What Went Wrong in Rwanda?

The Rwandan genocide confirmed the worst fears of those who, more than 50 years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, never could find any rationale beyond their own hopes and dreams for believing that humanity had progressed very far. Unlike other examples of post-World War II mass slaughter, from the killing fields of Cambodia to the hills of northern Bosnia, what took place in Rwanda exactly fit the typology of Hitler’s Final Solution. And when it did, it bore out the warning of Primo Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz, when he insisted, very much against the received wisdom of his time, that “[t]he simple fact is that it has happened once, and it could all happen again.”

The received wisdom from 1945 forward had tended to be more sanguine, at least in the West. Obviously, violence and extreme cruelty had not been expunged from humanity’s inventory of malignity, but in the aftermath of the Holocaust, it was at least possible to believe that the attempt to exterminate an entire people would never be permitted to happen again. The international system that was created in the aftermath of World War II was, overwhelmingly, a horrified response to what the Nazis had done and, more important, had been allowed to do.

With Hitler’s example still fresh, what decent person could continue to insist that rights were not at least as central as sovereignty? And governments gave their imprimatur to this idea, institutionalizing it in the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention, which imposed an affirmative obligation on states to intervene to prevent genocide--in other words, to do exactly what they had not done as the Jews and Gypsies of Europe were sent to their deaths by the millions.

In Rwanda, as in Nazi-occupied Europe, extremist members of a self-described majority targeted a minority people for extermination, and the effort almost succeeded. To be sure, ethnicity in Rwanda is a complicated question. There will probably never be any consensus about whether the majority Hutu and the minority Tutsi are distinct peoples, members of different castes or victims of an insane system of ethnic classification that was the most malign of all the malign legacies of German and then Belgian colonial rule. But then Germans and Jews were not quite the discrete categories Nazi propaganda insisted upon either. Racial purity is almost always a myth.

Obviously, that does not make it any less powerful. In April 1994, after the death under mysterious circumstances of the Rwandan president, Maj. Gen. Juvenal Habyarimana, Hutu militants from his own political party and factions allied with it unleashed their own “Final Solution” on the Tutsi minority. It had been planned for some time. Although civil war between the two groups had raged since the late 1950s, when the Belgians declared their intention of granting the colony independence, the extremist elements within the Hutu ruling elite worried that an internationally imposed peace agreement signed in Arusha, Tanzania, in 1993 would force them into power-sharing. The Arusha power-sharing plan is a textbook case of why the current enthusiasm in the West for what is euphemistically called “conflict resolution” is so often misguided. Faced with the prospect of peace, the Hutu extremists chose extermination instead. And it is unlikely that this will be the last time the good intentions of what we self-regardingly call the “international community” will produce such disastrous results.

Of approximately 1 million Tutsis living in Rwanda, somewhere between 500,000 and 800,000 were killed in cold blood in a little more than three months. In many cases, their murderers were their friends and neighbors; sometimes, because intermarriage between Hutu and Tutsi was anything but unknown, they died at the hands of their relatives. Many thousands of Hutus who refused to participate in the slaughter or who had vocally opposed Hutu “exterminism” before the genocide began were killed as well.

International law proved of no avail. Indeed, one bitter irony of the Rwandan situation was that the very government that unleashed the genocide had ratified the Genocide Convention in the 1970s. As in World War II, only war brought the murderers to account and stopped the genocide, however belatedly. But it was not the great powers, or the United Nations’ Department of Peacekeeping Operations, that brought this necessary force to bear. Rather, it was the Rwandan Patriotic Front, or RPF, the army led by and largely comprising those Tutsis who had fled into exile in neighboring Uganda and Burundi a generation earlier, who did what, both morally and practically, needed to be done.

Ever since the genocide, there has been a need to come to terms with what took place in Rwanda. The lessons are anything but clear. Too often, Rwanda seems to stand in the imagination of those who can bear to contemplate it like an infernal Rorschach blot. Some agree with the European missionary who, having lived through the genocide, declared that although his faith in God continued to be unshaken, his belief in the decency of the human species had been destroyed. For them, the genocide demonstrates once again that all this talk of “never again” is self-flattering nonsense and that the world was, is and will always remain a slaughterhouse.

