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Ten
Years After: Copyright © 2004, Mickey Z. All Rights Reserved. Ten
Years After, a long-forgotten 1960’s rock band that featured the
dynamic guitar work of Alvin Lee, was perhaps best known for its live
rendition of "Goin' Home." Ten
years after genocide in Rwanda was purposely ignored by a Democratic
president who was perceived as a step forward from a man named George
Bush...well, it kinda feels like we're "goin' home" again. (How’s
that for a segue?) "The
term 'genocide' has been used with varying degrees of precision, but
even under the most demanding definition there is no doubt that the
events in Rwanda between April and July 1994 qualified as genocide,"
says historian Stephen R. Shalom. Unfortunately
for members of Rwanda's Tutsi ethnic group, the U.S. had already decided
that the G Word could not be spoken. Columnist
Nat Hentoff has written extensively about the calculated US indifference
to the Rwandan crisis in the Village Voice. "Before 1993, the Hutu
majority in Rwanda had long nurtured a deep resentment against the Tutsi
minority who had been, under Belgian rule, the country's aristocracy,
subjugating the Hutu underclass," Hentoff says. "After independence
in the late 1950’s, the Hutus seized power and oppressed the Tutsis.
Following a civil war, the Hutus agreed to share power with the Tutsis,
but the pact was doomed because Hutu hatred of their former overlords
was too deep." When
the presidents of Rwanda and neighboring Burundi--both Hutus--died in
a suspicious plane crash on April 6, 1994, the Tutsis became the target
of what author Philip Gourevitch calls, "the most unambiguous case
of genocide since Hitler's war against the Jews." "Nearly
a million Tutsis were massacred in Rwanda in 1994," reports Hentoff.
"The holocaust took only one month before one-seventh of the population
became corpses. As with the Jews under Hitler, the orgy of killing was
not interrupted by any intervention from anywhere, until it was much
too late." So
much for "never again." James
Woods, deputy assistant secretary at the Defense Department from 1986
to 1994, has candidly explained US inaction: "In the spring of
'93, when the Clinton administration came in, we were asked to develop
lists of what we thought would be serious crises this administration
might face," says Woods. "I put Rwanda on the list, but I
received guidance from higher authorities: 'If something happens in
Rwanda-Burundi, we don't care. Take it off the list. United States national
interest is not involved, and you know, we can't put all these silly
humanitarian interests on lists.'" The
Organization for African Unity (OAU) later convened a panel to review
both the 1994 genocide and the world's response. "The (panels')
report recalls that after the genocide began the Clinton Administration
refused 'to accept publicly that a full-fledged...genocide was in fact
taking place,'" says journalist David Corn. "Under the 1948
UN Genocide Convention, once a genocide is recognized, the nations of
the world are obligated to prevent the killings and to punish the murderers." "Clinton ordered that America do nothing to stop the killing, even though at the end of April 1994, a State Department secret intelligence report unequivocally called what was happening 'genocide.'" Hentoff adds. "The word from the Clinton administration was that congressional elections were coming soon, and the Democrats could lose votes if the president admitted genocide was underway in Rwanda and he wasn't going to do anything about it."
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