2008-2009 Winning Essay - National Second Place Winner

National Second Place Winner
Erin Morbeck
Pulaski Academy
Roand, Arkansas
Coordinator: William Topich

    In April 1994, Rwanda exploded in violence. Over the next 100 days, one million people died at the hands of Rwandan government troops and militia gangs.¹   The Hutu killers targeted all Tutsi men, women, and children.  When the massacre was over, half of the Tutsi population in Rwanda was dead.²   This was genocide.³   In July 1995, Serbian troops overran the UN safe haven Srebrenica in Bosnia and massacred 7,417 Muslim men and boys.⁴   The Serbian general Ratko Mladic promised his men “a feast,” saying, “There will be blood up to your knees.”⁵   Srebrenica became the site of the worst massacre in Europe since World War II.   This, too, was genocide.⁶   In Rwanda and Srebrenica, the United States government knew about, yet failed to stop, the killings, stating it was not in our national interest.  These failures reveal a critical need for the development of political will among countries to intervene and a ready-response military force to act.   
    Civil war had existed in Rwanda since 1990 between the ruling Hutu and the rebel Tutsi.  The underlying causes of the conflict included the politicization of the Hutu and Tutsi under colonial Belgian rule; the second-class political status of the Tutsi, who were excluded from government and education; a pervasive economic crisis; and France’s role in fueling and financing Hutu extremism in order to maintain a French presence in Africa.⁷   In 1993 Tanzania brokered a ceasefire and arranged for a new government representing both the Hutu and Tutsi.  Hutu extremists and Tutsi rebels disagreed with the accord.  When an airplane carrying the Hutu president was mysteriously shot down over Rwanda’s capital in April 1994, the mass killing began.
    The genocide that consumed Rwanda from April to July 1994 was “the fastest, most efficient killing spree of the twentieth century.”^8,9 The Hutu used firearms, machetes, and garden implements to systematically kill the Tutsi.  Victims were “dragged out of homes and hiding places and murdered, often after torture and rape.”¹⁰   At roadblocks, Tutsi were shot or hacked to death.  So many corpses were dumped into the Kagera River that, downstream in Lake Victoria, some 40,000 were fished out.¹¹  
    In the midst of this genocide, the international community deserted Rwanda.  The U.S. administration knew three months before the genocide began that Hutu militias were making preparations to kill Tutsi.¹²   After the disastrous 1993 mission in Somalia, “the United States refused to intervene in any African conflict, no matter how appalling.”¹³   The UN peacekeeping mission created in October 1993 to assist the governmental transition in Rwanda was, at the request of the United States, reduced from 2,500 to 503 people.¹⁴   Patience for peacekeeping was thin; at the time of the genocide, the United Nations already had 70,000 peacekeepers on 17 missions throughout the world.¹⁵   President Bill Clinton stated flatly, “The UN has to learn when to say ‘No.’ ”¹⁶   In May, at the height of the massacre, U.S. spokespeople were instructed not to use the word “genocide” in describing Rwanda, as this would compel the United States to intervene.¹⁷   Moreover, Clinton issued a directive stating that because the collapse of Rwanda would not affect the United States or breach international security, the United States would not intervene.¹⁸   The morality of stopping the slaughter was not considered.  
     After reports of the carnage mounted, the United Nations finally agreed to send 5,500 soldiers to stop the violence.  The genocidal killers, however, moved quicker than the bureaucrats.  The troops did not arrive until months after the genocide ended; none were from the United States.  Moreover, the Pentagon successfully blocked even the provision of vehicles and equipment, which could have been used by the existing troops to defend the Tutsi.¹⁹
    The genocide in Srebrenica occurred during the Bosnian war (1992¬95), which erupted after Bosnia’s declaration of independence from Yugoslavia.  The roots of the war extend as far back as the Ottoman Empire’s defeat of the Serbs in the medieval Battle of Kosovo.²⁰   More recently, the slaughter of Serbs by the Croatian ultra-nationalist Ustashe²¹  during World War II and Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic’s desire to carve a “Greater Serbia” out of the ruins of Yugoslavia in the 1990s laid the groundwork for ethnic conflict among Serbs, Muslims, and Croats.  The Bosnian war was the “greatest European upheaval since 1945, involving enormous displacement of population [and] more than 100,000 deaths, most of them . . .  in consequence of deliberate terror accompanying the practice of ethnic cleansing, mass rape, expulsion, concentration camps, and integral nationalism run riot.”²²   Atrocities were perpetrated by all sides against all sections of the population, but the Serb strategy of mass executions of non-combatant men was the most severe and systematic.  
