Remember the Blood Frenzy of Rwanda

When Hutu began murdering Tutsi in Rwanda 10 years ago this week, many Rwandans had to decide whether to desert their loved ones. At a church in the town of Kibuye, two Hutu sisters, each married to a Tutsi man, faced such a choice. One of the women decided to die with her husband. The other, hoping to save her 11 children, chose to leave. Because her husband was Tutsi, her children had been categorized as Tutsi and thus were technically forbidden to live. But the machete-wielding Hutu attackers had assured the woman that the children would be permitted to depart safely if she joined them.

When the woman stepped outside the church, however, the assailants butchered eight of her 11 children as she watched in horror. The youngest, a 3-year-old boy who saw his brothers and sisters slain, pleaded for his life. “Please don’t kill me,” he said. “I’ll never be Tutsi again.” The killers, unmoved, struck him down.

In three short, cruel months, between April and July 1994, Rwanda experienced a genocide more efficient than that carried out by the Nazis in World War II. The killers were a varied bunch: drunk extremists chanting “Hutu power, Hutu power”; uniformed soldiers and militia men intent on wiping out the Tutsi inyenzi, or “cockroaches”; ordinary villagers who had never themselves contemplated killing before but who decided to join the frenzy.

The murderers, and their ebullient abettors, were turned into ghastly marionettes, consumed by a manic wrath. Men and women, young and old, religious and agnostic, became killers. They killed with machetes in one hand and radios broadcasting instructions in the other. They killed in churches, at traffic lights, in supermarkets and in homes. They killed after taunting, after savagely beating and, often, after raping.

The Clinton administration’s response was best captured by a State Department press conference two days into the slaughter. Prudence Bushnell, the midlevel official who had been put in charge of managing the evacuation of Americans -- and only Americans -- from Rwanda, spoke with journalists about the Rwandan horrors. After she left the podium, State Department spokesman Michael McCurry took her place and seamlessly turned to the next item on the day’s agenda: U.S. criticism of foreign governments that were preventing the screening of the Steven Spielberg film “Schindler’s List.”

“This film movingly portrays the 20th century’s most horrible catastrophe,” McCurry said. “And it shows that even in the midst of genocide, one individual can make a difference.” McCurry urged that the film be shown worldwide.

“The most effective way to avoid the recurrence of genocidal tragedy,” he declared, “is to ensure that past acts of genocide are never forgotten.”

No one made any connection between Bushnell’s remarks and McCurry’s, between Rwanda and the Holocaust. Neither journalists nor officials in the United States were focused then -- or in the ensuing three months -- on the fate of Rwanda’s Tutsis.

By July 1994, when Tutsi rebels took control of the country, the killers had accomplished much of what they set out to achieve. At least 800,000 people -- half of the Tutsis who had lived in Rwanda three months earlier -- had been eliminated.

The Rwandan genocide revealed, more than any other event in the 20th century, the shallowness of the pledge of “never again.” Again, a dozen key plotters managed to organize a society around mass murder. Again, an inconvenient minority found itself targeted for extermination. And again, the world watched.

Indeed, the U.S. and its allies on the U.N. Security Council didn’t simply watch. They voted to withdraw the U.N. peacekeepers who were in Rwanda, abandoning Rwandans who had relied upon the blue helmets for their protection.

While it was once possible to view the world’s neglect of Europe’s Jewry as a monstrous aberration, the Rwanda genocide shows how three patterns persist: The U.S. and other states ignore the warning signs that would enable them to act early. When the killing starts, “mere genocide” doesn’t command high-level attention or resources. And domestically, U.S. leaders do not fear they will pay a political price for being bystanders to genocide.

Genocide comes with ample early warning, as would-be perpetrators are careful to test the waters before plunging in. In the months preceding their slaughter, the Rwandan killers staged a number of mini-massacres in order to gauge international reaction. By January 1994, Rwanda had become so militarized -- and imported machetes had become so omnipresent -- that the U.N. commander in Rwanda, Romeo Dallaire, urgently cabled Kofi Annan, the U.N. head of peacekeeping, in New York. Dallaire warned that militia members could exterminate “up to 1,000 [Tutsis] in 20 minutes.”

Dallaire sent his cable three months after 18 U.S. soldiers had been killed in a Somalia firefight. Annan, believing that the United States and its allies were unwilling to confront the militants, opted not to cross what became known as “the Mogadishu line.” He buried what has become known as the “genocide fax,” and the militia members took their cue.

Annan was wrong not to sound an alarm, but he accurately predicted the U.S. attitude: Stopping Rwanda’s massacres was not seen as in the U.S. national interest. The foreign policy of the United States is devoted to advancing a narrow national interest, which has long been defined in terms of economic and security gains for American citizens. Genocide rarely affects such interests, so no matter how many men, women and children are killed, the occurrence of genocide rarely rises within the bureaucracy to command the attention of influential U.S. policymakers. Focusing foreign policy attention on acts of genocide would require presidential leadership, which has rarely been forthcoming.

More shocking than the U.S. avoidance of military intervention in Rwanda was the fact that President Clinton never even convened his Cabinet to discuss what might be done about the murder of nearly a million human beings. The response was low-level, and neither Bushnell nor the other career bureaucrats nor Africa specialists had the clout needed to move the machinery of a risk-averse system in time to save lives. Thus, the U.S. not only failed to intervene, it also failed to even denounce the “genocide,” or to use its technology to jam the “hate radio,” or to rally additional U.N. troops from other countries, or to freeze the financial assets of the killers. The Rwandan killers went utterly unchallenged.

It’s easy and right to hold Clinton accountable for American by- standing, but his administration’s inaction was affirmed by societywide silence. While U.S. officials dithered, the rest of us failed to generate the “noise” that would have gotten their attention. Editorial writers at the major newspapers who pushed for intervention in Bosnia made no such appeals on behalf of the Rwandans.

The Congressional Black Caucus was consumed with the refugee crisis in Haiti. And we voters never picked up our telephones, so the congressional and White House switchboards didn’t ring.

Then-Rep. Pat Schroeder (D-Colo.) described the relative silence in her district. “There are some groups terribly concerned about the gorillas,” she said, noting that Colorado was home to a research group that studied Rwanda’s imperiled gorilla population. “But -- it sounds terrible -- people just don’t know what can be done about the people.”

The Clinton administration didn’t help inform Americans -- indeed it distorted the facts, deliberately avoiding use of the word “genocide” -- and then it invoked the public and congressional indifference as yet one more alibi for its inaction.

On this historic 10-year anniversary, we must try not to allow 800,000 to become a faceless statistic. Each Rwandan lived a precious life and died a horrible death. And if we are serious about learning the “lessons of Rwanda,” we must do more than remember and regret; we must press our leaders to make genocide prevention and suppression the foreign policy priority it has never been. Otherwise, when we pledge “never again Rwanda,” what we will really be saying is “never again will Rwandan Hutus kill 800,000 Tutsis between April and July, 1994.”