Genocide in Rwanda and Darfur: The World's Failure to Act

Introduction: The World's Selective Memory of Genocide

When people think of modern genocide, the event that comes to mind is the Holocaust, and society tends to ignore the genocide that occurred in Rwanda in the early 1990s and the genocide that has continued in Darfur. The sheer number of people killed during the Holocaust makes that understandable, but modern society has a troubling tendency to overlook the genocides that have occurred in this generation. While the genocide in Rwanda did not kill as many people as the Holocaust, it was an equally horrific event. "The dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust. It was the most efficient mass killing since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki" (Gourevitch, 1999, p. 3).

Just as it had at the conclusion of prior episodes of genocide, the world vowed it would never happen again. However, those vows seemed hollow when the United Nations failed to intervene in a timely manner, even as the horrors in Bosnia demonstrated that rape continues to be used as a tool of war. Rape was combined with other weapons of genocide in Darfur, which continues to this day, with relatively little response from the global community. This lack of response is difficult to understand — almost as difficult as understanding why people commit genocide in the first place. Whatever the explanation, the reality is that by failing to respond and prevent these mass murders, the world has tacitly approved of genocide. This is an indictment not only of the killers and rapists who committed these atrocities, but of all complacent human beings around the world who sat in their homes and did nothing, despite knowing about these events.

Prior to the 1990s, Rwanda was a country with two major ethnic groups — the Hutu and the Tutsi — and those two groups had a long history of conflict. The genocide in Rwanda was based on a government policy that mandated members of the Hutu majority kill everyone in the Tutsi minority (Gourevitch, 1999, p. 6). It was a personal genocide, one that relied on civilians acting out against other civilians. Moreover, while the Nazis used gas chambers and automatic weapons to accomplish many of their killings, the Hutus used machetes to kill the Tutsis. The sheer enormity and physical difficulty of the killings forces one to question how the killers remained motivated.

The Rwandan Genocide: Ideology, Motivation, and Civilian Violence

Genocide is frequently presented as the means to a new world order, and its driving ideology must be simple and absolute. As Gourevitch explains:

"The ideology of genocide is all of those things, and in Rwanda it went by the bald name of Hutu Power. For those who set about systematically exterminating an entire people — even a fairly small and unresisting subpopulation of perhaps a million and a quarter men, women, and children, like the Tutsis in Rwanda — blood lust surely helps. But the engineers and perpetrators of a slaughter...need not enjoy killing, and they may even find it unpleasant. What is required above all is that they want their victims dead. They have to want it so badly that they consider it a necessity" (Gourevitch, 1999, p. 17).

In contrast, the UN forces or sovereign country forces that went into Rwanda to intervene did not share the same level of motivation as the murderers. The UN forces were given limited power to act, despite clear UN guidelines allowing — and perhaps even demanding — intervention in cases of genocide. Gourevitch describes UN peacekeeping forces failing to intervene when they witnessed murders, yet shooting at dogs eating the corpses of the dead in Rwanda, because "the UN regarded the corpse-eating dogs as a health problem" (Gourevitch, 1999, p. 149).

A substantial part of the responsibility for the global community's failure to act rests with the United States. The UN forces deserted Rwanda largely because of U.S. pressure. The United States was so intent on avoiding involvement that the U.S. government even denied that genocide was occurring — because acknowledging acts of genocide would have required intervention, and the U.S. did not want to intervene.

Conclusion: Why Genocide Continues

What the book and the documentary made clear is that genocide is not a simple issue and does not have a simple solution outside of violence. Of course, violence increases the risk of more deaths, including civilian deaths, inside and outside of the region of genocide. That means many countries are unwilling to intervene in genocides that pose no threat beyond their borders. While that seems both horrific and callous, it should perhaps not be entirely surprising. After all, there is substantial evidence suggesting that the United States was aware of Nazi genocide schemes years before U.S. involvement in World War II, yet refused to act because of its isolationist foreign policy.