Nation fails to recognize Rwandan Genocide

Lalas is a fourth-year international development studies and
political science student and vice president of Samahang
Pilipino.

By Jonah Lalas

Two days ago, students and community members commemorated the 6
million people who died in the Holocaust. As I watched students
gather at Meyerhoff Park, I recalled going to the Holocaust Museum
and seeing a pile of shoes on display that came from the bruised
feet of people who were exterminated because they were Jewish.

I felt sick at the human potential for extreme violence. Little
did I know that despite the Holocaust Museum opening in 1993 with
slogans of “˜Remember’ and “˜Never Again’ and
President Clinton’s statement that the museum was “an
investment in a secure future against whatever insanity lurks
ahead,” another genocide would occur in Rwanda.

This time, unlike the Holocaust, the United States and the
international community stood by and did nothing. The Rwandan
Genocide began on April 6, 1994 and within 100 days 800,000 people
lay dead, their bodies hacked into pieces by machetes. The killing
added up to an average of 333 murders every hour, five-and-a-half
lives every minute. The rate of deaths equated to three times the
rate of murdered Jews during the Holocaust, and yet we did not
respond.

We must begin to understand that unless we, as Americans, start
looking more critically at the world and our government, people of
all races, nations, and creeds will continue to suffer. This month
marks the 8th anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide, and it is
important that we recognize the facts behind this massive
extermination in the hopes that we may learn from it. The Rwandan
Genocide is evidence that despite important events like
Tuesday’s Holocaust Memorial Day, we have collectively
learned nothing.

Rwanda is mainly comprised of two ethnic groups: a Hutu majority
and a 15 percent Tutsi minority. For over a century, these two
groups coexisted rather amicably amid racial tensions linked to the
fact that the Tutsi minority composed most of the upper class. The
real seeds of hatred were planted by the Belgian colonial rule that
employed ethnic identity cards and used racial policies to curry
favor with the Tutsis as a means of imposing rule upon the
Hutus.

But in 1961, Rwanda won its independence and Hutus seized
control of the government. The resulting reversal of power led to
decades of more violence that exploded in 1994. On April 6, 1994,
the airplane of Hutu President Hayarimana, who was willing to make
concessions to Tutsi demands for equality, was shot down. Though it
is now widely known that the plane was shot down by Hutu
extremists, Hutu leaders at the time blamed the killing on the
Tutsis, using the assassination to call on the Hutu population to
systematically murder the Tutsi people. The history of hatred
combined with extreme poverty, exacerbated by economic policies
imposed by the United States, created the conditions for mass
genocide.

In 1948, the Geneva Convention established that genocide is a
crime under international law and that nation-states that are aware
of genocide have an obligation to intervene. But at the time of the
Rwandan Genocide, the Clinton Administration forbade U.S. officials
from using the word “genocide” to describe the events
in Rwanda and merely stated to the press that “acts of
genocide may have occurred.”

Christine Shelley, a State Department spokeswoman, was asked on
April 28, 1994 how many “acts of genocide” it took to
constitute genocide. She responded that she “wasn’t in
a position to answer.” Shelley went on to explain to the
reporters, “There are obligations which arise in connection
with that use of that term.”

Clearly, despite the United States’ claim of supporting
human rights, our government refused to act. To make things worse,
President Clinton signed the Presidential Decision Directive 25 on
May 3, 1994, which aimed to limit the United States’ role in
international peacekeeping missions. Two days later, National
Security Adviser Anthony Lake gave a press briefing on PDD 25
stating, “When I wake up every morning and look at the
headlines and the stories and the images on television of these
conflicts, I want to work to end every conflict.” But,
“the reality is that we cannot often solve other
people’s problems; we can never build their nations for
them.”

This sounds extremely contradictory, especially given our
government’s interest in “rebuilding” the state
of Afghanistan. What United States’ inaction demonstrates is
that while the United States praises human rights in theory,
positive interests and incentives motivate United States’
actions.

Considering the Rwandan tragedy, I wonder if public efforts to
honor the victims of the Holocaust are merely token gestures.

Our war on terrorism has given the green light to states like
Israel, China, India and the Philippines to attack their
marginalized communities, and the fallout of these attacks has been
used by psychopaths like Saddam Hussein to justify further
oppression of their own people.

When will the United States start placing the value of human
life over its national interests?

Black or white, Jewish or Muslim, when genocide is involved, we
must pressure our leaders to work with the international community
to defend human rights around the world.