We must ensure genocide that shattered Rwanda is never repeated: Will the international community intervene in future such situations?

David Kilgour, MP

Edmonton Journal, April 8, 2004 

Opinion, A18

KIGALI / The first thing that strikes anyone landing at the airport here are the lush green hills, thousands of small farms and the seeming tranquility of the people.

It's easy to see how Romeo Dallaire fell in love a decade ago with the country dubbed "the Switzerland of Africa."

We Canadians attending ceremonies to mark the 10th anniversary of the genocide are treated warmly by all, mostly because Dallaire is admired greatly by Rwandans for his human commitment to them during the genocide, despite the failure of the institutions he represented.

Other links include the founding of the national university by the Canadian priest Georges-Henri Levesque, and decades of development work by CIDA.

No one, however, should allow the passage of time to erase judgments about what happened. How can the world ever forgive the 15 member governments of the UN Security Council, who, two weeks after the killing began in April, 1994, voted unanimously to reduce Dallaire's force to a few hundred hapless peacekeepers?

This decision signaled to the génocidaires that the UN body mandated to protect world peace was giving them a free hand to murder as many as one million human beings in 100 days.

The indifference of the Canadian government violated many of our national values as well.

In his award-winning book, Shake Hands With The Devil, Dallaire admits that our Defence Department wanted to send Canadian soldiers with him as the commander of the mission, but Foreign Affairs, the lead ministry, had become more interested in central Europe and was able to block even minimal participation until far too late.

The role of a number of governments in other industrialized nations was equally bad or worse.

Had the Belgians not withdrawn their soldiers after 10 of them were killed, many more lives might have been saved, including the 2,000 Tutsis who, placing their lives under their protection, were predictably, all massacred within hours of being abandoned.

To his credit, the Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt apologized to the Rwandan people Wednesday at the memorial ceremony.

According to American documents recently released under their Freedom of Information Act, the Clinton administration had timely and accurate information on what was happening from its embassy in Kigali and elsewhere, but made a deliberate decision to do nothing. Its officials even declined to use the "G" word because doing so might have obliged it to intervene under treaty obligations and public opinion.

The French actions were even worse: as the Economist magazine put it recently, "France did indeed -- scandalously -- arm the killers; the (previous Hutu) Habyarimana regime was one of its clients, and it did not want to see it overthrown by the RPF" (the Tutsi-dominated forces that seized power as a result of the genocide).

What of the UN and Kofi Annan, who was then head of its peacekeeping office?

Dallaire's book sets out a good deal of the facts from the standpoint of the field commander, but he is clearly more favourably disposed towards Annan than to some others in the UN organization. The secretary general, moreover, recently apologized personally at an event organized by the government of Rwanda and Canada.

Among his other key points:

• If the international community had acted promptly and with determination, it could have stopped most of the killing.

• "Eight hundred thousand men, women and children were abandoned to the most brutal and callous of deaths as neighbour killed neighbour. Sanctuaries such as churches and hospitals were turned into slaughterhouses. An entire country was shattered."

• Better ways of equipping the UN and member States "to meet genocide with resolve, including a special rapporteur or advisor on the subject" must be found.

Foreign Minister Bill Graham is also promoting a better approach to crises before they escalate into catastrophes.

If a government will not protect its population or a minority group in defined circumstances, the international community must do so.

This was the essential position of the International Commission on State Sovereignty which reported in 1999, although the concept faces continuing opposition in many capitals.

The real question for the international community is whether, a half century after enacting the UN Genocide Convention, we have developed our sense of a common humanity and political resolve enough to intervene in genocide situations. Member nations of the UN must accept the responsibility to act in any situation similar to what the Rwandans faced a decade ago.

David Kilgour is Liberal MP for Edmonton Southeast and former secretary of state for Latin America and Africa in the federal government.

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