Finally, the World Must Look

The killing is reportedly subsiding in Rwanda and Burundi, two Central African neighbors that shared a kingdom before colonialism and continue to share ancient tribal hatreds.

The deaths of the presidents of the two nations in a suspicious plane crash Wednesday and ensuing anarchy forced an international spotlight onto an ethnic cleansing that rivals that in Bosnia. Reports of a cease-fire and new interim government in Rwanda Friday offer hope. But will that hope persist?

So far the slightly more than 250 Americans in Rwanda appear not to be targets. Belgium--which is the former colonial ruler of Rwanda and Burundi--France and Britain may go in to evacuate foreigners including Americans. One way or another, President Clinton must see that the Americans are evacuated safely.

Human rights activists--among them Monique Mujawariya of Rwanda, who had been beaten and threatened with death after she exposed government brutality in both countries--during a White House visit last December pleaded for action to stop the torture and murders. Today, help is too late for Mujawariya, 39. It is also too late for the first woman prime minister, more than a dozen nuns and priests and several U.N. peacekeepers. All are presumed dead--and thousands seem destined to be next in an unyielding struggle between the Tutsi minority and the historically oppressed Hutu majority.

As many as 100,000 Hutu men, women and children were killed in 1972 in Burundi. More fled. The world ignored subsequent massacres in both nations as Africans killed Africans. The superpowers, myopic from Cold War calculations, imposed no consequences on a corrupt regime that, like Somalia’s, refused to share power with rival ethnic groups.

About 100,000 Hutus and Tutsis died last year after the assassination of Burundi’s first democratically elected president. His successor, President Cyprien Ntaryamira, and Rwanda’s President Juvenal Habyarimana were returning from peace talks in Tanzania when they died.

Sadly, in the wake of the two leaders’ deaths worldwide attention is drawn not by the peace that they sought but by the horrific slaughter their peoples are enduring.