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For others, Rwanda demonstrates the need to strengthen international institutions. Most pressing, they argue, is the need to establish an international legal order with real power. In the aftermath of the genocide, an ad hoc international tribunal was established under United Nations auspices to try to bring those guilty of the genocide to account. And the worldwide movement to establish a permanent international criminal tribunal derives much of its authority from the Rwandan experience.

It is likely, though, that whatever the merits or utility of more international legal instruments, the priority, for Rwandans and non-Rwandans alike, should be to understand what actually took place. Not in the deepest sense, for that may still be impossible; after all, more than half a century after the death of Adolf Hitler, do any of us really understand the Final Solution? Rather, what need to be established are those stern things, the facts. Paradoxically, though several first-rate books have been written about the Rwandan genocide--works by Colette Braeckman, Philip Gourevitch and Gerard Prunier come to mind--the reality of the genocide remains occluded. It may be too early, now that the reporting has been done, to hope for anything except a book that will establish what actually took place in an authoritative and exhaustive way.

Extraordinarily, that book has been written. “Leave None to Tell the Story” will stand as the definitive investigation into what occurred during the Rwandan genocide. And yet apparently no mainstream U.S. publisher was willing to risk bringing the book out; this in an era when “Schindler’s List” is required viewing for many high school students and when Daniel Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” is an international bestseller. Poor Africa. “Leave None to Tell the Story” appears under the aegis of the American-based Human Rights Watch and the French-based International Federation for the Rights of Man, and it is a foregone conclusion that it will not get the same kind of attention.

But whatever the reasons are, they have nothing to do with either the quality or the accessibility of the book. Of course, humanly it is almost unbearable to read a book about Rwanda that details, prefecture by prefecture and commune by commune, how the killing was organized, who carried it out, what the murderers and the surviving victims remember and what the role of such foreign countries as the United States and France, and of the United Nations system, really was. But it should not be more unbearable than Goldhagen’s book or Lucy Dawidowicz’s magisterial “The War Against the Jews.”

Indeed, if any worthwhile meaning can still be attached to the phrase “never again,” it must be in terms of a Rwanda; it must confront the horror in the here and now, not just memorialize the past, however valuable that may be. And certainly there can be no more authoritative guide to what took place in 1994 in the Great Lakes region of Africa than the book’s author. Alison Des Forges’ name does not even appear on the cover of the book she has been working on for half a decade. But it is the culmination, however unwelcome it must be to have had to have written it, of a lifetime of work and thought this distinguished human rights activist and great scholar has devoted to Rwanda. Des Forges lost many friends during the genocide and, while it was still going on, did everything she could to organize pressure on the United States government to intervene to stop it or, at least, to stop blocking the efforts to do so by other nations organizing at the United Nations. Those efforts failed, and even President Clinton has admitted that his administration should have acted differently. Indeed, the United States bears the greatest responsibility for fatally delaying moves that were belatedly made within the United Nations to intervene to stop the genocide.

Des Forges’ book is, she writes, in part meant to “lay the groundwork for justice for Rwandans and all others who failed to respond to the bonds of our common humanity.” The evenness of her tone barely masks the immense bitterness she must feel about what took place. Des Forges’ book in no sense is an effort to shift the blame from the Rwandans to the French, the Belgians, the Americans or the U.N. secretariat. To the contrary, she goes to great lengths to emphasize that the killers who executed the genocide in Rwanda “were not demons nor automatons responding to ineluctable forces. They were people who chose to do evil.” And a great deal of the book is devoted to showing how the genocide was planned, what elements of Rwandan society were most engaged in it, what the rewards for participating in it were (as well as the costs of refusing to kill, which sometimes meant being killed) and how the campaign of mass murder was carried out.

What is most terrible about Des Forges’ account is the way she demonstrates that, of a total Hutu population of some 7 million, literally hundreds of thousands committed murder. And if one remembers that the average family size in Rwanda is eight people and that a sizable part of the population consists of small children, the conclusion seems inescapable that, whether they were manipulated by the mass media, above all the ubiquitous radio stations whose two principal kinds of programming seem to have been the excellent local music and exhortations to the Hutu masses to complete the genocide, the proportion of adult Rwandans who killed was very high.

