(Editor's note: Mr. Harris writes for Yellow Times and covers DRC for News From The Front. Members of the UN Global Security office have also subscribed to it. Axis of Logic has posted many of his articles. We appreciate the depth of his knowledge and his compassion and respect in covering DRC and African issues, and are very pleased to post this article he has submitted to us. bh, Axis of Logic)
April 7, 2004 - The United Nations declared April 7, 2004 to be an international day of reflection on the genocide that killed in excess of 800,000 Rwandans 10 years ago. In the 13 weeks or so that followed April 6, 1994, the ruling Hutus slashed and slaughtered their way through the Tutsi community of Rwanda in a fit of killing that was even more prolific than the Nazi extermination camps during the Holocaust.
Better than 8,000 people a day were being killed in some of the most barbaric and cruel acts ever visited by one man on another. Pregnant women were mutilated and their unborn children ripped from their wombs to be chopped into pieces. Bleeding bodies were pitched into latrines to die. No one was spared because of age or gender. Tutsis actually paid Hutus to shoot them and their families (the going rate was about $32 per person) to avoid being hacked to death by machete.
An international day of reflection think about the dead, think about the inhumanity and brutality, think about the needless slaughter and the innocent victims.
But dont think about why this catastrophe happened in the first place. Dont think about the monumental gall of the U.N. to sanctimoniously urge the world to feel sorry about all this when it was the complete failure of the U.N.s moral authority and its will to act that allowed these people to die in the first place. And dont think about the fact that it was the recalcitrance of the United States who vetoed any moves by the Security Council to act. The U.S. forbade the U.N. to use the term genocide in 1994 because, under international law, acts of genocide require certain responses from the U.N. and the Americans were just not interested. Letting the Rwandans die was easier.
This crisis had its origins, as so many African crises have, in the residue of European colonialism. The ethnic rivalry between the majority Hutus and minority Tutsis has deep roots in history. But during colonial times, Belgian colonists forced people to carry identity cards that classified them by their ethnicity, much as was the case under South Africas Apartheid system. The Belgian masters favored the Tutsis which naturally lead to resentment among Hutus and when Rwanda secured its independence in 1962, the Hutus seized power. Tensions increased over the years until eventually reaching a crisis point in 1994 with the eruption of the genocidal slaughter.
This was probably the fastest genocide in history, even though the killers were mostly armed only with farm tools. A sense had been developing within the regime of then President Juvenal Habyarimana which convinced the Hutus that the only way to hang on to power was to exterminate all Tutsis. The leaders of the genocide recruited and indoctrinated thousands of militiamen, and imported a sufficient supply of machetes (a farm tool in Africa) to give to every third Hutu male. A pretext for the eruption of violence was found on April 6 when Habyarimana's plane was shot down by unknown assailants.
The killing only stopped when Paul Kagame's Rwandan Patriotic Front overthrew the Hutus in July 1994. Kagame went on to seize power and he continues as president today; despite accusations of election fraud, he swept to re-election last year. Ironically, evidence is mounting that the American-backed Mr. Kagame may have personally ordered the shooting down of Habyarimanas plane.
But the shame of the United Nations is that it did nothing to prevent or stop the 1994 slaughter. A small contingent of around 400 U.N. troops was stationed in Rwanda in 1994 under the command of Canadian Lt.-General Romo Dallaire. The build-up of weapons and tensions was abundantly clear to Dallaire and for months he had pleaded with U.N. headquarters to send reinforcements or, at the very least, to grant permission to the troops already on the ground to do more than simply defend themselves if shot at. His pleas were strident and were made to the highest levels of the U.N., including to current Secretary General Kofi Annan personally.
The response from New York was that the mission was over, come home. Dallaire refused and he and his small band of troops remained in Rwanda to protect as many people as possible. In the end, he couldnt do much and to this day he blames himself for not being able to convince the Security Council to act.
But the fact is that the United Nations, with the callous and cowardly obeisance to Washington, did nothing. It failed the people of Rwanda, its moral authority sunk to the lowest level it has ever known and now it is asking the world to reflect on Rwandas genocide. Although the U.N. has grudgingly issued a mea culpa over the years, there is little evidence that they have learned a damn thing.
When the Rwandan Hutus were routed by Kagame, huge numbers of them fled across the border into the Democratic Republic of Congo (or DRC, then known as Zare) for their own safety. That flight was the catalyst for a Congolese civil war which erupted in 1997 and eventually killed in excess of 4 million people. Again, the U.N. did not intervene at the behest of the United States. Eventually, a U.N. presence did arrive in DRC but with observer status only. After the Congolese managed to reach a peace settlement on their own, with the able assistance and urging of South Africa, United Nations troops finally arrived in larger numbers after most of the killing was finished.
DRC presently has a transitional government, made up of the former national government and the remnants of many of the warring rebel groups. It is a remarkable effort that is extraordinarily fragile and has so far experienced many setbacks; no doubt there will be further hazards along the way to what is expected to be democratic elections in 2005, the first in over 40 years. [Ironically, those earlier elections chose Patrice Lamumba who is said not to have been suitable for the interests of the United States. All evidence suggests that the CIA arranged Lamumbas assassination with the assumption to power of the dictator Joseph Mobuto.]
But while the U.N. is urging as all to reflect, lets reflect a little on just how much attention anyone is giving to Africa.
Last week, there was an attempted coup in DRC. A scan of a very popular search engine was conducted on April 3, 2004 to review the coverage of that coup. Only the first 200 entries were observed (out of about 21,000 listed) but, as expected, none of the news articles found emanated from North America or Europe. On that same day, the same search engine was scanned with the phrase: Janet Jacksons nipple. And what do you know: about the same number of hits, and all the stories in the top 200 came from Europe and North America.
Let the U.N. reflect on that.
[Paul Harris is self-employed as a consultant providing businesses with the tools and expertise to reintegrate their sick or injured employees into the workplace. He has traveled extensively in what is usually known as "the Third World" and has an abiding interest in history, social justice, morality and, well, just about everything. He lives in Canada.]
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