, 1994, when his plane was shot down by a mysterious missile, thus
setting the stage for the genocide. The new militant Hutu leadership set in motion the
organized unemployed interahamwe gangs to massacre
Tutsis. Armed mostly with machetes, the interahamwe
was joined by many in the Hutu population who shouted the refrain "Hutu
Power," as they engaged in a killing spree that was unprecedented in its
ferocity. That the resulting genocide, which culminated in the murder of
800,000 Tutsi men, women, and children, was preventable is the argument made
in Shake Hands with the Devil by Lt. General Roméo DaIlaire, who served the United Nations Assistance
Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR 1) as its Force Commander
during the genocide. General Dallaire was appointed
by the United Nations to lead a contingent of peace-keepers to monitor the
implementation of the Arusha Peace Agreement. The
authors discussed in this essay attest to Dallaire's
valiant efforts to head off the evolving genocide, but he found himself
frustrated by the United Nations' reluctance to provide him with the
necessary military personnel and logistic support that would have prevented
the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives.
The mass-murders were provoked by radio broadcasts, which
referred to the Tutsis as inyenzi or
"cockroaches," much as Nazi propaganda referred to the Jews as
"parasites." Dallaire notes that Rwanda
is a radio-based culture in which broadcasts were "akin to the voice of
God, and if the radio called for violence, many Rwandans would respond,
believing they were being sanctioned to commit these actions." Dallaire's tome describes the unfolding genocide in detail, a
murderous frenzy in which children were brutally killed, pregnant women had
their fetuses ripped from their womb as they were murdered, and where the
churches were defiled by the massacre of the Tutsis who sought refuge only to
find that the Hutu priests, in this mostly Catholic country, betrayed them to
the killers. With his undermanned force, Dallaire
was helpless to prevent the bloodshed. Dallaire
laments the fact that had the UN given him permission to act, he could have
prevented much of the carnage. Instead, the UN ordered him not to intervene,
not even to intercept caches of machetes that were subsequently used in the
genocide. In addition to his graphic account of the atrocities, Dallaire's indispensable record is also a scathing
indictment of the advanced industrialized world in general, and the United
States in particular, in its reaction to the unfolding genocide. Dallaire argues that because of casualties the United
States suffered in Somalia, the Clinton administration was reluctant to
support UN intervention in Rwanda, lest it be forced to send troops to stop
the genocide. This condemnation of the Clinton administration is echoed by
Samantha Power who writes: When the massacres started, not only did the Clinton
administration not send troops to Rwanda to contest the slaughter, but
refused countless other options. President Clinton did not convene a single
meeting of his senior foreign policy advisors to discuss U.S. options for
Rwanda. His top aides rarely condemned the slaughter. The United States did
not deploy its technical assets to jam Rwandan hate radio, and it did not
lobby to have genocidal Rwandan government's ambassador expelled from the
United Nations. Those steps that the United States did take had deadly
repercussions. Washington demanded the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers from
Rwanda ... Dallaire contends that there were politically pragmatic reasons
why the United States and other industrialized countries did not support
intervention in Rwanda. When it comes to genocidal conflict, states Dallaire, the criteria for intervention is whether the
country has any possible strategic value to the world powers. If so,
"then it seems that everything from covert operations to the outright
use of overwhelming force is fair game. If it is not, indifference is the
order of the day." Rwanda, a poor nation located in Central Africa, had
absolutely no value to the developed world, which resulted in a reluctance to
invest financially in intervention or risk the possibility of suffering
casualties. The absence of a vital national interest trumped any humanitarian
consideration that might have stopped the genocide. Dallaire
divulges that "an American officer felt no shame as he informed me that
the lives of 800,000 Rwandans were only worth risking the lives of ten
American troops." Gourevitch similarly reports
the response of an American military officer who stated that in regard to
Rwanda, "genocide had about as much emotional impact as the words
'cheese sandwich.'" Writing with great passion, Dallaire
ponders the question, "are we all human, or are some more human than
others?" Dallaire concludes that the failure
to prevent genocide in Rwanda suggests that many in the developed world
consider their lives worth more than those of other citizens on the planet.
But for those who believe that the world shares a common humanity, "then
we must be prepared to move beyond national self-interest to spend our
resources and spill our blood to prevent future genocide." In the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, when the Tutsi
RPF emerged victorious in the struggle against the hard-line Rwandan
government, millions of Hutus fled the country, finding sanctuary in Goma, across the border in Zaire. The international
community, including the United States, responded to this exodus of almost
two million Hutus, by establishing refugee camps in Goma.
