The Rwanda genocide.

Great Debates
61

My familiarity with the Rwandan situation is largely limited to the AM article. As I recall that article, the commander of the UN forces in place believed he could do considerably more with relatively little increases in manpower and support.

Also, at least some of the killing was spurred/directed by radio broadcasts. Control of these radio stations, or elimination/preoccupation of certain organizers might have had a huge impact.

As was pointed out above, this was an extremely one-sided conflict. Far distinguishable from a hot civil war. Which leads me to suspect that intervention by an armed and committed third party have had considerable fortune deterring the aggressors.

Any shortening of the genocide would have saved thousands of lives. However, at what point did it become obvious that this situation would go as far as it did? 100 days is only 3 months.

Just curious - how quickly can the US mobilize what size of a force, and maintain it for how long?

I feel there is a significant amount of - I’m not sure the correct word - but I’ll say prejudice with regard to US international relations. Simply put - I suspect Rwanda is not all that important in the minds of most Americans. And given limited resources, what portion of them does the average citizen want committed to the goal of resolving domestic unrest in Rwanda? And what motivation is there for US/european decision-makers to support military involvement which will undoubtedly result in local boys coming home in body bags?

Please forgive the seeming harshness, but what hard reasons are there for an American to care what goes on in Rwanda? Of course, there are altruistic concerns of world peace and respect for life. But IME, such altruistic concerns alone are generally insufficient to spur significant state action. What vital natural resources does Rwanda have? Is Rwanda in a strategic location?Was this genocide likely to lead to wider unrest throughout Africa?

Also, minega - I am sorry to tell you that as horrendous as this situation undoubtedly was to one living through it, it was entirely possible for folks in the US to be completely ignorant of it. Today, less than a decade later, I bet the majority of folks on the street would not be able to say anything meaningful about this genocide, identify the 2 tribes in question let alone say which was the aggressor, or even identify Rwanda on a map. I’m not sure exactly why that is, but in my experience - living in a large city, working with primarily college aged people - I assure you it most definitely is.

In fact, a person who did not read the world news section of a major newspaper or watch/listen to the evening network news, could manage to go happily about their life entirely ignorant of the situation. Even if the average person became aware of it, he might simply resort to complacency thinking, “Some more of THOSE people are killing each other over THERE.”

Yes, the US is generally extremely hesitant to involve itself in other nation’s “domestic” situations. Which, of course, makes our willingness to jump into Iraq all the more confusing.*

And “keeping the peace” is a rather nebulous goal. Against which just about any loss of American life can be seen as unacceptable.

Is anyone aware of any specific actions Africans nations within the UN urge that body to take?

I don’t know that I would say anyone outside of Rwanda was “to blame” for this situation. But in retrospect I certainly wish my country or the world community had done SOMETHING. And the failure to act in response to such an obvious need makes me all the more suspicious of instances in which we DO decide to commit our military and other aid.

62

Hi, jjimm -

Is your question limited only to Africa? If we are going to talk about, say, Viet Nam as a former colony of France, it is going to get complex. Unless Viet Nam fits your standard model.

In the sense of the OP, in that the West did not “do enough” to prevent the atrocities in Africa, I suppose one could blame practically everything that has happened since about 1960 in Africa on the former colonial powers.

It’s just that I find it hard to see how what the Belgians did fifty years ago in Rwanda is the cause of the slaughter of a few years back.

I grant you, for another example, that the Italians attacked Ethiopia back in the 1930s. But I wouldn’t exactly say they are to blame for the famines of the 1980s. Especially since there the West actually tried to do something about a famine that was engineered almost deliberately by Mengistu, who took the opportunity to try to starve his opponents and their supporters.

Of course, we still have Haile Selassie’s famous line, “When there is a famine in my land, the poor people starve.” So famines in that unhappy land are hardly new, any more than a sort of calloused resignation among African leaders is new. And the Lion of Judah hardly qualifies as the world’s most enlightened leader at his best.

Still, it is hard for me to see how the West could prevent Mengistu from acting as he did, or how blame accrues to us rather than to him.

