Future of genocide is unfortunately very bright-decade after Rwanda, human carnage alive & well

While the numbers change, the vows stay the same. After 11 million people (including 6 million Jews) were exterminated in World War II, the world said, "Never again." After 1.7 million people were confirmed dead from Pol Pot's murderous rule in Cambodia, the world said, "Never again." After the tragedy of Rwanda, when 800,000 people were massacred in three months, the world said, "Never again."

Can it happen again? It's hard to believe it cannot. Genocide always makes a comeback somewhere in the world.

Wednesday marked the 10-year anniversary of Rwanda's genocide. In a pilgrimage of respect, representatives from every hemisphere flew to Rwanda's capital, Kigali, to express their sorrow and to witness the country's attempts to move on. Kofi Annan has already apologized for the United Nations' failure to stop Rwanda's murders. So has former President Bill Clinton, who has said he'll "always regret" not taking more action against the Hutu extremists who used machetes, clubs and other crude weapons to kill their victims.

Unfortunately, there may always be more genocides for which to apologize. Even today, alarming atrocities occur out of the glare of international attention.

For example, in Sudan. Because of fighting in the western part of the country, almost 1 million ethnic Sudanese have been forced to flee their villages in the past year, while thousands of their countrymen reportedly have been murdered and raped by government-backed militias. The perpetrators are of Arab descent (Sudan is a member of the Arab League); the victims are non-Arab tribespeople. Nine days ago, Human Rights Watch issued a scathing report about the brutality, but it generated little outrage or media attention.

For example, in Ethiopia. In the past five months, hundreds of Anuak -- an indigenous people living near the country's western border with Sudan -- have been killed, apparently with the tacit support of the government in Addis Ababa, which is trying to resettle other Ethiopians onto the land.

"The world knows nothing about this," says Gregory Stanton, a former State Department official who heads Genocide Watch, based in Washington. "There are only 100,000 Anuak left on the face of the Earth, and the Ethiopian government has declared that it wants to resettle about a million highland Ethiopians into the lowland areas where the Anuak live. So, ethnically cleansing them and moving them off and getting them to move to Sudan is government policy."

Stanton calls it genocide. He also has a theory (also voiced by others, including Rwandans) about why Western governments are reluctant to get involved when genocide happens in Africa: That atrocities against blacks there don't count as much as atrocities against Americans or Europeans that happen anywhere in the world. Ten years ago, there was no international political will to stop the Rwandan genocide.

"We still have not come to the point where African lives are worth as much as (other) lives in the eyes of many people," Stanton says. "I think it's racism. It's too bad that we're still in that era, that we don't see that we're all part of the human race."

Beyond the issues of race and will are the practical impediments to stopping genocide. The United Nations doesn't have an armed force it can easily dispatch. It doesn't have an effective monitoring system for genocide.

These shortcomings exist despite the fact that U.N. member countries supposedly adhere to a convention -- adopted in 1948, after the horrors of the Holocaust -- that requires them to prevent genocide anywhere it happens. (When Rwanda's murders began on April 7, 1994, the United States sent Marines to rescue American citizens in Rwanda, but for the next month, Washington officials refused to utter the word "genocide" to describe the killings there -- despite knowing that atrocities were being committed. By April 21, 1994, Hutu extremists had already killed 100,000 people.)

Annan admitted the U.N.'s shortcomings at a major genocide conference three months ago in Stockholm. There he announced his support for a special envoy on the prevention of genocide, a new U.N. position that would report directly to the Security Council. Ten years ago, when the U.N.'s top commander in Rwanda, Gen. Romeo Dallaire, cabled his bosses in New York to warn of an impending slaughter, his pleas fell into a bureaucratic black hole. They were discounted by top brass, including Annan (who was then in charge of U.N. peacekeeping). Dragged down by the U.N.'s indifference, Dallaire was powerless to stop the widespread killings, which quickly escalated and lasted for 100 brutal days.

Waves of killings of Tutsis, as far back as the 1950s, preceded the 1994 slaughter. Rwanda should have been on some kind of genocide watch list, but it wasn't.

