Channel 4's (UK) Unreported World recently showed a documentary about the continued existence of the Hutu Interahamwe militia in the Great Lakes region of Africa. Despite having been ousted from most of Rwanda by the Rwandan Patriotic Front in 1994, this brutal militia is claimed to still control an area of Africa which is the size of Belgium (an unfortunate comparison considering this former colonial power's role in fostering the social and legal conditions which contributed to the small nations ethnic conflicts). This (brilliant) documentary led me to thinking about the implications of a failure to intervene in defence of civilians, especially considering that much of the world is currently more focused (through catastrophe in Iraq) on the implications of intervening.
Firstly, a brief historical recap. Colonial powers in Africa often used the, now recognised as dangerous, tactic of boosting the minority ethnic groups in order to keep the majority down. Typically, this involved offering jobs, education and other opportunities to the minority ethnic group at the expense of the majority. In Rwanda, this meant that Hutus were denied opportunities by the colonial powers, leading to significant resentment by the Hutu majority. Following independence, Tutsis were discriminated against by successive Hutu governments in retaliation and a long period of interethnic conflict began. In 1990 a Tutsi rebellion was launched from neighbouring Rwanda and continued raging until, in 1994, a plane carrying Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundi's Hutu President Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down, killing both men. The identity of those who shot down the plane remains disputed, but the incident is widely recognised as the trigger for 100 days of violence launched by Hutu militias against the Tutsi population and moderate Hutus, in which between 800,000 and 1,000,000 were killed. The international community's response was to draw back existing forces in Rwanda and allow the violence to continue unchecked. The French government has even been accused of direct complicity with the genocide for reasons of national interest (see http://www.survie-france.org/ ). As a result, the orgy of horrific violence only ended when the Rwandan Patriotic Front launched a successful offensive and took power in Rwanda.
Former US President Bill Clinton has described his decision not to intervene in Rwanda as his greatest regret. As mentioned in a previous post, Lt-Gen. Romeo Dallaire of Canada, who was present in Rwanda during the genocide, was driven to repeated suicide attempts by his memories of events and his decision to obey orders and do nothing to stop the massacres. The world was united, upon seeing the final result of their inaction, to declare the (all to often repeated) mantra of 'Never Again!', before promptly allowing massacres (albeit on a smaller scale) to occur during the break-up of Yugoslavia. Meanwhile, the Hutu militia known as the Interahamwe managed to slip into the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC, then known as Zaire), hidden in the flows of hutu refugees fleeing the feared reprisals. What followed is remarkable for many awful reasons, but for the purposes of this post one will be emphasised. The arrival of the Interahamwe in DRC was a major factor in sparking a war that lasted 10 years (if one considers that it is, as claimed, now over), killed 4 million people and dragged in all of the DRC's neighbours in some capacity, earning the disturbing nickname 'Africa's World War'.
What is intriguing about this whole affair is that, while the 100 days of the Rwandan genocide have quite rightly become a permanent part of the global political memory (and inspired numerous books, films, songs, NGOs, etc.), the slower burning but, in the end, more destructive war in the DRC has remained a subject of interest for only for those individuals most interested in Africa, human rights, international relations and/or conflict. It is as if, while disgusted by the failure of anyone to help Rwandans when they were threatened by the worlds swiftest genocide, the majority of the world's people have happily drawn a line under the incident despite the fact that it NEVER REALLY ENDED! The interahamwe continue to engage in killings, rape and the indoctrination of child soldiers on a large scale, and their Tutsi enemies in the DRC continue to commit atrocities of their own under the justification of self-defence.
A question I find myself asking quite regularly when thinking about Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo and Darfur, is that if the same situation again arose, if there were UN troops on the ground of a distant country, with credible intelligence that a genocide of almost unfathomable speed and ferocity was about to be launched, would the world remember the old mantra 'Never Again!'? Or would we hear; 'The sovereignty of [country A] must be respected.'; 'Dialogue is the only true path to peace'; 'It would be dangerous to insert forces at this time', 'Look at Iraq, we cannot afford another quagmire', followed by; 'We could not possibly have predicted the scale of what was about to happen', 'What happened was deeply regrettable and we will do everything in our power to help [country A] recover from this tragedy.'
I am not at all convinced that if exactly the same situation arose this month, in a country of equally little strategic significance as Rwanda in 1994, then we wouldn't simply sit and watch the massacres play themselves out exactly as happened last time. It must be noted that the ultimate result of inaction in Rwanda (apart from the horrendous human tragedy) was the war in DRC, which has ultimately cost the world 4 million more lives since 1994 and $1,100 million this year alone to support the 18,000 uniformed UN personnel present in the country. With such huge costs of inaction, one would hope that ensuring the existence of a widely recognised and effective mechanism for prompting intervention when justified and preventing it when it is not would be a priority for all nations. It seems that, when observing the decision to intervene in Iraq despite the absence of an immediate humanitarian emergency (or any WMDs, for that matter) and comparing it to the decision not to intervene in Darfur despite the presence of an immediate humanitarian emergency, unfortunately, the current system seems unwilling or unable to fulfil this task.
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1 comment:
Thanks for this insightful post-- most of all the observations that this conflict (like most?) has not necessarily ended.
But I would like to ask-- what intervention would have been appropriate in 1994? Since we did nothing, it's easy to imagine that had we "done something" everything would have been ok. But isn't this the kind of thinking that created the mess in Iraq-- the assumption that large countries can just drop into a small country like God's angels and fix things? Was it not in part the Belgians' in Rwanda at the turn of the century that set the stage for 1994
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