Haunting 'Ghosts' chronicles horror in Rwanda
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At the same time, it chronicles the utter failure of will by the rest of the world -- from the United Nations to the United States, Europe, and most of Africa -- to stop the genocide while it was occurring over 100 days from April to July 1994. There are no heroes in this story outside of Rwanda, just craven statements from politicians and diplomats. "It was like the world had disappeared out there," recalls Major Brent Beardsley, who served as military assistant to the head of UN peacekeeping forces in Rwanda. "The world just didn't care, and it made no difference what you said or how you said it to them."
This shock is particularly troubling to those who favor a multilateral approach under the UN aegis to international problems like Iraq. The Rwanda holocaust does great damage to the credibility of the UN as the answer, and of the world community as the salvation of last resort.
"They cannot tell us, or tell me, that they didn't know," says Philippe Gaillard, head of the Red Cross delegation in the Rwandan capital of Kigali, who stayed throughout the carnage. "They were told every day what was happening there. So don't come back to me and tell me, `Sorry, we didn't know.' No, no, no, no, no. Everybody knew."
And yet that's exactly what they do. "I have to make so clear to you that at the time people just did not have a sense that this was happening in the proportions that it was," says Madeleine Albright, who was US ambassador to the UN at the time. "And by the time that it happened, you couldn't do anything about it."
This collaborative effort between "Frontline" and the BBC tells the story the best way possible. Journalists call it "tick-tock." We ride the chronology of the genocide beginning in August 1993, when General Romeo Dallaire, a Canadian, arrives to command a UN peacekeeping force of 2,500 amid a fragile cease-fire between the minority Tutsi tribe and the ruling majority Hutu tribe. It continues as the tension builds, month by month and then, as the killing begins, day by day, even hour by hour.
"Ghosts of Rwanda" excels in pacing and thematic balance. It never overwhelms the viewer with grisly footage of corpses at the expense of the critical issue of world inaction. The sound bites from Bill Clinton and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan (then head of the organization's peacekeeping operations) are as devastating as the footage of bloated bodies floating down a river.
Rumors surface early in 1994 of an incipient killing campaign by Hutu extremists targeting Tutsis and, to a lesser extent, moderate Hutus. A Hutu informer then confirms the plan. The genocide begins in earnest on April 6, when a missile destroys the plane in which the Rwandan president is flying. At 2 the next morning in Kigali, Dallaire asks his superiors in New York for guidance, only to be told he should not intervene.
Five hours later, Dallaire sends troops to guard acting Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, a moderate Hutu. Hutu killers soon arrive at her house, disarm the troops, and shoot her. Tutsi rebels then attack, and a civil war begins. Hutus murder 10 Belgian peacekeepers, believing that the UN will then pull out. It soon does, leaving a token force under the beleaguered Dallaire. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Annan reject Dallaire's pleas for more troops.
In less than two weeks, 100,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus are killed. Two weeks later, the number tops 250,000. This is low-tech butchery, prosecuted largely with machetes, that nonetheless moves at a faster pace than the Nazi Holocaust. The UN and the Clinton administration continue to do nothing. US officials tenaciously avoid the word "genocide" and traffic in absurdist language.
On May 17, the UN finally authorizes 5,000 troops to be sent to Rwanda, only to find that none of the 80 member states approached will supply them.
We find a few heroes -- Gaillard; an American aid worker; and, most hauntingly, an unarmed Senegalese peacekeeper named Mbaye Diagne who, alone, saved hundreds of lives by taking people to safe havens within Kigali before dying in a mortar attack on May 31. The aid worker, Carl Wilkins of the Adventist Development Relief Agency, saved fewer lives than Diagne, but more than "the entire US government," according to "Frontline." The killing stopped only when armed Tutsi rebels took effective control of the country.
The Rwandan genocide triggers the use of that word for all seasons, "evil," to explain everything. It doesn't. Still, we hear Dallaire say about a meeting with death squad leaders, "I literally was talking with evil."
Adds one Hutu killer interviewed for the program, Gitera Rwamuhizi, "It was as if we were taken over by Satan. You couldn't be normal and you start butchering people for no reason."
So where does that leave the rest of us?
Sam Allis can be reached at allis@globe.com.
Ghosts of Rwanda
On: PBS, Channel 2, as part of ‘‘Frontline’’
Time: Tonight, 9-11