Alison DesForges, a Rwanda expert who is senior adviser to the African division of Human Rights Watch, says the international community ignored warning signs in Rwanda, including the government's categorization of citizens along ethnic lines. In a policy that stemmed from Belgium's former colonial rule, Rwandans were forced to carry identity cards that listed themselves as Tutsi or Hutu.

In the early 1990s, an extremist Hutu radio station in Rwanda (Radio RTLM) repeatedly broadcast messages of hate against Tutsis. A pro-Hutu newspaper (Kangura) also published tracts in the 1990s encouraging ethnic hatred against Tutsis, including a "commandment" that warned, "Tutsi are blood and power thirsty. They want to impose their hegemony on the Rwandan people by cannon and sword." All of this was on public record before April 7, 1994, when Hutu extremists reacted to the death of Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana by unleashing their fury.

"Full-blown genocide grows out of decades of ethnic tension, racial hatred, that builds up and reaches a climax when it mutates into full-blown genocide," says William Schabas, a Rwanda expert who is professor of law and director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights at National University of Ireland in Galway. "Prior to that, you have waves of ethnic cleansing and other forms of persecution of a vulnerable minority. And that continues to go on in the world."

Experts say genocide almost always happens in countries run by despots, military figures or other unelected leaders. As in Sudan today, these countries often ignore human-rights pleas from outside the country, so it becomes a question of international resolve: How much is the Security Council or the United States willing to do to stop potential bloodshed?

Not much, it appears, in some cases. In her Human Rights Watch report titled, "Rwanda: Lessons Learned," DesForges writes that Washington considered jamming the messages of hate on Radio RTLM in 1994, but considered it too expensive. The cost: $8,000 an hour.

"Our leader, Abu Annan, says he will protect us, and that we don't need no stinking end of slavery, genocide, rape or terror
as long as money continues to flow to both the French and to Kofi's own son, Tojo Annan.
Now why don't all you dhimmis just give up and surrender NOW,
like the spineless and cowardly French and Spanish already have."

THE ANNAN FAMILY's WAR FOR OIL - the U.N. Oil company hired Kofi Annan's son, Tojo, who profited from Saddam's treachery and murder."

For what it's worth, all three instances happened on the Democrats' watch. I don't know if you can blame FDR for the Holocaust, but he could have admitted more Jewish refugees from Europe than he did, and he could have spoken out. He had far more power to speak out and act than the Pope, who was a prisoner of Mussolini and Hitler but did, in fact, speak out.

The Killing Fields of Cambodia were mainly the doing of the Democrats. Lyndon Johnson lost the war. The sanctimonious liberals in the press fought tooth and nail to abandon Cambodia to its fate.

And Rwanda was even more egregious. Clinton had the power to stop it, and he did nothing, because he was worried about taking minor political damage. In the case of Rwanda, stopping it would have been easy. Clinton did nothing. But when he returned later, he used the occasion to apologize for American slave holding by people long since dead. No apology for his own failure. Not then, not now.

The Annan gang (which includes family members and UN bureaucrats) are the successors to the mobs of thieves who have populated the UN caves since this worthless organization was founded. They are nothing but highly paid paper shufflers who sip wine, sample cheeses and pocket billions of dollars mainly supplied by the industrialized nations whose representatives never let out a whimper. I wish the damned terrorists who hit the Twin Towers would have settled for the UN building. In addition to being thieves and conspirators to international murder on a grand scale, they are cowards of the first rank. To hell with Kofi and the entire UN.

I am always fascinated by claims that we, the American taxpayer, can afford to be the world's policeman.

I grew up without health insurance because my dad was a laborer. I have no health insurance now in the US. It cracks me up when Europeans tell me "Americans are rich". I inform them that I sure the heck am not, and my "rich" government is in debt.

I live in Italy now. They don't have much of an army. They spend their tax money on health care. It is cheap and available for all, even when unemployed. I like that.

You have gotta admit America is a democracy. Just let Americans vote on it: would you like your tax dollar to buy health care for Americans or pay for attacking foreign countries who have not attacked us?

