PHR Library

Rwanda: 10 Years Later - Preventing Genocide

Talk by PHR Policy Director Holly Burkhalter given at the American Society of International Law in April 2004

I have written and spoken many times about the Rwandan genocide, and have proposed policies to prevent genocide and protect its victims. Today I offer a different perspective, in hopes that the ideas might in some small way invigorate the discussion of genocide among activists, scholars, and policy makers and help animate the U.S. public and our government to take actions to suppress mass killing and protect the innocent.

Genocide is the greatest crime known to humankind because of the machinery of the state that is set in motion to exterminate human beings because of their supposed membership in a racial, ethnic, national or religious group. It is genocide's vast numbers of victims and the pitilessness and thoroughness of the slaughter that has earned it a loathsome special status among crimes, and a treaty specifically crafted to prevent and suppress it.

Like most of you, I believe states which are party to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide are compelled by it to take political or even military action to suppress it. Article I states, "The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish." During the Rwanda genocide, human rights activists invoked the treaty in the first weeks of April, and appealed for an international response.

Unfortunately, appealing to our own government as a signatory to the Genocide Convention was profoundly unsuccessful in the case of Rwanda. As Samantha Power chronicled in her study of genocide, "The Problem From Hell," the U.S. Government was apparently reluctant to invoke the term of genocide during the early weeks of April1994 lest the terminology have legal implications that would necessitate the U.S., as a party to the Treaty, take action to prevent and punish it. Officials in the executive branch refused to describe the carnage in Rwanda as genocide, though it was quite clear that genocide was precisely what was occurring. After having been shamed by Congress and the media, Secretary of State Warren Christopher belatedly succumbed to the pressure and issued a directive that the dangerous word of "genocide" could be used. It was a Pyrrhic victory. Washington's use of the word "genocide" did not change the Clinton Administration's position, which was to withhold support from United Nations intervention, and to let the genocide run its murderous 100-day course.

Notwithstanding our experience with language and genocide in Rwanda, I, and many other human rights activists continue to believe that when reports of vast, organized atrocities have not galvanized an effective response, invoking the Genocide Convention can embolden U.S. policy. For example, we at Physicians for Human Rights have monitored Russian forces' vast butchery in Chechnya, the physical destruction of most major towns and villages, the falling birth rate, and the targeted execution of civil society leaders. And we, among others, have concluded that the Genocide Convention's description of genocide as "Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part," might well be accurately applied in the case of Russian occupation of Chechnya.

Yet despite the expectation and hopes of human rights activists that the Treaty would compel action to prevent, suppress, and punish the crime of genocide, there has been no occasion in which the Genocide Convention was invoked to justify international intervention, and, to my knowledge, neither the United Nations nor the United States military have developed or put into practice effective strategies to actually protect a civilian population under siege, other than the cordon sanitaire to prevent the Iraqi regime from destroying Iraqi Kurdistan at the end of the Gulf War.

This observation is by no means meant to suggest that the precious words of the Genocide Convention have lost their meaning or legal significance. The fact that the first cases of genocide have been brought successfully against individuals responsible for the crime in both Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia clearly indicate otherwise. It seems to me, however, that invoking the Treaty in situations where it clearly applies is not necessarily the most effective strategy for inspiring public support for action to prevent genocide and save those at risk, and that those of us who invoke it for this purpose may unwittingly and paradoxically undermine the suppression of killings and protection of the innocent that we hope to promote by invoking our government's legal obligations under the treaty.

Every humanitarian organization and human rights group knows that the story of one victim or ten is infinitely more compelling than reports that thousands have died. It is simply human nature to identify with the single victim and to find incomprehensible the murder of thousands - much less hundreds of thousands. There are sobering political implications to this commonplace observation: the sheer magnitude of the abuses results in a sense of defeat, and can even undermine efforts to save the few, as well as the many. Indeed, it is the very characteristic of genocide - its broad reach and large number of victims - that appears to undermine practical strategies to save anyone at all.

I call this paradox "promoting the many at the expense of the few." In the case of the genocide in Rwanda, it seemed that that the U.S. Government avoided opportunities to save even a few Rwandans or engage in even small diplomatic measures to stigmatize the genocidal regime as if such activities would be seen as shameful in light of the killing of so many. Let all suffer an equality of neglect, rather than attempt to do what one could to save some.

We see this same poisonous and defeating rationale in the context of mass death in a different context. The HIV/AIDS pandemic has claimed millions of lives in sub-Saharan Africa, even though the same disease is manageable - if not curable - in rich countries. Antiretroviral medicines have prolonged life and enhanced its quality immeasurably for people with AIDS in the U.S. and Europe. But until very recently, the notion of treating AIDS in poor countries was largely dismissed by policy makers in donor countries. And there was a good deal of reluctance by both governments of AIDS-burdened countries and by international donors to treat anyone at all, because the task of treating all in need was so daunting. Thus almost ten years after the development of pharmaceuticals to successfully treat AIDS fewer than 100,000 (out of millions who need it immediately) in Africa are on this treatment. Again, equality of neglect has been the result.