The refugees, however, also included the remnants of the defeated Hutu
military, and an even greater number of interahamwe
militia, the main perpetrators of the genocide. The refugee camps were
established and administered by the United Nations,
and non-government relief organizations, which included American
representation. Aside from feeding and clothing the refugees, the United
Nations primary objective was to repatriate the evacuees back to Rwanda as soon
as possible. But the unrepentant Hutu perpetrators, who blended in with the
refugee population, began killing camp inmates so as to intimidate them to
renew the battle against the Tutsis. To complicate this already tense
situation the RPF, whose ranks included many soldiers whose families had been
murdered by the Hutus, knew who the killers were and cordoned off the camps.
Under these circumstances, it was inevitable that fighting would erupt
between the RPF and the remnants of the Hutu military. This aspect of the
Rwandan tragedy is told in Journey Into Darkness by Thomas P. Odom, an
American intelligence officer, who served as the United States attache in Zaire in the immediate aftermath of the
genocide.
Like Power and Dallaire, Odom is
critical of America's role in the unfolding genocide, accusing the Clinton
administration of moving at glacial speed, first in recognizing that genocide
was taking place, and then the timeliness of its response to the outfitting
of UNAMIR 2, whose mission was to contribute to the security and protection
of displaced persons, refugees, and civilians at risk in Rwanda. By the time
the UNAMIR 2 force was equipped to halt the killings, however, the genocide
and the war was largely over. Subsequently, the United States, through
Operation Support Hope, participated within the framework of the United
Nations to play a role in efforts to solve the refugee crisis in the
aftermath of the genocide. Odom argues, however, that although the objective
to halt the killings between the RPF and the Hutus was achievable, the effort
to return the refugees to Rwanda was an unrealistic one. Odom writes: There was no way the United States, the international
community, or any combination of forces was going to force two million
Rwandan refugees to pick up and go home. They had just slaughtered eight
hundred thousand of their neighbors. They believed an equally bloodthirsty
army was waiting for them across the border They had just marched one hundred
miles or more to escape that army, suffering at least seventy thousand dead. Caught between their fear of the RPF and the armed Hutu
military, and interahamwe, the refugees had little
choice but to follow the dictates of the latter. Furthermore, as long as the
Hutu hardliners were armed, there was little chance that a return of the
refugees to Rwanda could be accomplished without further bloodshed. After the
humiliating setback in Somalia, the Clinton administration saw no political
capital in attempting to disarm the Hutus. Looking back at the events in Rwanda, Odom concludes that
by 1995, a year after the genocide, the United States still did not have a
clear policy in Rwanda. The Clinton administration, states Odom, remained
reactive to events. The United States sought to end the killings and bring
about stability by reducing external threats: We believed if we did not work toward that aim, the new
government in Rwanda was bound to strike out at its external enemies and grow
increasingly harder on its internal foes. Regional conflict was on the
horizon ... if we did not move quickly enough . . . Rwanda would take most of
Central Africa with it into war. In late 1996, the RPF moved into Zaire and closed the
refugee camps, which included the disarming of 110,000 armed Hutus. For the
most part, the Hutus were repatriated and those identified as having
participated in the genocide were imprisoned. When instability in the region
continued, the Rwandan government created an allied army of Tutsi exiles in
Zaire and ultimately conquered the country. Odom notes that the Rwandan
action in Zaire led to an expanded ongoing war. Zaire, renamed the Congo, was
the scene of an uneasy peace and periodic fighting between Uganda, Zimbabwe,
Zambia, the Congo, and Rwanda. Odom estimates that as of 2005 the casualties
in this "African World War," exceeded three million. Unlike the books discussed above, Jean Hatzfield's
Machete Season takes a different perspective on the Rwandan genocide. His
important work seeks to understand how the perpetrators rationalized their
participation in cold-blooded mass murder. Following the return of the Hutu
refugees to Rwanda, the Tutsi government adopted a special genocide code to deal
with the perpetrators. Although all of the perpetrators were liable for the
death penalty, the genocide code limited executions only to those who
planned, organized, supervised, and instigated mass murder, as well as to
those who participated in sexual torture. For those perpetrators who followed
government orders to kill, the maximum penalty was life imprisonment,
or a reduced sentence if a guilty plea or a valid confession was forthcoming.