    From 1992 to 1995, the Muslim enclave Srebrenica was besieged by Bosnian Serb forces.  The Serbs felt justified; Bosnian Muslims had led countless raids against Serbs in Srebrenica and surrounding villages, torturing, decapitating, and roasting Serbs.²³   After Srebrenica fell, Serb forces began systematically killing Muslim males.  Some were separated from their families outside Srebrenica and shot, while the majority died attempting to flee across Serb territory to Muslim-held land.  The majority were unarmed.
    As with Rwanda, the United States and the United Nations failed to stop the genocide.  President George Bush’s “decision not to allow American ground forces to play any role under any circumstances in Bosnia effectively precluded decisive Western military intervention.”²⁴   Involving U.S. ground forces would lead to an eventual massive U.S. engagement. The Bush administration was convinced that, with no national interest at stake, the American public would not support the level of commitment and casualties required for intervention to succeed.   
    NATO air strikes were aborted when the Serbs threatened to kill Dutch hostages.  The United Nations hid behind its principles of consent and impartiality.  The UN’s principle of consent “underlines its general reluctance to use force to deliver humanitarian assistance.”²⁵   Although the United Nations was authorized to use “all necessary means,” its forces opted instead to ask for consent from the Serbs, and were therefore at their mercy.  The principle of impartiality led to the UN’s unwillingness to defend the safe havens.  The UN’s “moral authority is founded on its impartiality,”²⁶  and protecting civilians would mean taking sides—adversely affecting the UN’s neutrality and future effectiveness.  The UN used force only to protect its own peacekeepers, not to defend Srebrenica.
    The failures in Rwanda and Srebrenica show that without the exercise of political will, nothing will prevent genocide.  The international community’s ability to deliver the right response—whether prevention, reaction, or rebuilding—can occur only if there is political will.  In Rwanda and Srebrenica, the world community had warnings of the atrocities and had the ability to intervene, yet turned its back.  Lack of political will to combat genocide stems from governments’ belief that genocide does not endanger their national interests.  Bureaucracies offer excuses instead of solutions: We didn’t know . . .  It wasn’t genocide . . .  We were too late.  If the hurdle to creating political will is national interest, then governments must recognize that genocide creates chaos.  It creates floods of refugees, incites civil war, brings starvation, ruins economies, and upsets world peace.  The United States must recognize that “non-strategic internal problems of other countries fester into international crises.”²⁷
    To create political will to fight genocide, the United States must, while defending its national sovereignty, “provide the UN with enough support to act with timely decisiveness instead of with tardy half-measures.”²⁸   The president should announce that the prevention of genocide is a vital United States interest.  He or she should reverse Clinton’s directive and state that the United States authorizes support for UN military action to stop genocide.  Political will includes risking lives of Americans to stop genocide.
    As political will grows, a supplementary strategy is required.   Because countries are reluctant to intervene with their own soldiers to prevent genocide, an alternative force is needed.  Members of the United Nations have “argued for a 5,000-strong light infantry volunteer force, under the direction of the Security Council, that would be able and willing to forcibly intervene to break the cycle of violence at an early stage.”²⁹    This should be a standing army of individual professionals who have trained together and who have uniform equipment and mandate.  The purpose of any operation would be to enforce compliance with human rights and not to defeat any state.  In the first days of Rwanda’s genocide the commander of the UN forces calculated that a force of only 5,000 could secure the capital and protect the buildings in which the hunted Tutsi were gathering.³⁰   Stopping a crisis in its early stages negates the need for a larger, often ineffective, peacekeeping force later.  In 1992 Ronald Reagan advocated that the world community “put its weapons behind its words,” saying, “We must work toward a standing UN force—an army of conscience—that is fully equipped and prepared to carve out human sanctuaries through force if necessary.”³¹ 
    The 1948 Genocide Convention defines genocide and declares it illegal in international law.  Since its adoption, the convention “has been notable above all for States’ nearly wholesale failure to enforce its terms.”³²   Citing that neither Rwanda nor Bosnia was of national interest, the U,S. government avoided admitting genocide was occurring and prevented other countries from intervening.  In the face of these failures, the world community must develop the political will to stop future killings.