I suppose, in theory, it would be possible for the West to have set up nations based on purely altruistic motives, and dedicated themselves, not to exploiting the resources of the Dark Continent, but to creating a substantial middle class with a stake in genuine liberal democracy, so that the history of post-colonialist Africa is not summed up in the cynical “one man, one vote - one time” slogan so common there. It’s just that I doubt that any country has ever treated any other country so, with nothing to gain, as well as committing the necessary military resources vital to an area with a history of tribal warfare and a different tradition of how to treat the subjugated than, for instance, the Marshall Plan in post-WWII Europe. Even there, the West had a lot to gain. There have rarely been nations who acted so disinterestedly throughout the history of the world.

Could you describe your “standard model” for post-colonialist societies? Maybe I would understand your question a little better if I understood what you see as the procession of history in such cases.

Regards,
Shodan

PS - minega, don’t worry about it. This is the SDMB. People get excited. It doesn’t hurt the discussion unless we let it. If I was offensive to you, I apologize in my own turn. - S

63

Well, there’s two issues here that aren’t necessarily linked:

  1. Were the Western powers responsible for the Rwandan genocide?

My answer would be “no.”

  1. Could the Western powers have greatly reduced the scale of the Rwandan genocide without a huge commitment of men and resources?

My answer would be “almost certainly.”

Which begs the following question:

Should the Western powers have tried to prevent or ameliorate the Rwandan genocide?

My answer would be “yes.”

64

Shodan, well, there was the whole, “you people do this yourself!”, implying, in some part, that minega was responsible.

Also, yes, colonialism is PART of the problem. Not all of the problem. It’s part of it, but I would guess it’s much more complex than all that.

65

I agree with Guin. It’s a complex, multifaceted situation, I’m not a historian, so I may be talking out of my hat, but in my observation of postcolonial situations, here’s my model:[ul]
[li]Colonialist targets colony.[/li][li]Colonialist employs divide and conquer tactics.[/li][li]Colonialist favours one ethnic or political group to create beaurocracy.[/li][li]Colonial stability.[/li][li]Colonialist pulls out/is kicked out.[/li][li]Civil war & attendant chaos, often along divide & conquer lines.[/li][li]Ongoing strife[/li][/ul]Obviously this is not going to be 100% applicable to every situation, but I think this basic model can be applied with varying degrees of correlation to Vietnam, to the former Yugoslavia, to Ireland, to India, to Rwanda, to East Timor (though in this case the vacuum was filled by a second colonial power), Cambodia, and many countries in South America. It doesn’t always happen (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the US, etc.), but when it does, some former colonial countries feel they have a duty to help sort out the mess they left behind.

66

----The Rwandans kill each other, and say, “The West is responsible for this because they didn’t stop us.” If we had tried to stop you, you would have called it neo-colonialism, and condemned it.—

I very much doubt this, especially when presented as an after-the-fact excuse. In fact, this is a straw man to begin with. Rwandans don’t have to blame us FOR the genocide: they can simply blame us for not taking rather minor measures to stop or curtail it, especially since we so boldly parade around our claim to take on a moral duty to stop such things to justify our interventions elsewhere. Your argument is akin to the one holding FDR’s administration blameless for not bombing the known Holocaust ovens or train lines to the death camps, despite these targets being only a few miles away from other military targets. Of course the Germans were 100% responsible for their own actions: but doesn’t any moral question fall upon us for not acting? Especially since we later claimed that the Holocaust was unacceptable and that we had a right to sit in judgement over those that carried it out German?

I mean, do you believe that individuals are always undertaking actions utterly without any regard for their historical context, their own iniatives utterly uncontrolled by actions of people in the past. That some things (like singular and sudden mass genocides) are simply inevitable?

If someone spends years sexually abusing a child, do you think it just random luck that the child grows up to be an abuser himself much of the time? Certainly, the grown child is 100% responsible for their actions. But IMO, THEM being 100% responsible does not in any way relieve or exhaust the responsiblity of parties that helped create, in very predictable ways, the person they became.

If a person ties a child to a train track, that person is responsible for killing the child. But if you walk past the child and think “well, I would untie him before the train came to smoosh him, but I might be late for lunch” then aren’t you likewise responsible for not saving the child?