Des Forges insists that there is a crucial distinction between the tens of thousands she believes killed willingly and the hundreds of thousands whom she says participated only reluctantly. So convinced is she of the success of media manipulation that during the genocide, she called on the United States government to jam the Hutu Power radio stations’ transmitters. American officials, she reports, refused, citing both international treaties and United States support for freedom of expression. But it is not clear that Des Forges was not indulging, however understandably--these were desperate times--in some wishful thinking of her own. In most massacres, from Poland under the Nazis to Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge to Serb-controlled northern Bosnia, it takes only a minority of dedicated killers to get the rest of the population to go along. Alas, this is less a matter of people being manipulated by the media, as human rights activists and pro-democracy advocates so often claim, at least publicly, as it is a product of the unwelcome truth that in most groups of 100 people, 10 are likely to be quite willing to kill, 10 are likely to refuse at almost any cost, and 80 will follow the prevailing trend.

I can attest from personal experience that this was the way it was in Bosnia. And though I arrived in Rwanda only at the very end of the war, my impression then and after talking to many of the Hutu refugees who fled after the genocide across the border into what was then eastern Zaire over the course of the following two years, my impression afterward was that similar processes were behind the Rwandan genocide.

To insist upon this point is not, however, to quarrel with the main thrust of Des Forges’ argument. The Rwandan genocide, as she definitively establishes, was no spontaneous massacre, no unplanned expression of ancient ethnic, tribal or caste hatreds. Nor was it based on psychic and material pressures brought on by Rwanda’s overpopulation, as certain Western writers, including, regrettably, the Social Darwinist wing of the environmental movement, have suggested. Quite the opposite. As Des Forges writes, “This genocide resulted from the deliberate choice of a modern elite to foster fear and hatred to keep itself in power.” And when its control was threatened by the prospect of peace, the elite “seized control of the state and used its machinery and its authority to carry out the slaughter.”

This is not to say that the hatred did not exist or that overpopulation was not a problem. By institutionalizing the Hutu-Tutsi distinction and by turning what had been, at the very least, a far more fluid and contingent notion of identity into a legal division in which every Rwandan had Tutsi or Hutu on his or her identity card, the Belgians had created a context for hatred. And, self-evidently, the appeal of murdering your neighbor and taking what was his is as old as Cain and Abel. But kindling does not burn without a spark, and without people to fan the flames of hate, or even rekindle them if they burn out, genocides do not happen.

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Des Forges goes further. She is persuaded not only that the Rwandan genocide need not have taken place--indeed, her book has as one of its subtexts a compelling argument against the notion of historical inevitability--but that, had the great powers acted differently, it might have either been prevented or at least halted. The major powers, she writes, as well as the U.N. secretariat and the Department of Peacekeeping Operations “all knew of the preparations for massive slaughter and failed to take the steps needed to prevent it.”

About the United Nation’s role, there can be no doubt. On Jan. 11, 1994, almost three months before the genocide began, Maj. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian commander of the U.N. peacekeeping force, cabled his superiors at the United Nations in New York warning of the preparations for slaughter. In the succeeding six weeks, he repeated these warnings on a number of occasions along with requests to be allowed to take action. The United Nations’ reply, sent in a letter over the signature of Kofi Annan, then the head of U.N. peacekeeping, was that Dallaire refrain from taking any action.

Annan has subsequently regretted the U.N.’s failure in Rwanda in general terms but has continued to defend his role at the time. He and his deputy at the peacekeeping department, the Pakistani diplomat Iqbal Riza, who is now Annan’s chef de cabinet, have consistently preferred to blame the international system and exonerate themselves. The failure has had no effect on their careers, any more than it did on that of Madeleine Albright, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Since the genocide, Annan has become U.N. secretary-general, and Albright U.S. secretary of state.

In fairness, there is blame enough to go around. As Des Forges demonstrates, then U.N. secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali, seems to have taken more seriously the upbeat assessments about the situation in Rwanda of his special representative, the Cameroonian diplomat Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh, than the grim warnings proffered by Dallaire.

Some have suggested that in setting the U.N.’s course in Rwanda on the basis of the view that things were going reasonably well, Boutros-Ghali was only following the line of the French government, which had been and remained to the end his strongest supporter at the United Nations. Des Forges gives evidence for this but rightly refrains from judgment. And, in any case, her account of the U.N.’s failure in Rwanda, justifiably harsh as it is, if anything pales when compared with her excoriation of the role most international leaders and, above all, the American and French governments played in the catastrophe. Her conclusion is both simple and unbearable. “Most international leaders,” she writes, “found mass slaughter of Tutsi tolerable provided it furthered or at least did not impinge on narrowly defined interests.”