When I move back to the US, I will tell every person I meet about how the Italian government takes care of its own people and not the people of far-away foreign countries.

Where on earth did you get the idea that the US taxpayer needs to take on all the world's problems while we sure have our own?

I will never forget lying in bed with a broken leg as a child because my parents had no health insurance.
No Italian child would ever be put through that. Hubris.
Linda

I live in Italy now. They don't have much of an army. They spend their tax money on health care. It is cheap and available for all, even when unemployed. I like that.

Sounds great. I know my brother-in-law loves to visit. But... how long will it last with a birthrate that is far below the replacement rate? Do they talk about that there as a future problem?

I admit I have some problems with the immigration issue, FDR could have saved lives. Beyond that, the best thing he could have done to save Jews was to build up our military early on, and forcefully support the Brits, in retrospect enter the war on the side of the Poles. The paleos of the day would have gone nuts, and there weren’t many neo’s then, so I can’t assign him much blame.

Cambodia, lay it on both parties. Give George McGovern a pass, he spoke out for military intervention. Brave guy, but I’ll never understand how his mind worked on that one, or how he could reconcile his position with Vietnam, without admitting the error of his ways.

Rwanda, our first black President, I’m sorry to say I think there’s a racial component at work there, in the Sudan too.

Do me a favor.

Feel free to list the genocides of the last century and the perpetrators. Start with Turkey and Armenian Christians, end with the Sudan and fundamental Islam.

Please, under perpetrators, use bold type for the movements we didn't come into conflict with. Somehow, the perpetrators of genocide always seem to have a problem with America.

I'd be glad to see some of my tax dollars go to arming Christians and Animists in the Sudan over your health care. You live in Italy and don't need it anyway. If you come back to America, health insurance will be available, though you might have to either get a job or pay for it, possibly both, or settle for the health care available for indigents.

In fact the Rwandan Hutu/Tutsi genocide episode has not stopped. After three months of intense ethic purging and nonstop massacres in Rwanda, the culpable parties fled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, then the Zaire of Mobutu Sese Seko, where they killed several million Congolese and Rwandans and greatly intensified an existing civil war. In the Ituri region, this warfare continue to this day, although its intensity and geographical coverage have decreased markedly with depopulation resulting from the war and with the peace efforts of the past year.

I should note that the history of the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been one of repetitious episodes of genocide, perhaps unlike that of any country in the world. This awful history did not begin until Belgian King Leopold II sent the Belgian army to take over this personal domain of his. The Belgian army mercilessly extracted labor and other commodities from the local populations, and wiped out entire towns throughout the Congo with little or no reason. The Belgians also set numerous factions of Congolese against one another and taught them to kill one another. Belgium continued these episodic genocides until 1960, when they simply departed.

Hi, sorry for the delay.
They are having a mini baby boom in Italy right now. So many famous actresses have been showing off their beautiful babies on the covers of magazines...Well, Italians love to be fashionable and babies are in fashion at the moment.
Like the French, they are letting in boatloads of muslims from Africa to pump up the birthrate. It is a problem.
The muslims want crosses and santa claus removed from the schools!
Lynne

Cicero,
Ho chi mihn and stalin commited genocide.
Americans have no health insurance program.
We are a democracy. Nobody knows who ho chi mihn or stalin are. Why on earth would we spend tax money on stopping their ilk from committing genocide?
I mean, Americans can't really decide to spend tax money on places and people they know nothing about. If someone decides for them, well, then that really is not a democracy!
Linda

its not racism--Its Poverty. The color of the skin has nothing to do with this--If it happened in Blegladesh (SP?) Tamil or Lower Slobovia we wouldn't give a fig. Why wast treasurew in the East Tamil want to kill the west Tamil? Who helped us when we had a Civil War? Who support the Native Americans when we drove them on to reservations? There was nothing in it for them--so why help? In this France is right--They only support things that will help France. They don't even attempt to pretend to be concerned if one group wants to slaughter another. That's whay there will be more Mass Deaths in the future.

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