Philip Gourevitch

n 1994, Rwandan Hutus massacred 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The brutality of the genocide—the sheer scale and methodical nature of the slaughter—remains almost incomprehensible.

So, too, does the failure of the world to intervene.

Since the Holocaust of World War II, the leading nations of the world have vowed to prevent and punish genocide: two-thirds of the members of the United Nations, including the United States, have signed the Convention on Genocide, which celebrated its 50th anniversary on December 9.

     In this context, says Philip Gourevitch, a U.S. Institute of Peace grantee and staff writer for The New Yorker, it becomes necessary to examine the disconnect between our desire to uphold humanitarian values and our failure to act in Rwanda. “We need to examine the growing gap between the easy rhetoric of concern for victims of tragedy and the hard challenges of averting such tragedies before they occur.”

Gourevitch is the author of a recent book that explores the Rwandan genocide and the world’s feeble response to it, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The Institute of Peace helped to fund the research for the book, and Peace Watch recently interviewed Gourevitch.

UN Officials Explain

In November 1993, the UN had sent several thousand peacekeeping forces to Rwanda under the command of Maj. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, a Canadian, to deter renewed outbreaks of violence between the Hutu and Tutsi. Within months—on January 11, 1994—Dallaire sent a fax to the Department of Peacekeeping Operations at UN headquarters in New York informing officials that a genocide was being planned. Dallaire outlined the genocide plans in considerable detail and asked permission to take preventive action.

The same day, he received a reply from the UN telling him that he had no mandate to act.

For a long time, UN officials refused to discuss the reply, Gourevitch says. But one day, he received a copy of the UN reply from a reliable source and, with that in hand, once again asked UN officials for an explanation. Among those he interviewed was Iqbal Riza, who at the time of the genocide was deputy to Kofi Annan, the current UN secretary general but then in charge of UN peacekeeping.

Riza, who wrote the reply to Dallaire’s fax, told Gourevitch that Dallaire’s report was “just one piece of an ongoing daily communication” with the UN forces. “We get hyperbole in many reports,” Riza told Gourevitch.

Gourevitch was stunned, not just by Riza’s comments, but also by what other UN officials told him. “They were trying to make me understand the burdened life of a bureaucrat and how a high- level bureaucrat is swamped with information and can’t be expected to recognize unusual information except in hindsight. They were describing themselves as having become numbed, blinded, deafened, and indifferent, which struck me as not entirely encouraging.”

The genocide began on April 6. The next day, Hutu extremists tortured and murdered 10 Belgian soldiers belonging to the UN mission. A week later, Belgium withdrew its troops. “The Belgian soldiers said they were forced to act as cowards, forced to leave in humiliation,” Gourevitch says. They shredded their blue berets on the tarmac of Kigali airport in protest as they left.

A week later, Gen. Dallaire said that with 5,000 troops and a clear mandate he could still stop the massacres. “No one has ever disagreed with him,” and many military experts have confirmed his assessment, Gourevitch says. But Dallaire and his men had to essentially stand by helplessly as the genocide continued around them.

Canadian military authorities recently put Gen. Dallaire on indefinite mental health leave, because he is still suffering from the trauma of his service in Rwanda, according to a November 3 Associated Press report. “The figure of Dallaire is now in many ways the figure of Western humiliation through peacekeeping,” Gourevitch says.

The Price of Peace

Any investigation into why the UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda failed, says Gourevitch, has to be a discussion about the fear of casualties—especially on the part of the United States—and “how that fear is crippling aggressive peacekeeping.”

Six months before the Rwandan genocide, 18 American soldiers on a peacekeeping mission in Somalia were killed. The American public was horrified by newscasts of one soldier’s body being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu.

In the aftermath of Somalia and Rwanda, and similar failures early on in Bosnia, especially the failure to protect the refugees in Srebrenica, “the biggest problem . . . is the problem of false protection,” Gourevitch says. “Is it fair to people, is it the most humane thing if one’s concern is humanity, to tell them you mean to protect them by sending in a blue helmet force . . . and then it turns out they are completely unprotected.”

“You can’t fight for good things unless you’re willing to take casualties,” Gourevitch says. “The guys who fight for bad things are always willing to take casualties. That leaves the field pretty much to them.”

What Works?

Although the genocide and human rights conventions represent humanity’s best intentions, they also represent rather recent prohibitions against certain kinds of brutality, Gourevitch says. After all, Homer’s story of the sack of Troy was a good story, “one of the great texts of our civilization, babies and women impaled on spears, the whole business.” And when the early colonists conquered North America, everyone thought at the time that the slaughter of Native Americans, now seen as genocide, was done in a noble cause. So our difficulty in coming to grips with such behavior should not be underestimated.

Still, Gourevitch says, adding his voice to a loud chorus from humanitarian aid workers around the globe, addressing root causes of mass violence might prove more fruitful than trying to stop such conflicts once chaos has broken out.

Among the many conditions that facilitate genocidal violence is a near-total lack of democratic institutions within a society able to speak out against such criminal behavior, Gourevitch says. The absence of mechanisms to ensure the peaceful transition of power is another contributing factor. And the scramble for power is fueled by crippling poverty. “The gap between the globally integrated and the lost-in-the-bush citizen is vast. The struggle for power becomes a struggle for survival because that’s the only means to literally lift your family from the total abyss.”

There’s ample evidence that genocide could not only happen again, but that it will happen again, Gourevitch says. “There’s also ample evidence to believe that should it happen again, the world is unlikely to be moved to do anything about it.”