Not surprisingly, the French seem to have played the most malign role of all. They were the Hutu Power regime’s traditional backers. When Rwandan Patriotic Front guerrillas had launched a major offensive in 1990, French officers had organized the Rwandan army’s response. The experience of working with the Hutu regime, furnishing it with arms and fighting alongside its troops, was conclusive for much of the French military. And when the genocide began to unfold, the results of this approach became apparent. The Tutsis--in French military circles RPF guerrillas were routinely referred to as the Khmer Noirs, the “Black Khmer”--had to be at fault.

As Des Forges shows, the French were fixated on the idea that Francophone Africa was “their” territory. It was, French officials insisted, inconceivable that a regime they supported be overthrown by force, genocide or no genocide. Moreover, the fact that the exiled Tutsis who led the RPF spoke English, which was hardly surprising since many had grown up in refugee camps in Anglophone Uganda, led French officials to believe in the existence of an “Anglo-Saxon” plot to transform Rwanda into a country in which the second language was English rather than French. Boutros-Ghali, who, after his forcible retirement (courtesy of Madeleine Albright) from the post of U.N. secretary-general was installed by the French government as the head of La Francophonie, the association of French-speaking states, is widely believed to have shared this fear.

No one has ever lost any money underestimating the cruelly cynical and blatantly self-serving nature of French foreign policy and, above all, of French Africa policy. Even by the standards of international politics, it has always been in a league of its own. To paraphrase Churchill, it gives cynicism a bad name. And where Africa was concerned, there was also the question, regularly raised by the muckraking French newspaper Le Canard Enchaine, of the immense bribes that purportedly were routinely paid to officials in Paris by their African proteges--a practice that does not seem to have varied whatever the party of the French government.

If anything, the Socialist government of President Francois Mitterrand was worse than its right-wing predecessors. After Rwandan President Habyarimana’s death in April 1994, it did everything it could to protect the genocidal interim regime in Rwanda that was quickly established. France continued to funnel arms shipments into Rwanda, both directly and through third country intermediaries. Des Forges notes that although the dominant image of the genocide was of mobs with sticks and machetes, the weapons the French sent were used in the killings and used by the Rwandan military to fend off the RPF and thus prolong the genocide. France also supported (and may even have instigated) the decision of Boutros-Ghali to allow the Rwandan ambassador to continue to keep his seat, a decision of vast symbolic importance that also gave the architects of the genocide a forum for spreading their lies and obfuscations as the killing went on.

For the first month of the slaughter, the French took the same line as Boutros-Ghali’s representative, Booh-Booh, and denied that a genocide was occurring. Then, as at the U.N. secretariat in New York, the line shifted. French officials began talking of a “double genocide”--of Hutus killing Tutsis, and of Tutsis killing Tutsis--and of a tribal war with abuses on both sides. As Des Forges shows, this allowed the Mitterrand government to continue to try to impose a policy that would have prevented the RPF, which by then had crossed into Rwanda and was advancing rapidly, from achieving victory.

It was under this rationale in mid-June 1994, that the French decided to launch Operation Turquoise and deploy forces in Rwanda. As Alain Juppe, then France’s foreign minister, put it, the troops would endeavor “to stop the massacres and to protect the populations threatened with extermination.” The use of the plural--”populations”--was indicative of Paris’ real agenda. For it was only one population, the Tutsis, which was being exterminated. Of course, Turquoise was not presented as an effort to stave off the RPF or preserve Rwanda from “Anglo-Saxon” influence. Rather, French officials insisted angrily that their only goal was to save lives. This, as Des Forges demonstrates, was a lie.

But eventually, even the French could not maintain the fiction that the genocide had not taken place. Whatever their original intentions, French forces on the ground in Rwanda did find themselves engaged in saving Tutsi lives. It should be added that they also arranged for most of the leadership of the genocidal regime to flee Rwanda safely and, to the end, continued to seek some third way between Hutu Power and the RPF. Arguably, even today the French government remains unreconciled to an RPF-dominated Rwanda.

