You Will Anyway: Denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good

April 14, 2005

Rwandan President Paul Kagame, in a speech at Boston College Monday afternoon, marked the anniversary of the genocide that cost the lives of nearly a million of his countrymen in 1994, while endorsing quick action by the international community to address the current violence against civilians in the Darfur region of the Sudan.

"The Rwandan genocide was a crime against humanity," said Kagame, who led armed resistance to the mass slaughter as a guerilla general, and who since has been credited with restoring stability to the country as president.
Boston College Chronicle article

The title of this post are words by author Philip Gourevitch which put me in mind of our current hosts in Washington (and many of ourselves) decrying the evil of men like Saddam Hussein, and whole countries like Iran and Syria, and whichever other country fits into our "axis of evil" agenda at the moment. In fact, reading Gourevitch's book We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, about the 1994 Rwandan genocide, I came across numerous passages that remind me very much of our current position in the Middle East - at least the principles.

I'll post some of that, but first, some quotes from an interview with author Philip Gourevitch:

The story had been bothering me, which is to say that in April of 1994 a program of massacres began in Rwanda that ended up claiming the lives of 800,000 in a hundred days. People were murdered at a rate that exceeded by three times the speed the extermination of Jews during the Holocaust. It happened in our time, in front of our noses, somewhat before our cameras. And it vanished very quickly. As soon as the blood was dry the story disappeared from the newspapers. Nobody really had explained it. When one read the papers it didn't seem to me to make much sense. It was described as anarchy and chaos, which struck me as implausible simply because in order to kill at that clip requires organization, it requires method, it requires mobilization. It requires the opposite of anarchy and chaos. Mass destruction is not arbitrary, it doesn't just come about willy-nilly. Those things interested me. So in other words, I felt the story was being told wrong, and casually and cavalierly, and that in some basic way a great calamity had happened which we were quite content to be ignorant of.
I had spent some time prior to that writing about the early nineties when they built the Holocaust Museum in Washington and Schindler's List was coming out and there was all of this very hyped-up Holocaust commemoration rhetoric going around that by standing tall against intolerance we would ensure that nothing like this would ever happen again. The Holocaust Museum was dedicated in Washington on the mall in 1993 with this idea that it somehow or other has a preventive function. And I thought that was rubbish. I thought it was wishful thinking. I thought it was a fantasy. And I also thought, sadly, that denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good [...]
[...]
People like to go to the Holocaust Museum and say, that's who I relate to, the guy who did right. Either they relate somehow to the victim and feel bad about themselves and sorry for themselves, or they relate to the good guy. Very few go in there and say, oh yeah I probably would have been just like an ordinary conformist Nazi murderer, right? But probably the great majority of people who go through that museum would have been, because that's what the great majority of people in Europe were. They were either bystanders, collaborators, or in some other way morally reprehensible positions which are all too understandable. But there they are. But no, this museum allows you to fantasize that you're sort of morally excellent. And reality doesn't allow that fantasy much room, sadly.
[...]
The general who has essentially run Rwanda since the genocide, General Paul [Kagame], who is the vice president and minister of defense in the post-genocidal government, said something that made a strong impression on me in that context. He said, "People can be made bad and they can be taught to be good. And if you look," (he was saying this as an optimist in post-genocidal Rwanda), "the same mechanisms that could be used to pervert a society to that degree can be used to influence people towards harmony." And it struck me as both the most optimistic and the most cynical or sinister remark that one could make, because it makes one conscious of how utterly malleable and adaptable people are to context.

When the movie "Hotel Rwanda" came out, I thought the trailer looked interesting, and Don Cheadle seemed to be giving an especially good performance, but what really drew me to watch it was that it was based on a real-life character who had lived through the Rwandan genocide.