So what do we do when considering the total percentage of responsibility? I submit that a percentage is entirely the wrong way to go about it. Indeed, I sumbit that, by claiming that blaming another party for inaction reduces the responsiblity of the killers, people are using faulty reasoning (the total percentage idea) to avoid moral responsibility by appealing to hatred for the killers: that it is a deversion, not a legitimate objection.
To use such a measure suggests that the original killers responsibility would diminish simply by the addition of a fact the killer wasn’t even aware of: that you came by and refused to save the boy. But that can’t be right.

Further, what if, instead of saving the boy, you shot the boy as a timesaver (less cruel than death by train, but doesn’t make you late for lunch)? Is the original killer now less culpable? Is he less culpable if he KNEW that you would come along and kill the boy in the way you did?

My conclusion here is that moral responsbility does not exhaust itself in a single person, and is not meaningfully represented by a multi-person total percentage that changes relatively with the addition of more parties.

67

As I pointed out earlier in this thread, the Belgians exacerbated “racial” ( or class, if you prefer, there is a fine and amorphous line in this case ) tensions.

The Belgians bought into the scientific racism of the day and became convinced that the dominant Tutsi must represent a “superior race” that while obviously inferior to Europeans, were superior to the Hutu. Based on this “Hamitic hypothesis” ( i.e. all “civilized” African societies were based on invading “Hamites” - lapsed “Christian Ethiopians” ), they imposed a rigid classification system that placed the Tutsi on the top, granting them all local leadership and educational opportunities, which were denied to the Hutus. In otherwords they took an unequal society with nonetheless permeable ethnic barriers and transaformed it into a much more polarized society with impermeable barriers. Denied the outlet of social mobility ( i.e. “Hutu” rising in economic status to become “Tutsi”, “Tutsi” falling in status to become “Hutu”, as previously was possible ), the stage was set for a deep ethnic hatred based on a locked-in inequality.

The Belgians certainly deserve a share of the blame.

  • Tamerlane
68

But that single person decided to pick up a machete and decided to kill some woman or child. I don’t buy the ‘I am a victim of society’ defense over here, and I don’t buy it on a tribal level either.

It seems a but paternalistic to assign blame to the Belgians for the massacre. As if, “Oh, those Tutsi and Hutu don’t really know what they are doing. It must have been bad parenting (or governing) that made them like that…”
During the festivities of the mid-90’s in Croatia/Bosnia/Serbia, nobody was blaming the Romans/Illyreans/Ottomans/Russians. Those who commited or called for mass murder were (properly) called out by the rest of the world, without some inane searching for deeper blame.

When someone decides to cross the lines of ‘civilized warfare’ and decend to genocide, it is just that; Someone deciding to act like a frigging animal.

69

Sure.

But it’s not a defense. It’s an explanation. The Belgians ( those involved in the formulation of racial policy in Rwanda-Urundi ) took a bad situation if you will and made it much worse. You might say they transformed a strong class system into a far more rigid caste system.

Does this exculpate the murderers? Certainly not. Murder is murder.

Does it explain the motivation behind the murders? In part, and only in part, yes.

Do the Belgians ( those mostly long-dead men who enforced this caste system ) share in any of the moral blame for the killings? Yes. Why? Because they directly helped set in motion the train of events that would lead to them.

Did the slavers and slave-owners hold any moral responsibility for the people killed in Nat Turner’s Rebellion? Yes. Does Milosevic ( and to a lesser extent, perhaps, Tudjman ) hold any moral responsibility for inciting ethnic tensions in the Balkans, leading to massacres, never mind his direct orders? Yes.

MHO.

  • Tamerlane
70

Why don’t we assign blame to the anti-colonialists then? Sure, they were right bastards in some ways, but they generally kept the peace. And I am not being facetious here; While colonial rule was in place, Africa was generally a more peaceful place, no?

71

originaly by:smilig bandit

If that is what you think then you study the wrong art. I would put my sifu up agains 4 or 5 people armed with fire arms. I would also pray for them. Remember , it took 2 NYPD officers 19 bullets to hit Amidou Diallo twice from 5 feet away and he wasnt a threat. I dont see how our millitary could do any better because the NYPD see real combat more often.