Des Forges is not the first writer to expose France’s dishonorable role in the genocide. But this does not make her gloss on it any less important. Over and over again, she returns to one central point, which is that precisely because France had such immense influence over its Rwandan clients, it was in a position to have prevented the genocide before it took place or to have brought it to a close once it began. As Des Forges points out, even within the Rwandan military, there were senior officers who disapproved of the killing and called for it to stop. As Des Forges puts it, “[h]ad the international community . . . taken a united and uncompromising stand--with the threat of the refusal of any future funding for the interim government,” the efforts of these officers might have been successful.

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One does not have to accept all the premises of the human rights movement, of which Des Forges is such a distinguished and thoughtful representative, to believe that it is at least possible that the genocide could have been prevented and that, by refusing to try, the great powers and the United Nations were, in varying degrees, morally to blame for what took place. Certainly one does not have to believe that in the absence of world government, international law can really be an effective tool to prevent or deter such horrors as genocide to agree with Des Forges that the role of the great powers and of the United Nations made the terrible even worse. As a former Rwandan army officer remarked to Des Forges, “We must now have the courage to pay the price of our cowardice.” As Des Forges comments acidly, “The same holds true for those international leaders who, secure in their distant offices, could have intervened--at no risk to their lives--and yet did not.”

It is important to emphasize that Des Forges is not speaking here of military intervention. She is persuaded that governments such as that of France, Belgium and the United States had the power to curb the Rwandan authorities through diplomatic and economic pressure. The success of the human rights movement in the 1980s in pressuring the United States government to pressure its client states in Latin America supports her conviction. And even the post-Cold War era presents human rights activists with very different kinds of challenges, and even if “never again” was and remains an empty slogan, not the binding pledge human rights activists like Des Forges sometimes seem to suggest it was, Rwanda was in many ways particularly susceptible to international pressure.

Even beyond its status as a French client, as Des Forges writes, its long-standing dependence on foreign financial support, whether from the World Bank, United Nations development agencies or bilateral programs, meant that foreign wishes, if forcefully and convincingly enough conveyed, were sure to be taken seriously. As Des Forges writes, “Any public condemnation of the genocide by the combined donors and the World Bank, particularly if accompanied by an explicit warning that they would never fund a genocidal government, would have shown Rwandans that the interim government was unlikely to succeed and made them less likely to implement its orders.”

Des Forges concedes that the genocide still might have taken place. Her willingness to do so does her great credit, given the strength of her conviction that had the world acted, hundreds of thousands of Rwandans would be alive today. It is possible, of course, that her faith that the world can be made a more moral place, a place in which, as she puts it, governments will stop placing their “lesser diverse interests . . . before the need to avert or end a genocide,” is misplaced. That might be the most sobering lesson of all of Rwanda. But it is also possible that Des Forges is right and that, at least in these extreme cases, something can be done. The fact that the human rights movement is suffering from a bad case of hubris at the moment should not make people forget that its accomplishments, given the realities of our terrible world, are extraordinary.

No one in the 18th century thought colonial slavery would ever be abolished. And unrealistic though the prospect had been, seemingly miraculously it was. But of course, there was no miracle. Activists, people of conscience, persuaded their own governments to change their policies. Wars were fought. The world was changed. By the same token, the kinds of standards activists like Des Forges are using to call their own governments to account are, by any rational calculus of our time, unlikely to carry the day. My view is that this time it will not succeed, that exposing the horrors of genocide and documenting less extreme patterns of human rights abuse may be the most the human rights movement can expect to accomplish in this era of orphan wars and cognitive dissonance. Knowledge, in short, may not always be power nor lead to justice.

But surely truth is a value. In the end that is likely to be the greatest contribution Alison Des Forges has made by writing “Leave None to Tell the Story.” She has established the truth of the Rwandan genocide, once and for all. She has done so without fear or favor (the book ends with a chronicle of crimes and mass killings committed by the RPF) and in the somber and authoritative tone appropriate for this tragedy. No one involved--not the Rwandans themselves, not the French, or the Americans, or the United Nations--will be able to peddle the self-exculpating fictions again without fearing that someone will be able to quote the truth, as told in Des Forges’ book, back at them. The Rwandan story is one of defeat on every score; nothing anyone can do now will ever set things right. Perhaps paradoxically, that is why telling the truth is so important. And Alison Des Forges has told the truth.