In 1994, at the height of the genocide activity, I was working in an agricultural department at the university with a post-doctoral student who happened to be a Tutsi from Rwanda. His entire family - what was left of it - including a wife and baby, were still in Rwanda. I don't now remember what city, but I remember well my bewilderment at his attitude. He told me very matter-of-factly that 18 of his closest kin had been murdered, and that his wife and child were living amidst the ongoing genocide. He wasn't able to reach them by phone except sporadically, but he said, without a hint of concern, "They're okay. They just have to stay inside the house."

Perhaps that's what made me incurious about what was happening in Rwanda; along with the seeming unconcern of the "international community" and the lack of news, perhaps I figured things must not be "that bad." All I really experienced regarding the situation at the time was a dislike for my co-worker - a man who could go gaily about his studies and work in the U.S., always looking for parties and after-work diversions, while his wife and child were confined to a house in another country for fear of the dangers of stepping into the streets. I tended then to think he must be exaggerating the number of relatives killed, looking for some attention perhaps - otherwise, how could he behave so casually? And, like today's non-news from Falluja, there wasn't much particularly distressing coming through the media here.

I'm sorry I didn't try to understand more of what was happening at that time. Were the man's wife and child Tutsi like him? I don't recall. If so, as it turns out, staying in the house was not going to save them. Did they survive the massacres? I don't know. Money for my co-worker's job came to an end, and he moved on.

There's so much I didn't understand in 1994 about the Tutsis and Hutus and what went before, during and afer the genocide - things that the book puts into perspective. Mr. Gourevitch not only recounts events, but asks the questions about humanity in such clear ways that it's also a good human nature philosophy discourse.

Also, the movie "Hotel Rwanda" is a good watch, even though there are discrepancies (as always with movies) between the film version and the actual events in Paul Rusesabagina's life. According to the Gourevitch account, on which the movie was based, in my opinion the actual events are more interesting.

And now for those passages from Gourevitch's account that reminded me in some sense of three things: our Middle East situation; our own precarious, fascist-leaning government and its citizenry; and that we humans go round and round and round on this planet, never learning anything much useful about ourselves.

I need to make a point here of saying that there is much, much more from this excellent piece of work to be gleaned, both as a historical account, and as a commentary on humanity, than these few passages. Gourevitch ponders all the questions that ought to be asked about something so incredible - something that isn't over (see below**) and yet has been relegated to obscurity as a news item by "the mainstream press". (It has nothing to do with us, does it? I mean, those people have been killing each other for forever. It's what they know. Just like those Middle Easterners. Just like the Sudanese. Does Rwanda have oil?)

Excerpts from We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, 1998 - Philip Gourevitch:

p. 82

[...] Europe and North America began demanding gestures of democratization from their client regimes in Africa. It took a good deal of bullying, but after a meeting with his chief foreign patron, President François Mitterrand of France, [Rwanda's self-proclaimed President Major General] Habyarimana suddenly announced, in June of 1990, that it was time to establish a multiparty political system in Rwanda.
Habyarimana's embrace of reform was conspicuously half-hearted, a capitulation to foreign coercion, and instead of simple relief and enthusiasm, the prospect of an open competition for power provoked widespread alarm in Rwanda.

p. 83

Habyarimana's crowd [...] welcomed nationwide turmoil as a pretext for rounding up "internal enemies." Lists had already been prepared: educated Tutsis, prosperous Tutsis, and Tutsis who traveled abroad were among the first to be arrested, and prominent Hutus who were, for one reason or another, considered to be out of step with the regime were picked up as well.

p. 187

Consider General Sherman's march through Georgia at the head of the Union Army near the end of the American Civil War, a scorched-earth campaign of murder, rape, arson, and pillage that stands as a textbook case of gross human rights abuses. Historians don't seem to believe that the atrocities of Sherman's march fulfilled any otherwise unfulfillable strategic imperative. Yet it's generally agreed that the preservation of the Union and the consequent abolition of slavery served the national good, so historians regard Sherman's march as an episode of criminal excess by agents of the state rather than as evidence of the fundamental criminality of the state.

p. 218

Military men regard the army [Kagame] forged from the ragtag remnants of Rwigyema's original band, and the campaign he ran in 1994, as a work of plain genius. That he had pulled it off with an arsenal composed merely of mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, and, primarily, what one American arms specialist described to me as "piece of shit" secondhand Kalashnikovs, has only added to the legend.