Hatzfeld interviewed ten men who were part of a gang that were
heavily involved in the killings and were now imprisoned in a Rwandan jail
for their role in the genocide. It was the author's objective to glean from
these killers the motivation behind their participation in mass murder. Hatzfeld, a journalist based in Paris, notes that he was
drawn to write about mass murder in Rwanda because of its similarity to the
Holocaust. He discovered that in both genocides there were similar patterns
of behavior, whereby the decision to kill was the result of government
indoctrination and preparations formulated and implemented by orders passed
down by legitimate state authority. The precondition for mobilizing both
Germans and Hutus to annihilate their targeted victims required that the
government inundate the perpetrators with propaganda that declared Jews and
Tutsis to be subhuman, thus making it easier for the killers to rationalize
murder. As one of the Rwandan perpetrators informs Hatzfeld,
"we no longer saw human beings when we turned up a Tutsi
. .. savagery took over the mind." Hatzfeld's study makes an important contribution to our
understanding of the darker impulses of humanity which, under certain
conditions, can undermine the fragile line between civilization and
barbarity. This was true in Rwanda as it was in Nazi Germany, and we are
witnessing this breakdown in Dafur. In his
interviews with the Rwandan perpetrators, Hatzfeld's
work echoes a similar type of investigation found in Christopher Browning's influential Ordinary Men: Reserve Police
Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (HarperCollins, 1992). Browning's indispensable work on the Holocaust examined
the reaction of a battalion of German Order Police, numbering 500 men, who in
July 1942 rounded up 1,800 Jews in the Polish village of Jozefow
and shot some 1,500 women, children, and elderly people. Browning discovered
that many of these overage reserve policemen were neither committed Nazis nor
virulent anti-Semites. Within sixteen months, however, these "ordinary
men" participated in the direct shooting deaths of at least 38,000 Jews
and the deportation of an additional 45,000 to the Treblinka death camp.
Based on postwar interrogation records, Browning recorded what they did, what
they thought, and how they rationalized their behavior. Hatzfeld
notes the reluctance of those motivated by anti-Semitism among Browning's police reservists to acknowledge that the
hatred of Jews was driving them to kill at the time. Hatzfeld
likens Browning's "ordinary men" to some
of the Hutus he interviewed who were also reluctant to admit their anti-Tutsi
feelings, inasmuch as the author was told that "the Hutu infant was swaddled with hatred for the Tutsis before opening his
eyes to the world." He found that the perpetrators were more reticent
about their feelings towards their victims than they were about their first
murders, and Hatzfeld concludes that the Rwandan
perpetrators may have used this as a tactic to exonerate themselves by
insisting that they killed because they were brainwashed, a phenomena found
in the literature surrounding the interrogation of Nazis after the war about
their participation in the killing of Jews. Hatzfeld discovered that the hatred of the victim was not the only
motivation for many of the Hutu perpetrators to participate in the mass
murder. One Hutu interviewed was happily married to a Tutsi, and harbored no
anti-Tutsi feelings at the beginning of the genocide. Another was only
interested in playing soccer, never caring at all about anti-Tutsiism, until he got caught up in the massacres. Even
the leader of the interahamwe, Joseph-Desire Bitero, was not rabidly anti-Tutsi until the last few
months before the massacres. From his interviews, Hatzfeld
concludes that: This tends to prove that if anti-Tutiism
was a driving force of the genocide, helping to push it into criminal
reality, the bigotry was only one motive of many and not sufficient on its
own to explain everyone's actions and attitudes. ... Although they are not
disturbed by the killings, they often seemed befuddled and overwhelmed by
them. Ignace, for example, one of the most vicious
Tutsi-haters and certainly one of the most anti-Tutsi in the gang, is one of
those who swung his machete the least. ... They dread facing the consequences
of the genocide. . . . More important they are afraid to learn the reasons
and motives behind the upheaval and see no point in trying to understand it. A conclusion not unlike the one that Browning found among
the members of the police battalion. From Hatzfeld's
interviews there emerge a number of reasons why "ordinary" Hutus
perpetrated genocide, least of which was that some of the killers enjoyed it.
As one of the gang explained, "the more we saw people die, the less we
thought about their lives... and the more we got used to enjoying it."
