The Rwanda genocide.

Great Debates
21

----Why blame France, Belgium or America for what Rwandans did? No offense, buddy, but it wasn’t Belgians who went on machete-sprees…----

The OP already covered that. What is asked was why the international agencies (the ones who before and after use rhetoric of moral commitment against genocide and abuse of human rights) supposedly committed to preventing such things did nothing: even abbetted the killers.

If the police did nothing while a murderer killed someone, would you have the same criticism of anyone who complained about the police just standing around and watching? I mean, this is the Clinton administration for goodness sakes. It’s okay to let loose on them. Really.

The Clinton administration showed a criminal lack of leadership in Somalia: instead of explaining WHY Somalia was important (as Bush had been ready to), and worth American lives, he cut his political losses and backed out. Rwanda was just an extention of that policy. And in both cases, IMHO, the wrong decision.

22

So what some of you are saying is that the world has no obligation to stop mass killings? I guess its pretty easy for you to say since its probably never happened anywhere near your country. Anyway there were enough peacekee^ping forces in Rwanda already BUT THEY WERE PULLED OUT WHEN THE KILLINGS BEGAN if they arent going to defend the victims what the hell were they doing in the first place? Judging by many of these posts, moral responsiblity has died a horrible death.
As for the poster who brought in hookers and AIDS as impediments to a rescue mission…WTF?You got your priorities straight dont u?

23

Here is an excellent article about the genocide by Atlantic Monthly.

24

No offense buddy but your attitude stinks. If we follow your line of reasoning then all ethnic cleansing is permissible because it is the people killing themselves-those stupid Africans again!. your comments are just plain offensive.

25

Fixed quote tags in above post.

26

And our moral responsibility to our own people? We don’t have that? Our soldiers are just robots, without families or needs?

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but these killings were not physicaly centralized—not in an execution camp? Done by many non-uniformed people? In remote areas? And US tropps would be under severe restrictions about returning fire if endangered? And perhaps arrested & jailed if they accidentaly shot the wrong people? Or the alledgedly wrong people, which is not the same thing at all.

I think that a 10,000 or 15,000 man force would be totally inadequate. This whole thing would be a recipe for disaster.

And yes, we have a responsibility for the health of our soldiers. Africa has a HIV rate many, many times higher than the US. As well as the unaddressed problem of tropical disease or parasites.
If you think parasites aren’t a serious problem, think “Guinea Worm”.

Oh, yeah…it’s spelled “YOU”, not “u”.

27

‘The world’ is not a political or military organization, and there is no world police, although the UN has attempted to carry out that function with varying degrees of success. At some point such an organization is required to carry out any effective action. In any event, as the OP’s own cite shows, there was a UN force on the ground, but it was insufficient in numbers to be effective.

According to the article the OP cites in the post following this quote, there were NOT enough peacekeepers in the country to effectively, er, keep the peace. The article states that the UN commander had only half the personnel he felt necessary to accomplish his mission, that they were of more than twenty nationalities, posing great problems of command and communication, and that they were woefully undersupplied. Under these circumstances, the peackeeping force was more likely to end up as additional victims of massacre than an effective deterrent.

The OP seems to be arguing that the US, for one, should have done more, but has not, as yet, clearly stated what that ‘more’ should have been. Perhaps the OP is aware that there is considerable sentiment worldwide that the US not take on a role as world policeman. Is the OP arguing that the US SHOULD be world policeman, and if so, how should this task be implemented?

28

First, welcome minega! I’m assuming that you are a Rwandan born and bred. If so, I hope you might contribute to future discussions regarding Africa or the Third World since I and most of us here will be interested in your point of view.

minega, it is likely that you have witnessed things in your country so unspeakably horrific and brutal that I can only count my blessings that I was born elsewhere, beautiful though Rwanda may be. It is entirely understandable that you might cast around for someone else to blame, if only in order to bring some semblance of understanding or explanation to something so bewilderingly appalling, especially when you see the world act with great haste in the name of arguably far less deserving causes.

I believe more could, and should, have been done in order to reduce the slaughter, even though I agree that the nature of the conflict was such that a terrible atrocity was never going to be entirely avoidable. For some UN troops to at least try to set up viable safe havens within Tutsi dominated territory might have saved a few thousand lives and given hope to the victims that the world was taking notice.

Also, in a wider scope and looking longer term, a major factor in this and almost every other civil war in Africa is the prevalence of cheap but immensely powerful small arms, most of which are manufactured and exported from here in western democracies. Were similar regulations applied to such weapons as, say, nuclear power station parts, it might encourage more Africans to turn to the ballot before the bullet in future disagreements. (Of course, the use of machetes and bare hands in the genocide was well documented, but a small-arms race between even small groups of militia is sometimes enough to kick-start all out war between two entire ethnic groups.)

However, you must also understand the reluctance of foreign nations to risk the lives of their own young men and women in an interference which, as has been pointed out, faced massive logistical problems and which might even have made a terrible situation even worse, difficult as that might be to imagine.

If a strong peace is to come to your country, it will not be from seeking people to blame, but people to forgive.

29

So you think i dont know the spelling of you…stupid Africans eh? Ilike to abbreviate things that doesnt mean i dont know English.
As for HIV…do u think there were prostitutes while people were being slaughtered?Give me a break.
And i dont recall saying that your soldiers were robots or anything.I understand your point of view very well but i disagree.

30

sigh…stressful thread…get back to the Natalie Imbruglia thread minega…

31

minega, please stay a while, and try not to get stressed. The reason this is such a popular Debate Board is precisely because you are likely to meet someone with whom you strongly disagree.

It is also a little more “formal” here than elsewhere on the Board, and you must be prepared to cut people a little more slack. However strongly they may be disagreeing with you, they will not be insulting you since direct insults are not tolerated by the moderators.