"The problem isn't the equipment," Kagame told me. "The problem is always the man behind it. Does he understand why he is fighting?" In his view, determined and well-disciplined fighters, motivated by coherent ideas of political improvement, can always best the soldiers of a corrupt regime that stands for nothing but its own power.

p. 350

In mid-December of 1997, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright delivered a speech to the Organization of African Unity in Addis Ababa in which she said, "We, the international community, should have been more active in the early stages of the atrocities in Rwanda in 1994, and called them what they were - genocide." [...]
Three months later, Presdient Clinton followed Albright to Africa, and on March 25, 1998, he bacame the first Western head of state to visit Rwanda since the genocide. [...] Clinton forcefully reiterated Albright's apologies for refusing to intervene during the slaughter, and for supporting the killers in the [refugee] camps. [...] "It is important that the world know that these killings were not spontaneous or accidental ... they were most certainly not the result of ancient tribal struggles ... These events grew from a policy aimed at the systematic destruction of a people." And this mattered not only to Rwanda but also to the world, he explained, because "each bloodletting hastens the next, and as the value of human life is degraded and violence becomes tolerated, the unimaginable becomes more conceivable. [...] Never again must we be shy in the face of the evidence" of genocide.

It's interesting to note that the way we managed to shunt off our responsibility (according to a pact signed after WWII) to the genocide victims in Rwanda, like the White House legal staff discussing just what constitutes torture, was by choosing to interpret the pact not to say that we are required to act to defend the victims of genocide, but that the act gives us permission to act on their behalf. And in the alternative, our official stand on Rwanda at the time was, it wasn't genocide, but merely that "acts of genocide" may have occurred. As a reporter tried to ask, "How many 'acts of genocide' does it take to make a genocide?"

But, regardless of Clinton's eventual fine words, are we repeating the outrage of interpretation and avoidance in Darfur?

**
KIGALI, Apr 22, 2005 (Xinhua via COMTEX) - A batch of 700 Congolese nationals has arrived in Rwanda citing rebel harassment and mounting war tension in the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), an official said here Friday.

Straton Kamanzi, an official in the Rwandan Refugee Commission, said that the refugees are entering the country via Gisenyi province and are taken to Nkamira transit center where they are catered by local authorities in collaboration with the UN agency for refugees.

The refugees have been warned and given few hours to leave their country and had no option but seeking refuge in the neighboring state, he said.

"The Rwandan rebels, the Ex-Far and Interahamwe, vowed to kill us if we don't return to Rwanda and we had to run seeking refuge in fear of our lives," said a refugee Jean Kamaliza.

Kamanzi added that over 3,000 Congolese refugees had crossed into Rwanda since the beginning of April.
Relief Web article

One man was tasked by the United Nations with ensuring that peace was maintained in Rwanda - Canadian Lieutenant General Roméo Dallaire. But unsupported by U.N. headquarters and its Security Council far away in New York, Dallaire and his handful of soldiers were incapable of stopping the genocide.

After ten years of mental torture, reliving the horrors daily and more than once attempting suicide, Roméo Dallaire has poured out his soul in an extraordinary book. Shake Hands With The Devil is a cri de coeur. The General pulls no punches in his condemnation of top UN officials, expedient Belgian policy makers and senior members of the Clinton administration who chose to do nothing as Dallaire pleaded for reinforcements and revised rules of engagement.

Dallaire is convinced that, with a few thousand more troops and a mandate to act pre-emptively, he could have stopped the killings. His impotence, at a time of extreme crisis, preys on his conscience still.
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