Some were fascinated by the process of killing. One Hutu revealed to Hatzfeld that he had killed two children and found that
"it was strange to see the children drop without a sound. It was almost
pleasantly easy." Compare this testimony to that of a member of the
German police battalion who would shoot only infants and children, to
"release" them from their misery. Still another informs Hatzfeld that "killing is very discouraging if you
yourself must decide to do it... but if you must obey the orders of the
authorities ... if you see that the killing will be total and without
consequences for yourself, you feel soothed and reassured. You go off to it
with no more worry." Then there was the matter of the competition for
limited land resources. A Hutu reveals that he killed the Tutsis because
there was not enough land for the two ethnic groups, and since neither would
leave, it was up to the Hutus to solve the problem. This rationale for
killing was reinforced when another of the gang told Hatzfeld
that hatred flourished in the fields because the plots of land were not large
enough for the two ethnic groups. Profiting from the murder of the Tutsis was also a factor
that played a role in the genocide. As was the situation in Nazi Germany,
when the government "Aryanized" Jewish
property, Hutus benefitted from the removal of the Tutsis. As the author was
told, when you receive firm orders, and promises of long-term benefits,
"the wickedness of killing until your arm falls off is gone to
you." The wives of the perpetrators fanned the zeal of their husbands to
kill Tutsis, as they weighed the loot and the promise of spoils from the
victims. Although there are differences when one compares the
Holocaust to the genocide in Rwanda, there are also striking similarities. Hatzfeld notes that in Germany the intention was to
purify being and thought by eliminating the Jews, who were found guilty of
fostering a degenerating influence on the nation. In rural Rwanda, the intent
of the genocide was to purify the earth, to cleanse it of its cockroaches and
snakes, the Tutsis. Whereas the Holocaust was the product of an industrial
society using the methods of technology to murder its victims, the Rwandan
genocide was the product of an agricultural people, whose weapon of choice
was the machete. Nevertheless, as Hatzfeld notes,
despite archaic weapons, the Hutus, in terms of killing efficiency, proved to
be more effective than the Nazis in murdering the Jews and Gypsies. Hatzfeld points out that some 800,000 Tutsis were killed
in twelve weeks; whereas, at the height of the shootings and deportations in
1942, the Nazi regime, equipped with its weapons of mass destruction, such as
carbon monoxide, Zyklon B, and heavy machine guns,
never attained so murderous a result anywhere in Germany or its fifteen
occupied countries. Both the Holocaust and the Rwanda genocide were
implemented in the midst of war. Hatzfeld notes
that war is neither the cause or consequence of genocide, but that the mass
murder of innocent victims occurs because war suspends the rule of law,
"it systematizes death, normalizes savagery, fosters fear,... reawakens old demons and unsettles morality and human
values." As one Rwandan summed it up for Hatzfeld,
"war is a dreadful disorder in which the culprits of genocide can plot
incognito," yet another confirmation why genocide continues to be
"the problem from hell ..." Since the Holocaust, the international
community has witnessed the outbreak of genocide, or mass murder that
approximates it, in Bosnia, Cambodia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Srebrenica, in Saddam
Hussein's use of poison gas against the Kurds, and now in Darfur. Ironically,
as Samantha Power informs us, the industrialized nations that use the absence
of a vital national interest to avoid intervention in behalf of the victims
of genocide have also invoked the Holocaust to justify inaction. Because the
Holocaust is the model for measuring the perpetration of state-generated
genocide, intercession is avoided if it does not totally measure up to the
Nazi extermination of the Jews. Power cites the reaction of US Assistant
secretary of State Richard Murphy to Saddam's use of chemical warfare against
the Kurds to illustrate her point. Murphy refused to acknowledge Saddam's
murder of the Kurds as an act of genocide because, "it was clear to me
that Saddam had no intention of exterminating 'all' Kurds." Power notes
that Murphy "had never read the genocide convention and thus equated
genocide with Hitler's holistic campaign to wipe out every last Jew in
Europe." The Bush administration has acknowledged that the
atrocities in Darfur are acts of genocide, but has proceeded to do little to
halt it. Once again, the industrialized world is faced with the opportunity
to prevent the murder of tens of thousands, and once again reasons are found
to delay intervention until it is too late, as was the response to the
Holocaust and the genocide in Rwanda, although the latter so closely
paralleled the former. Based on its record, Lemkin's
faith in the United Nations to prevent another Holocaust may have been
misplaced, and the international community's failure to respond to genocide
forces us to ponder Samantha Power's somewhat cynical but, nevertheless,
insightful assessment of the UN genocide convention when she writes, that in
practice it means "never again would the Germans kill Jews in Europe in
the 1940s."
|