By way of illustrating the point in another way, consider a crime that claims very large numbers of victims, and where strategies to save any of them are almost unknown. The commercial sexual exploitation of children is a crime practiced with impunity in many countries of the world that, particularly in the age of HIV/AIDS, results in the death of hundreds of thousands of victims. UNICEF states that an estimated two million children enter prostitution every year. Child prostitution is a clear violation of every country's domestic law and a flagrant offense under international law, yet these crimes are carried out in broad daylight, and almost invariably with the complicity of local law enforcement.

The notion of a particular ten-year-old girl whom we know personally suffering multiple rape every day is unthinkably vile. Yet we have accommodated ourselves to the reality that there are hundreds of thousands of such atrocities against children every day. Moreover, because of the sheer volume of sexual trafficking victims and sexually exploited children and their proximity to even larger numbers of sex workers, the prospect of identifying, liberating and rehabilitating children illegally held in prostitution is so daunting that there are almost no policies, strategies, and practices to save all - or even some - of these young victims.

Last year in Thailand, for example, anti-trafficking police engaged in two raids on brothels that brazenly sold under-age girls to Western sex tourists. The police actions resulted in the liberation from brothels of dozens of girls or adult women forced or tricked into commercial sex against their will. Surprisingly, these rescue efforts have received near-unanimous criticism from Thai and American nongovernmental groups, anti-trafficking activists, scholars, and sex worker service organizations. One reason given by such groups for their stance is that rescue operations to save individual girls are seen to be too miniscule, given the dimensions of the problem of child prostitution, to be worthwhile. Even the United Nations anti-trafficking official in Thailand was quoted as saying that the rescue of a few child prostitutes is useless because others will soon take their place.

The upshot of such reasoning about the few versus the many is that governments which tolerate vast numbers of crimes against children trafficked into the sex industry do not face a torrent of demands to rescue the victims and prosecute the perpetrators. On the contrary, in Thailand, India, and Cambodia - among the world's worst offenders - the few occasions in which the authorities did secure individual victims' rights have generated a torrent of opposition from groups promoting social services for women in prostitution who felt that their efforts would be jeopardized by police action to secure the liberty of children and sex slaves in the brothels.

Interestingly, strategies abound about ways to address the "phenomenon" of sex trafficking. Experts have written extensively on the origins of child prostitution and on the prevention of trafficking. Yet practical proposals to save individual victims and remove them from situations of abuse, degradation, and disease are almost nonexistent.

Now consider the crime of genocide. The policy literature is full of recommendations for such things as government working groups, intelligence gathering on mass killings, "early warning" indicators and watch lists, stigmatization of perpetrators, and streamlining policy-making machinery. I've promoted such recommendations myself. Yet hard-headed and reality-based strategies for actually saving lives and pushing back genocidal assaults on unarmed people as genocide unfolds are usually absent from policy discussions.

By way of illustration, let us consider some of the salient features of the Rwanda genocide. All of us know of Commander Dallaire's fruitless appeal for additional resources before and during the genocide, and his conclusion later that with 5,000 additional troops he might have stopped the killings. In real time - April and May of 1994 -- as the killings accelerated and spread, there was almost no discussion among policy makers about specific actions that could be undertaken immediately to save any Rwandans at all. In Washington there was almost no public knowledge, media attention, or Congressional scrutiny of specific, pragmatic actions to save particular at risk groups, or demands on the U.N. or Western countries' national forces to take actions that might have stopped short of suppressing the genocide but would have saved thousands of its victims. Deliberations at the United Nations during the crucial first weeks of April similarly focused on the larger question of U.N. peacekeeping forces' withdrawal and initiatives to save even a few of the Rwandan children, men, and women in facilities guarded by U.N. soldiers was apparently not discussed.

Key Western governments, including the U.S., Belgium, and France who withdrew support from the United Nations force in Rwanda deployed their own forces to save a few people from the inferno. They had clear strategies to do so, and were remarkably successful. Those whom they saved, of course, were not Rwandans but their own nationals. Human Rights Watch researcher Alison Des Forges has written a meticulous account of how Belgium and France assembled an evacuation force of 900 elite troops, backed up by an additional 300 U.S. marines at Bujumbura to evacuate their own citizens. Rwandans were explicitly excluded from the evacuation convoys. And, shamefully, UNAMIR forces were literally diverted from protecting concentrations of Tutsis to help evacuate Europeans. Those whom they abandoned were slaughtered.

In this case, the decision not to save even a few Rwandans actively undermined "saving the many," because the decision to leave even those Rwandans who had been under the protection of international forces clearly telegraphed to those engaged in genocide and could only have had the effect of emboldening them. Similarly the U.S. and European embassies in Kigali left behind most of their Rwanda staff to be butchered. The political message to those committing genocide, who were calculating every move with an eye towards what the international community would tolerate, was unmistakable and must have contributed greatly to their confidence that they could kill virtually any Tutsi they could find.

