COMMENTARY: Our atrocious response to atrocities

c. 1999 Religion News Service (Dale Hanson Bourke is publisher of Religion News Service.) UNDATED _ Next week marks a tragic and increasingly ironic anniversary. April 6, 1994 was the day the killing began in Rwanda. The brutal campaign to exterminate the Tutsi minority was well documented by many western observers who recorded the slaughter […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Dale Hanson Bourke is publisher of Religion News Service.)

UNDATED _ Next week marks a tragic and increasingly ironic anniversary.


April 6, 1994 was the day the killing began in Rwanda. The brutal campaign to exterminate the Tutsi minority was well documented by many western observers who recorded the slaughter in words and photos.

In fact, the tragedy had been anticipated by the United Nations peacekeeping force in the country which had repeatedly asked for reinforcements and by aid workers who observed the growing tensions.

When all hell broke loose the atrocities were savage and the victims were as likely to be children as adults. Within 100 days, nearly one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were dead.

A report issued March 31 by Human Rights Watch documents the events leading up to the massacre and criticizes the United States, France and Belgium for failing to intervene in the killings.

Last week the U.N. Security Council said it would support an independent inquiry into U.N. actions and the role France and the United States played in the massacre.

France has been accused of providing military support for the Hutus.”The Americans were interested in saving money, the Belgians were interested in saving face, and the French were interested in saving their ally, the genocidal government,”said Alison Des Forges, author of the Human Rights Watch Rwanda report.

Last year President Clinton traveled to Rwanda to apologize for the lack of U.S. response.

But even as the president was apologizing, the death toll was mounting in the neighboring Sudan. There, as many as 2 million men, women and children have died in the civil war between Muslims and Christians.

Once again, the brutality has been recorded in words and photos by aid workers, journalists and U.N. officials. A report released late last year by the U.S. Committee for Refugees carefully documented the killings and the flow of refugees into other countries.


So as we increase our offensive against Serbia, many wonder why we couldn’t have used just a little of that muscle to avert many more killings in the African conflicts.

Is our intervention policy racist? It is a question being asked more and more openly by those who listen to the rationale given for our intervention in Kosovo.

After all, even the State Department officials admit they cannot accurately document the brutality in the Balkan province or clearly separate the acts of the Kosovo Liberation Army from those of the Serbian army.

But we do know that the entire ethnic Albanian population of Kosovo before the war numbered less than the total number of Sudanese who are already dead.

Clinton cited humanitarian reasons for intervening in Kosovo. Perhaps this signals a change in official policy and a new willingness to stop massacres simply because it is the right thing to do.

Says Roger Winter, executive director of the U.S. Committee for Refugees, of the efforts in Kosovo:”The world should not shirk its responsibility to intervene with military force, if necessary, to stop wholesale slaughter and ethnic cleansing.” But Winter, who was in Rwanda during the 1994 massacres, notes that the”international community stood idly by”while genocide occurred and has done little to stop the war in the Sudan.”But now in Kosovo, the NATO nations finally are stepping forward to use military muscle in an effort to stop the butchery and achieve humanitarian ends. It is an effort long overdue, and it must not be allowed to fail if we ever hope to see such interventions elsewhere in the world,”he says.


Winter chooses to be a diplomatic optimist. Perhaps he is right to hope that once the United States gets the hang of it, we will continue to do the right thing in other parts of the world.

For a million Rwandans and 2 million Sudanese, our awakening came too late. The shameful anniversary next week reminds us that atrocities haven’t always motivated us to act in the past. Let us hope and pray that our response in the future will be both courageous and colorblind.

DEA END BOURKE

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