 

Notes

1. Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2007), 245.

2. Neil J. Kressel, Mass Hate: The Global Rise of Genocide and Terror (Cambridge, MA: Westview, 2002), 74.

3. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, defines genocide as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group: killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
http://www.preventgenocide.org/law/convention/text.htm [1]

4. “A Cry from the Grave,”  BBC, May 14, 2007.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKuaV1-ILm4&feature=related [2]

 

5. “Cry from the Grave.”  

6. In June 2004 the presiding judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia ruled that the massacre at Srebrenica was genocide, stating, “By seeking to eliminate a part of the Bosnian Muslims, the Bosnian Serb forces committed genocide. They targeted for extinction the forty thousand Bosnian Muslims living in Srebrenica, a group which was emblematic of the Bosnian Muslims in general. They stripped all the male Muslim prisoners, military and civilian, elderly and young, of their personal belongings and identification, and deliberately and methodically killed them solely on the basis of their identity”  (Address by ICTY President Theodor Meron, at Potocari Memorial Cemetery, June 23, 2004).
http://www.un.org/icty/ [3] pressreal/2004/p860-e.htm

7. Jones, Genocide, 234.

8. Samantha Power, “Bystanders to Genocide,” The Atlantic Online, September 2004.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200109/power-genocide [4]

9. The daily killing rate was five times faster than the Nazi death camps (Jones, Genocide, 232).

10. Jones, Genocide, 238.

11. John G. Heidenrich, How to Prevent Genocide (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), 12.

12. “The 1994 Rwandan Genocide and U.S. Policy,” Africa Action, May 26, 1998. As early as 1993, human rights organizations told the U.S. government and United Nations that early indicators of genocide in Rwanda existed.  These warning signs included “selective killings of Tutsi, the formation of armed militia by extremist political parties, the drawing up of lists of Tutsi ‘enemies’ (who were later exterminated), the stockpiling and distribution of thousands of guns and other light weapons to civilians throughout the communes, and the broadcasting of virulently anti-Tutsi messages by extremist radio stations.”  Also, in January 1994 the commander of the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda sent a fax to the United Nations giving details of the upcoming genocide. 
http://www.africaaction.org/docs98/rwan9805.1.htm [5]

13. “Now the U.S. Backs Its Old Enemies,” Somaliland Times, November 13, 2003.
http://www.somalilandtimes.net/2003/95/9511.shtml [6]

14. Power, “Bystanders to Genocide,” 17.  

15. Power, “Bystanders to Genocide,” 4.

16. Tim Weiner, “Clinton in Africa: The Blood Bath,” New York Times, March 26, 1998.

17. According to the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which the United States signed in 1987.  
 http://www.preventgenocide.org/ law/convention/text.htm

18. Clinton issued Presidential Decision Directive 25 at the height of the genocide, on May 5, 1994.  It was designed to stop American participation in situations like Rwanda’s.  The directive requires that the United States participate in a UN mission only if the mission is in response to threats to international peace and security, advances American interests at acceptable risk, and has adequate command and control procedures and an exit strategy (“1994 Rwandan Genocide and U.S. Policy”).

