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GLOBE EDITORIAL
Remembering RwandaSURVIVORS OF the 1994 Rwandan genocide visited a new museum in the capital of that Central African country on Monday. The museum commemorates the carefully planned slaughter of 800,000 people while the nations of the world pretended not to notice. The visitors wept. One woman, who had survived by hiding under a pile of dead bodies, described the need for the museum by saying: "It's for us to remember and for the international community to feel shame."
The UN has called today "International Day of Reflection on the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda." But any such reflection is pointless if it does not lead to a recognition of the culpability of people in high places who failed to intervene while Tutsis and moderate Hutus were being hacked to death in Rwanda. Powerful figures such as Kofi Annan and Bill Clinton knew and refused to do anything about it. The shame of that refusal was documented in Samantha Power's 2002 book, "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide." And the recent According to these reports, General Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian in charge of UN peacekeepers in Rwanda, acted heroically. After being told by an informer that Hutu extremists linked to the Rwandan government were planning to exterminate all Tutsis, Dallaire passed the warning on to the chief of UN peacekeeping at the time, Kofi Annan. Dallaire's February cable even foresaw the Hutu extremists' tactic of killing a few Belgian peacekeepers to scare Brussels and other contributors to the UN peacekeeping force to withdraw their soldiers. Dallaire wanted to take preventive action. Annan, demonstrating a fatal fealty to any sovereign government no matter how criminal, instructed Dallaire not to take action and even to tell Rwanda's Hutu government about the informant's disclosures. Annan did this knowing of the regime's collusion with the Hutu militias preparing for genocide. And after the genocide started, Annan oversaw the reduction of the peacekeeping force from 2,500 to 450. Clinton's shame was even more unambiguous. Clinton, his Secretary of State Warren Christopher, and his UN ambassador Madeleine Albright deliberately thwarted any move to define the massacres in Rwanda as genocide so that they could avoid a UN obligation to intervene under international law. No US troops had been in Rwanda and none would have been required, but Clinton wanted to avoid any repeat of the political setback he suffered in Somalia the previous year. If these shameful performances by powerful people are forgotten, it will be that much more difficult to save other peoples from the next gang of genocidal killers. © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
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