Rwanda: A Diplomacy of Silence

By David Kilgour

Embassy Magazine, April 28, 2004

It's easy to see, even from an airplane window, how Roméo Dallaire fell in love with Rwanda, "the Switzerland of Africa," when he first saw this sight a decade ago.

Today, the just-opened Kigali Memorial Centre, which overlooks the burial site of 250,000 victims murdered in the capital district, offers much information about what has taken place in this country. For example:

Eighteen national clans lived together peacefully in Rwanda for centuries until their Belgian governors introduced identity cards in 1932, which classified all nationals as Hutu, Tutsi or Twa, depending on how many cows one owned.

The first organized killing of Tutsi began in 1959, when about 700,000 of them fled to Uganda, Canada and elsewhere.

Canadians attending ceremonies to mark the 10th anniversary of the genocide were 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.

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, which two weeks after the killing began 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.

Rwandan refugees in Ottawa and Montreal had attempted repeatedly in the early '90s to alert decidedly indifferent Canadian diplomats as to the catastrophe being prepared for Tutsi and moderate Hutu. In his award-winning book, Shake Hands With The Devil, Dallaire notes 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 it was far too late.

The roles of a number of other governments were 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 Had the Belgians not withdrawn their soldiers after 10 of them were killed, many more lives might have been saved, including the 2,000 Tutsi who placed their lives under Belgian protection. They were predictably all massacred within hours of being abandoned. To his credit, Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt apologized to the Rwandan people 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 worst of all: as the Economist magazine put it recently, "France did indeed scandalously arm the killers; the Habyarimana regime was one of its clients, and it did not want to see it overthrown by the RPF" (The RPF were Tutsi-dominated forces that seized power as a result of the genocide).

The international community attempted to cover its earlier indifference by sending aid and advisors after the fact. Rwandans are understandably dismayed by the record of one such initiative: the International Criminal Tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania. At an estimated cost of $1.2 billion (US) since 1994 and with a staff of about 872, it has completed hearing only about 20 cases--most of which are evidently now under appeal. What fraction of it would have paid for the 5,000 troops Dallaire thinks could have stopped the genocide in 1994?

What of Kofi Annan, who was then head of the UN's peacekeeping office, and then-Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali? Dallaire's book is clearly more favourably disposed towards Annan than to some others in the UN organization. Current Secretary General Annan, moreover, recently apologized personally at an event organized by the governments of Rwanda and Canada. Among Annan's key points:

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

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.

In short, Annan appears to have learned from his mistakes, and has recently noted that an international military response might well be required to confront a Rwanda-style genocide in the making in the Darfur region of western Sudan.

The real question for the international community is whether we have learned anything from the slaughter of Hereoes in Namibia in 1904 -1905, the Armenian genocide of 1914-1915, the Holocaust, Cambodia in 1975-1979, Rwanda and the Balkans in the 1990s.

If we are not prepared to breathe life into the UN Genocide Convention of 1948 and the Stockholm Declaration on Genocide Prevention, then, as the Kigali memorial reminds visitors, "Never Again!" seems destined to be, "Again and again." What we really need are elected national leaders with the courage to combat genocidal activity wherever it occurs.

David Kilgour is the Member of Parliament for Edmonton Southeast. He recently returned from Rwanda.