Rwandans Told World Shares Guilt for Genocide

After hearing bone-chilling eyewitness accounts and seeing scars from machete wounds on the head of a child, President Clinton said Wednesday that the United States and the rest of the world share the blame for the 1994 genocide in Rwanda because they did nothing while an estimated 800,000 people were killed.

Speaking to a few hundred Rwandans, Clinton called the 3-month-long massacre “the most intensive slaughter in this blood-filled century we are about to leave.”

“The international community, together with the nations in Africa, must bear its share of responsibility for this tragedy,” Clinton told the gathering at the airport here. “We did not act quickly enough after the killing began. We should not have allowed the refugee camps to become safe havens for the killers. We did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name: genocide.”

The president’s 3 1/2-hour visit was a powerful symbol to the people and leaders of Rwanda, who are striving to build a peaceful nation that includes the ethnic groups that were pitted against each other during the massacre: ethnic Tutsis, who were the principal targets, and Hutus, who dominated the military and militia groups that orchestrated and carried out the attacks.

Rwandan President Pasteur Bizimungu--whose Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front in 1994 captured Kigali, the capital, ending the genocide and civil war--called Clinton’s visit “an eloquent statement of your condemnation of the genocide, a sign of solidarity with the victims and a challenge to the international community to work to stem the recurrence of genocide.”

Clinton admitted that the international community still lacks a system for preventing or responding to episodes of mass terror such as engulfed Rwanda, but he vowed to work toward developing one.

The Rwandan genocide showed “the capacity for people everywhere to slip into pure evil. We cannot abolish that capacity, but we must never accept it,” he said.

The genocide was triggered when the plane carrying Rwanda’s Hutu president, Juvenal Habyarimana, was shot down April 6, 1994, as it prepared to land at Kigali’s airport, the site of Clinton’s appearance Wednesday. In the ensuing violence, Hutu militias slaughtered Tutsis and moderate Hutus alike.

Clinton’s emotional address Wednesday was gratefully received by Rwandans at the airport, many of whom had been angry at the United States and the rest of the international community for abandoning them and their families to the machetes and clubs of their attackers.

“The visit has made us feel that at last the world has come to us, recognized our problems and will assist us in coming back to life,” said Florence Kamili, 33, a teacher who lost most of her family in the genocide.

During a meeting with six survivors of the 1994 massacre who described in horrifying detail their narrow escapes, Clinton got a sense of how deserted by the world the Rwandan victims felt.

Venuste Karasira was one of nearly 4,000 people who took refuge at a technical school outside Kigali, believing that U.N. peacekeeping troops from Belgium stationed there would protect them. But when 10 Belgians were killed elsewhere in Rwanda a few days later, the United Nations decided to dramatically reduce its contingent, and the paratroopers at the school were withdrawn. Within hours, the Hutu-dominated militia entered the school and massacred all but about 400 of the refugees.

“I had to find some dead corpses, so when [the attackers] came to me, I swam in their blood to survive,” Karasira, who lost an arm in the attack, told Clinton.

A muscle in the side of Clinton’s face tensed as he listened in pained silence.

Clinton told the small group that they were not alone in facing mass brutality without international help. The people of Bosnia-Herzegovina also suffered genocide during his presidency, he told them, and it took years for the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies to act against the bloodshed there.

The U.S. president made it clear where he put the majority of the blame: “It’s important we not pretend these things happen by accident. They don’t happen by accident. Leaders get people to do things like this. And I think we have to lift up the leaders who do the right things.”

To help prevent the recurrence of such tragedies, Clinton announced a $30-million initiative to develop impartial, credible and effective judicial systems in the Great Lakes region, which includes Rwanda, Burundi and Congo. The initiative includes establishing a mechanism for giving the world early warnings if genocide is occurring. He also announced that the United States will donate $2 million to a new fund to help Rwandan survivors rebuild their lives.

In his discussion with survivors, Clinton indicated that although it was wrong for the international community to neglect the bloodshed, he is still not sure what the right path would have been, particularly since, unlike in Bosnia, strategic airstrikes were not a feasible solution.

“Here you had neighbors going from house to house cutting people up with machetes,” Clinton said. “Who was there to bomb?”

Nonetheless, Clinton said that if such a genocide started again, “something more would be done.”

“Never again must we be shy in the face of evidence,” Clinton added.

But some of the survivors said they were distressed that the world community has not responded to the ongoing sporadic killings in Rwanda, allegedly by the same groups responsible for the 1994 genocide.

“I feel sad when I see that some people from the international community are not reacting and now they are informed,” said Gloriosa Uwimpuhwe, 31, whose parents and four siblings were killed.

At least three Rwandans were killed and seven nuns kidnapped in a raid Sunday night at a health center in Kivumu, about 60 miles northwest of Kigali. Five of the nuns reportedly were freed Monday. As with other random attacks, which occur at a rate of a few every month and involve casualties ranging from a few to hundreds, Hutu rebels were suspected in the crime.

Clinton arrived in South Africa early today for a four-day visit.