19. “1994 Rwandan Genocide and U.S. Policy.”
    
20. On July 11, 1995, Serbian general Ratko Mladic stated immediately before capturing Srebrenica, in reference to the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, “We give this town to the Serb Nation, remembering the uprising against the Turks.  The time has come to take revenge on the Muslims” (“A Cry from the Grave”).

21. The Ustashe was a racist, terrorist, and Nazi-like movement that ruled Croatia, under protection from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, in part of Yugoslavia after that country was occupied by the Axis powers.  The Ustashe systematically killed approximately 40,000 gypsies and 500,000 Serbs during World War II, so brutally that even the Nazis were appalled (“WWII, Ustashi Butchery of the Serbs,”  Worldmark Encyclopedia of the Nations, Europe, 1995).
http://www.srpska- [7] mreza.com/library/facts/gallery.html
 
22. Thomas Cushman and Sjephan Mestrovic, eds., This Time We Knew: Western Responses to Genocide in Bosnia (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 67.

23. “Butcher of Serbs Goes Free,” Byzantine Blog: Orthodox Journal, June 30, 2006.
http://byzantinesacredart.com/blog/2006/06/butcher-of-serbs-free.html [8]

24. Richard H. Ullman, ed., The World and Yugoslavia’s Wars (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1996), 131.

25. Cushman and Mestrovic, eds., This Time We Knew, 152.

26. Cushman and Mestrovic, eds., This Time We Knew, 152.

27. Heidenrich, How to Prevent Genocide, 255.

28. Heidenrich, How to Prevent Genocide, 255.

29. Gareth Evans, The Responsibility to Protect (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2008), 213.

30. Jones, Genocide, 397.

31. Heidenrich, How to Prevent Genocide, 213.

32. Roy Gutman and David Rieff, ed., Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), 153.

Bibliography

Print Sources

Cushman, Thomas, and Sjephan Mestrovic, eds. This Time We Knew: Western Responses to     Genocide in Bosnia. New York: New York University Press, 1996.

Evans, Gareth. The Responsibility to Protect. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press,     2008.

Gutman, Roy, and David Rieff, eds. Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know. New York:     W. W. Norton, 1999.

Heidenrich, John G. How to Prevent Genocide. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001.

Jones, Adam. Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2007.

Kressel, Neil J. Mass Hate: The Global Rise of Genocide and Terror. Cambridge, MA:     Westview, 2002.

Ullman, Richard H., ed. The World and Yugoslavia’s Wars. New York: Council on Foreign     Relations, 1996.

Electronic Sources

 “Butcher of Serbs Goes Free.”  Byzantine Blog: Orthodox Journal. June 30, 2006.
http://byzantinesacredart.com/blog/2006/06/butcher-of-serbs-free.html [8]

Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. http://www.preventgenocide.org/law/convention/text.htm [1]

 “Cry from the Grave, A.” BBC. May 14, 2007.
http://www.youtube.com/ [9] watch?v=fKuaV1-    ILm4&feature=related

Meron, Theodor. Address by ICTY President at Potocari Memorial Cemetery. June 23,  2004.      
http://www.un.org/icty/pressreal/2004/p860-e.htm [10]

“1994 Rwandan Genocide and U.S. Policy, The.” Africa Action. May 26, 1998.  http://www.africaaction.org/ [11]     docs98/rwan9805.1.htm“Now the U.S. Backs Its Old Enemies.” Somaliland Times.November 13, 2003.
http://www.somalilandtimes.net/2003/95/9511.shtml [6].

Power, Samantha. “Bystanders to Genocide.” The Atlantic Online. September 2001. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200109/power-genocide [4]

Weiner, Tim. “Clinton in Africa: The Blood Bath.” New York Times.  March 26,1998.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F07E1DC1F38F935A15750C0A... [12]  8260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print.

“WWII, Ustashi Butchery of the Serbs.”  Worldmark Encyclopedia of the Nations, Europe. 1995.
http://www.srpska-mreza.com/library/facts/gallery.html [13]