72

Sorry, but 4 or 5 people with firearms (assuming basic proficiency) would gun down your sifu. Shit, provided I have my weapon out and ready, I could gun your sifu down pretty easily (provided he’s not starting two feet behind me or something). If it’s an automatic weapon or a shotgun it won’t even be close.

As for the military - they go through much more rigorous weapons training than your basic police patrolman. The average infantryman is a much better shot than the average police officer.

73

Some were/are to blame - Some were no more and no less that corrupt, self-aggrandizing empire-builders who happily supported ethnic tensions as part of a divide and rule policy once the Europeans had departed. However that wasn’t your point.

Whether colonialism was a good or bad thing has been argued before and I’m not interested in doing it again. Peace at the point of the bayonet of a repressive regime is not a peace worth having.

I’m afraid the other part of the argument isn’t much better. Excluding those I’ve already mentioned who did exploit the tensions present in post-colonial Africa, the anti-colonialists did not create any of the factors that led to this sort of slaughter. Saying that “well, the colonialists sure screwed things up, but once they had they might as well stick around because otherwise this screwed-up system they created is liable to implode”, is a non-starter as an argument, as far as I’m concerned. Never mind that it was psychologically harmful to the colonialists themselves ( no man should be placed in such dominion over another ), it is morally untenable to deny freedom. The anti-colonialists were in the right, the colonialists were not ( and it was they that created most of the mess ) and therein lies the difference.

  • Tamerlane
74

Another psuedo-random thought on the matter:

Does anyone (here), who think we should have militarily intervened in Rwanda, think that we should not militarily intervene in Iraq?

It seems that at least one of the conditions of Rwanda exist: The exertion of force by one party (Baathists) over another (everyone else).

For the record, I am all for regime change in Iraq, since we have vital national interests at risk, namely, oil.

Rwanda I know less about; It seems to me that the ‘only’ interest there was humanitarian. (From a quick glance at the CIA factbook, it seems they don’t have any vital minerals or resources).

And I would tend to say that we should not have militarily intervened there. To stabilize a country that may or may not want us there in the first place would have been an extraordinarily messy and expensive affair; Remember that half-starved mobs of Somalians decided it was a good idea to wave-attack our troops, and we were there to feed them. How many troops would we have needed for a country many times larger? How many Americans would have died to pause a massacre? Would we have had to become the new colonial masters, laying down the law? Maybe it would have been worth the cost, but I think not.

75

I strongly supported policing Rwanda and also going into Iraq.

My attitude is that we have no obligation to help people who are oppressed in other countries. We get involved because we are good people, and good people don’t stand by while the innocent are oppressed. If we see a wrong, and we have the power to fix it, then becoming involved is simply the right thing to do.

Saying, “We have no responsibility in Rwanda and should just stay home” is the international equivalent of standing idly by on a street while a woman is raped in front of you. You might be well within your rights to stay out of it, but going to the defense of the innocent is a virtue.

76

What’s the cut-off? If the Rwandans decide to kill each other next year is it still the fault of the Belgians? In 25 years? 50 Years? It seems that they (and other colonial powers) are being assigned blame on an open-ended basis. At some point the locals must bear the blame for their own actions. When is that point reached?

Thanks.

Testy

77

Hmmm…I thought I was clear that they do bear the blame for their actions. Nor is this baldly “the fault of the Belgians.” The Belgians bear some, I repeat some, responsibility for helping to create the current environment. But saying the system instituted by the Belgians was a causative factor doesn’t absolve the killers from any blame. It’s not like blame in this situation is a percentage and because the Belgians get a slice of the pie, the murderers now must take a smaller piece.

As to when the Belgians will no longer be ( partially ) at fault - When their are no more killings based on whether you are ethnically Hutu or Tutsi in Rwanda or Burundi. Until that happens, whether it be ten years or ten thousand, the taint, however diminished by time, will remain. There is no statute of limitations. None whatsoever.

  • Tamerlane
78

Thanks for that and apologies for my reading skills. You did indeed make the point that there is no fixed amount of blame or guilt that can be used up, leaving others guiltless.

