How Can We Ignore the Cries of Children?

If a child is murdered in the jungle and nobody hears its last cry, did the child really die? If we hear but ignore it, does a little of ourselves die with the child?

The world dithers as Africa’s Kivu Basin, home to the peoples of Rwanda, Burundi and northeastern Zaire, spirals through a genocidal nightmare.

After nearly 40 years of post-colonial meddling, unaccountable millions are dead or displaced. Colonial, post-colonial and Cold War dynamics have created a perpetual-motion machine of ethnic cleansing, which we have chosen to ignore.

We ignore it because it is too complex for Western minds to fathom. It is black on black, neighbor on neighbor, violence carried out with the crudest instruments against even the weakest and most helpless members of society.

We ignore it because we cannot deal with the fact that each group is guilty. Hutus kill Tutsis and Tutsis kill Hutus. Smaller tribes, such as the Hunde, show homicidal flexibility based on opportunity. We can’t find a good guy or a bad guy.

We ignore it because there is little material value in the Kivu Basin. These are poor, mountainous isolated lands. They have coffee, tea and misery--but no connection to our daily lives.

We ignore it because it has been going on for so long and is such a seemingly intractable problem that we just can’t get interested.

We ignore it because we allow our leaders to ignore it, all of us fearful of taking a morally grounded stand to send help to this desperate region.

While we ignore it, the United Nations must not. It must invoke the rule of law and stop the massacres of innocent civilians and murderous militiamen alike. In the latest affront, a shadowy terrorist cell has placed a price of $1,000 on the head of each American in Rwanda--relief workers as well as diplomats.

Efforts now being made by five African nations--Burundi and Rwanda, along with Ethiopia, Tanzania and Uganda--must be supported by the international community so that a peacekeeping force is brought into play before all sane and civilized observers are chased from the field.

If not now, then when does the United Nations--and by extension the United States--take the side of the unarmed and oppressed. Do we let ethnic cleansing expand? Can we really sit by and allow the massacre and segregation by tribe and clan to be the final solution to the region’s woes?

As human beings, we cannot. Call this what it is: genocide. Take the actions that need to be taken. We are not talking about remote and bizarre Rwanda, Burundi or Zaire, we are talking about our fellow man--our brothers, our sisters. And in an ever shrinking and complex world, we are also talking about our future.