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Jim's Journal
People of Detroit rejoice!
The Detroit Tigers won their opening day game today, 7-0.
It's the first time they've had a winning record since April, 2001.
Yep, that's right. 2001.
Go Tigers.
Beginning on April 6, 1994 the Rwandan Military and militia of a tribe called the Hutu begin killing their rival Tutsi tribal leaders on the eve of a Treaty signing which would have brought a measure of peace to the country. Among those killed were ten Belgian troops there as members of UNAMIR (the UN peacekeeping force) who were guarding the Hutu Prime Minister (a moderate in favor of the treaty). The Belgians were tortured before they were killed. The Belgians withdrew from UNAMIR ten days later. UNAMIR troops in charge of civilian refugee camps watched the slaughter but were forbidden to intervene by the UN. UNAMIR was, at the time, under the direction of Kofi Annan, the UN Director of Peacekeeping.
Over the next 100 days, into the end of July, the Hutu slaughter approximately 800,000 Tutsi in what's been described as the worse single case of genocide since the Holocaust.
During the genocide, the UN reduced UNAMIR troops from 2500 to 270. UNAMIR troops were pulled out from a school which sheltered over 2000 Hutus. Most of them were killed after the withdrawal. Most nations sent troops to evacuate their citizens including France and Belgium. The US also airlifted its citizens out of the country. None of them took any Rwandans with them, not even those Rwandans working in their embassies or on their consular staffs.
By the end of April, the International Red Cross estimated the deaths as "tens of thousands". The Canadian General, Romeo Dallaire, in charge of their contingent of troops begs the UN to send more troops and begs that their orders be changes from "shoot only in self-defense". Later he testifies that they only needed 5000 troops to stop the genocide at the time. The UN finally passes a resolution but leaves out the word "genocide". That word is not included in any UN resolution until Mid-May (UN Resolution 918) when it says that "acts of genocide may have been committed." The UN authorized in that resolution 5500 troops to be deployed in Rwanda. Unfortunately, none of them actually arrived. Four days before that, the UN considered restoring UNAMIR strength, but US Secretary of State Madeline Albright delays this vote four days.
French troops with the permission of the UN arrive at the end of June and set up a "safe zone". Those zones did not prove safe as Hutus were killed there as they had elsewhere. The French provided no hindrance and in fact may have helped the Tutsi. Rwandan President Paul Kigami says that, "they opened routes for people who were...committing genocide to flee...they saved those who were killing, not those who were being killed."
By mid-July, 1994 the genocide had mostly dwindled out. The French were replaced by Ethiopian troops. The US armored personnel carriers that had been asked for in mid-May never quite make it there.
You can find background information and current news on the genocide and its lasting effects via: PBS Frontline, and
this Rwandan news site .
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It is beyond a shame to see that while nearly a million people were killed in less than six months, we did absolutely nothing about it. We talked about it, debated over it, and slung nice legal arguments around whether what was happening was actually a "genocide". When it came to saving the lives of those people we here in the US sat on our hands and did nothing.
That's not exactly true. We didn't do "nothing". We did far worse than that. Our President and his administration knowingly distorted what was happening so that there'd be no outcry. See, they were gun-shy because of what had happened in Somalia, so they hid the slaughter. The UN wasn't clean either. According to General Dallaire, UN officials told him that "Rwanda was of no value in any way, shape or form." The French took action, of course. They helped the Tutsi with the genocide, letting those doing the killings go free. What wasn't widely known at the time to the population at large (but was pretty damned well known to the UN and the Clinton Administration) was that the French Government had very close ties to the Tutsi hardliners who were killing all those people. So the French let the murderers pass by without stopping them, and even halted an attempt to stop the Rwandan military forces involved in the killing. Pleasantly enough, a French commission blamed the US and UN for the genocide but absolved President Mitterand and his administration from any blame.
And let's throw one last thing in here. How were the Tutsis killed? It wasn't largely by gunfire, though the regular Rwandan military used guns. They were killed by either being burned to death or hacked to death with machetes. It may be the first time in recorded history that the machete was used as a weapon of mass destruction.
The denial continued well after the genocide. Millions of Rwandans died in the aftermath from internecine war, starvation, and disease. The conflict spilled over into Uganda and Burundi Some estimated have the deal after the fact at around 3 million in the general area.
What happened in Rwanda ought to shame us to our cores because, in the end, we allowed it to happen. We didn't pay enough attention and when there was a chance to act, we let ourselves be lulled to sleep by either a deceitful President or an apathetic UN. In either case, we ought not to let this happen again, no matter where it happens.