And that is what they did. As hundreds of thousands of Rwandans were murdered through April and early May the United Nations and its most influential member, the U.S. dithered and ducked. After interminable and disgraceful delays the Security Council on May 17 at last authorized "UNAMIR II" - a follow on force to allegedly stop the massacres. I recall during that period endless discussions between the peacekeeping office and the U.S. State Department over various "plans" to enter the country through this or that route. Should safe havens be set up on Rwanda's borders, or should the force work from Kigali? All were abandoned as inadequate or impractical. What is startling is that even modest strategies to bulk up protection where large numbers of Tutsi were concentrated or pre-positioning forces where the genocide had not yet extended, were not even discussed. Thus were strategies to save the few neglected while policy makers, allegedly crafting policies to save the many ended up doing neither.

The United States government eventually came to refer to the Rwandan genocide by its right name. But no amount of reference to genocide or strategy sessions at the U.N. on interventions to stop the genocide (which never came to pass) could outweigh the fact that the U.S. and its allies would not even save the few - even the few who worked for them, much less the many.

On the other hand, there are a few cases where UNAMIR soldiers - against the decision taken at peacekeeping headquarters in New York to save no one - took matters into their own hands, and protected the Tutsi Rwandans under their immediate care.

As Human Rights Watch recounts in "Leave None to Tell the Story," Alison Des Forges' masterful account of the genocide, describes how the remaining handful of UNAMIR troops following the withdrawal of the bulk of the UNAMIR forces continued to protect more than 15,000 persons, both Hutu and Tutsi, who had sought refuge at the Amahoro stadium. It also provided guards at other sites that were not U.N. posts, including the King Faisal Hospital where there were another 5,000-6,000 people.

The fact that a handful of lightly armed U.N. forces were able to prevent hordes of militia and presidential guard from overrunning such places of sanctuary is one of the most important - and least observed - features of the genocide. It appears that simply insisting that genocidal forces not cross a line saved thousands of lives, even while the same forces butchered thousands all around. Similarly, a young U.S. embassy employee insisted that hundreds of Rwandans be included in a convoy out of the country. The Rwandans were identified as Americans, and permitted to leave.

The lesson here is not to promote any particular strategy, but rather to indicate that the saving of those lives was precious in its own right, and a model to admire and emulate. Moreover, it offers some potentially useful insights into strategies to save at least some even if our government and the United Nations do not carry out their duty to prevent genocide.

We in the human rights community are not required to become military experts, and to devise strategies to protect convoys of people, safe havens, or escape routes. But by insisting that it is never too late to save some people, even when we have clearly lost the battle to promote humanitarian intervention to save them all, is a duty we must not shrink from.

In the early days of the modern human rights movement in the U.S., activists affiliated with Amnesty International concentrated upon individual prisoners of conscience. Today human rights groups have broadened their understanding and their concern to include crimes with millions of victims. Yet it is not the vast numbers of the vulnerable, the dying, and the dead that animates the public and policy makers to devise life-saving strategies, it is the notion that one human being is suffering and dying, who need not.

As we remember the Rwanda genocide and its bitter lessons in this year of its 10th anniversary, I propose that we scrutinize carefully not the specific failings and horrors that led to the death of 800,000 in 100 days, but rather the little-noticed strategies that saved a few among the many. And we should challenge ourselves and our policy makers, particularly those within the U.S. military and diplomatic community, to analyze those individual life-saving strategies and learn how they saved could be replicated and brought to scale to someday save the many.

The value of saving the few, then, is clear. In the first instance, every life is precious and saving ten or twenty or one is a great deed. Such deeds must never be renounced because they appear small in the context of mass death. Second, by focusing on the immediate and the doable, activists and policy makers are required to confront the internalized constraints that prevent action to save the few or the many. It reminds us that we in fact are not powerless in the face of killings, and it can remind the killers of that fact as well. Finally, examining strategies and models for saving the hundreds huddled in a stadium, for example, could encourage the scale up and replication of such models, and their application elsewhere.

The horror of the Rwanda genocide and its aftermath resonates around the world ten years later. Yet mass killing occurs even as we gather to commemorate the events of 1994 in Rwanda, and we appear to be as powerless today as we were then. I speak of the massacre of civilians in Darfur, Sudan where reportedly an estimated million people have been displaced, thousands killed and many more raped and tortured. In reference to Darfur, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, criticized UN Member States for lacking the political will to act in potential genocidal situations. Let us not be paralyzed there, as we were in Rwanda, by the specter of "genocide," and demand that our government take action to save as many of the vulnerable as they can. Let us look to every life-saving strategy from every such attack on vulnerable people, and see what may be done today to save the few, if not the many.

We in the human rights community rightly insist that a thing be called by its proper name. The word "genocide" carries with it the horror and weight of the greatest atrocities in human history. In these times, the word has not served the purpose of animating, inspiring, and outraging. Rather, it has conveyed a sense of inevitability and defeat. For those who are daunted and defeated by the word, let us attempt to convey our outrage and horror differently. A genocide is the destruction of a people, one life at a time, one after another, until the numbers are numbing. The converse of genocide is valuing, protecting, and saving a people. If the only way such a high purpose can be understood and acted upon is one life at a time, then so be it.