I, and I’m sure many others here, would be very interested to hear your personal experience of the war, including what you think could have been done differently. I’d be grateful if you could share your memories and insights, painful though they may be.

32

If the populace were as unarmed as the facts of the genocide suggests, 10-15,000 guys armed with assault weapons might have been more than enough to prevent or significantly reduce the genocide. The threat of facing a squad of guys armed with assault weapons who know how to use them would probably have kept a lot of massacre-ers at bay, if the massacre-ers had nothing more than machetes and bare hands to work with.

So far as I know, we’re not talking a well-armed insurgency here, but a mass uprising of unarmed or poorly-armed insurgents. This is one place where a world cop might have made a difference.

Yeah, I know I’m second-guessing the guys who were on the ground at the time, but I have the benefit of that 20-20 hindsight thing going.

33

Might?
Rwanda, area 10,169 square miles (26,338 square kilometers).
So that’s 1 to 1.5 soldiers per square mile.
Better hope these troops are damn mobile and have awesome eyesight!

34

originaly by I know lots

If this is the truth, what makes anyone thing that a peace keeping force of a similar number would have done any good??

originaly by sam stone

If the above was the plan, why do you think that any of the peace keeping force would have survived past 2 days? If they were killing 10,000 people a day how on earth could a measly 15,000 stop it?? Just because you have better guns doesnt mean you stand a chance. Guns have to be reloaded,machetes dont. As soon as they had run low on ammo the peace keeping force would have been cut up like chunks of bush meat.

35

I think we can fairly safely discount the scenario of 10,000 UN troops standing there mowing down a tide of machete-wielding Hutus advancing, zombie-like, until the ammo ran out, or indeed one single soldier policing two square miles of parasite-filled jungle while fantasising about a prostitute with Ebola.

I am by no means particularly well informed regarding the conflict itself, which is why I am hoping minega returns, but it is surely entirely possible that a well-armed 10,000 strong force might, at the very least, be able to defend a safe haven (similar to Srebrenica, for example). The UN troops at Srebrenica were attacked, but not by a full all-out assault, and although its civilian population was targetted by mortars and snipers, I doubt such wholesale slaughter as was witnessed in Rwanda would have been possible.

Of course, such a plan would require the Tutsis to get to any Safe Area quickly and without being butchered on the way, and large refugee camps have their own deadly dangers in the form of starvation and disease, and so thousands would still doubtless have perished. However, I would suggest that, had such a plan been carried out, we would not be talking of a death toll of 1 million plus.

36

Back to Somalia for a minute: over 15,000 soldiers, from Pakistan, Italy, Belgium, France, and Great Britain, Malaysia, etc. went into that country to try to stop a civil war. Billions in food and economic aid were expended, and the result? We lost 18 of our best soldiers (the Pakistanis lost 25 killed).
I thhink we learned a good lesson from Somalia: do not get involved in tribal wars! There is NO reason to suppose that ANY multinational force could have stopped the bloodbath in Ruwanda-it could just have well turned into another Somalia.
I think that intervention in remote places like Ruwanda could turn into major disasters, costing the lives of many soldiers.
Don’t do it!

37

I agree with SM: the scenarios of 15,000 troops facing down advancing hordes is utterlly without reason. What we were dealing with were small roving death sqauds and unarmed mobs going house to house: not soldiers, but ordinary citizens who realized that the normal constraints of law and order had been taken away, and that the government was on their side. They would never have stood up to a large armed force. The 10,000 killings were aggregate: not all happening in one place done by one huge unit. Even if the peacekeeping troops stuck together and only covered a small area, they most certainly could have prevented thousands of people at least from dying.

Indeed, international forces probably could have shut down the genocide simply by simply blowing up the Hutu radio stations that egged on and coordinated the genocides. Even a THREAT from the U.S. or U.N. to use force might have stopped things in their tracks just as quickly as it started. We don’t know because no one bothered to apply such pressures or make such threats. We not only just watched, but our administration actually tried to play down what was happening.

More than that, not acting makes a laughingstock of our claims to give a damn about human rights and genocide: our promises ever since WWII that such things would never be allowed to happen again, and the rhetoric of administrations since then to justify wars agaist oppresive leaders like Noriega, Saddam, et al. Is that simply convienient but empty rhetoric? If so, with what authority did we try anyone for genocide at Nuremburg? Or was that simply pleasant excuse for revenge?

38

Nobody called you “stupid”, minega.

As for you being African, I hadn’t noticed your Location until somebody pointed it out.

I don’t want massacres any more than any other decent person does. But can you tell me–did Rwanda’s neighboring states give permission for troop convoys to move through their territories? Or military transport aircraft, for that matter? If they said 'No", then there is no way we could have come.

On this last point I confess total ignorance. Was this issue resolved?

39

Apos, I am sure that at any given moment since 1945 there has been at least one genocide going on somewhere on the planet. As regrettable as this is, no power, the United States included, can afford to put a stop to every single one of these genocides by force. Otherwise they’ll be invading and occupying a different conutry every fortnight. It’s very regrettable, but that’s the way it is. In circumstances where it is politically and militarily possible to prevent, halt or even slow down a genocide, then intervention is sound (eg Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone). These are a minority of cases, however.

For instance, to use force to stop every genocidal government that exists right at this very minute, we’d have to attack Iraq, North Korea, Burma/Myanmar and Zimbabwe immediately. Plus China has a million plus political prisoners in labour-camps, so we’d better have a crack at them too…

40

You don’t need that big a police force to stop popular uprisings. Having them there keeps the population in check and prevents them from getting out of hand in the first place.

And the forces would be very heavily armed. When you’ve got helicopters in the air and light armor on the ground, you’ve got an awful lot of power against mobs.