OK, the Belgians bear some quantity of blame and there is no statute of limitations. Belgians will be guilty (in some degree) until the Rwandans stop killing each other over this particular flaw in their society.

How guilty should the average Belgian feel about this? And which ones? As you point out, the Belgians which erected the system leading to the recent slaughters are mostly long dead.

More importantly, what should the current Belgians do about it? Should they feel guilty enough to send troops to do social engineering? What could they do that would absolve them of the guilt they bear? And what would be the fallout of that?

Regards and Thanks.

Testy

79

Testy: Ah, tougher questions.

Not very, IMO. I’m not a huge believer in residual guilt on an individual level. Though I’m a white American male, I don’t feel directly guilty for either the American system of chattel slavery or the genocide of so many of the Amerindians. I do feel a little remote shame as a citizen U.S., that such actions took place and that there is fallout still resonating from them. Or maybe not even shame, precisely, but rather an acknowledgement of evils past which is a part of all Americans’ collective heritage, as evils of one sort or another are part of virtually every country’s heritage. But I try to put those feelings in a proper historical perspective and I don’t think they in any way invalidate the other strengths of the U.S. as a country.

However as a nation, I think the U.S. does have some special obligations stemming from those historical inequities. Of course just what those obligations might be and whether they are being/have been met is a matter for another thread. Regardless, I think a similar analogy can be made to Belgium and the other colonial powers.

A very hard question. I think something was/is owed the sub-continent by the colonial powers ( and Belgium was really a particularly bad actor, even by colonial standards ). However if you put me to it, I’m afraid I have hard time articulating just what or how much that should be. I will say that the first ( moral ) mistake was not making a more massive and protracted investment in these countries at independance, to help re-build ( or just plain build ), train, and stabilize them. But that’s water under the bridge. At this point it is far more problematic to say what is owed. Especially by a tiny country like Belgium, which while very prosperous by international standards, certainly doesn’t have the resources of a United States - I rather doubt they have the force-projection capability to do serious military-based social engineering even if they wanted to ( and it was determined that such help was actually both desired and desirable ).

I’m actually completely on the fence on whether or not a military intervention was a good idea given the information available at the time. Certainly in hindsight, I think Sam Stone is absolutely correct that there is a moral imperative that kicks in when we get a ( probably preventable ) genocide of that magnitude in the offing. And I do indeed think it was preventable. But I also think there is a real issue of pragmatism. Rwanda really isn’t an easy place to insert yourself in strength, being as deeply landlocked as it is, and though it became clear something bad was going on fairly quickly, I’m not entirely sure anyone in the west realized just how profoundly bad it was/was going to be until it was perhaps already too late to prevent the worst of it. That’s speculative of course, but I think it is a reasonable argument.

However I also believe the counter-argument of past history showed that this could be disastrous, isn’t bad either. So I’m conflicted. Should we intervene in every internal conflict? No, that’s probably not very realistic or smart. But preventing wholesale genocide on the scale we saw in Rwanda I think is a special case. I’m just not sure it could have been reliably predicted by anyone outside the actual country, other than perhaps a handful of experts. I might be wrong there, however.

So, not much of an answer for you, I’m afraid.

But at least I’m willing to say “I don’t know”, once in awhile ;).

  • Tamerlane
80

This has become quite an interesting thread, and apologies if I break up its flow a little.

Firstly, welcome back minega. You suggestions and insights seem limited to consideration of revenge and “getting the bastards”. While your bitterness is understandable might I suggest that, unthinkable as it may seem, forgiveness for the unforgivable is the only way to truly deal with this vengeful hunger in you and your countrymen. (It would take incredible bravery to do so, and I’m not sure I could achieve such a feat myself.) Also, your OP seems to attack the French “safe haven” since it allowed the killers to escape. Did this Safe Area save lives, in your opinion/memory? If so, surely that outweighs the fact that the killers escaped?

As to those responsible aside from the killers themselves, I again strongly recommend this article if you have a spare 10 minutes:

http://www.amacad.org/news/scourge.htm

You might well concur that we are partially to blame, and not merely by our inaction.