Complicity and cowardice in the face of genocide

On growing up and seeing the blood on your own hands.

March 10, 2024

What is the first massacre you remember? The first time you witnessed incomprehensible violence and disregard for human life? Maybe you didn’t witness it directly but it was a recurring segment on the nightly news, the front pages of newspapers, the covers of magazines. The news anchors switched from footage of bombs, bodies, medics pulling people from rubble, to the local shelter’s pet of the week and your young mind was still reeling, trying to understand what you just saw.

Just as important, though it might not be the same, what was the first incident that made you think, “the adults have to do something about this?” And then they didn’t? While it may not fully click that your country, your people are the villains in this story, you start to wonder if they at least might not be the heroes. 

A generation of young people right now are experiencing this with Israel's war in Gaza. The thought made me reflect on my earliest memories of massacres. Then I started digging into those conflicts (which is why this column is so late), determined to figure out, now as an adult, what happened, what was the U.S.’s role, and whether we have learned anything. 

My first was the war in Yugoslavia. I read Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Sarajevo, by Zlata Filipovic, who was in fifth grade when the war broke out in 1991. By the time her diary was published in 1993, I was in 3rd or 4th grade. Zlata documented the escalation of the war, her eventually leaving school, no longer going outside, to her family hiding in a shelter, and learning second-hand about friends, neighbors, and classmates that were killed by snipers or mortar shells.

"That was a real shock for everyone," former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan told PBS’s American Experience. "And for that to happen in Europe, many decades after World War II, was something that nobody could sit back and swallow."

Sound familiar? I doubt I was the only one ready to tear their hair out when they heard similar commentary on the war in Ukraine.

Even after Zlata left Sarajevo, the war continued. But then, as that earlier clip says, there was Rwanda. My memory of Rwanda is countless bodies clogging the Kagera River. The primary weapons were machetes, leaving survivors with missing limbs and disturbing scars. I also vaguely remember hearing that this was a Civil War between two groups who had fought each other for years. So why should we get involved? 

After the dust of the war had settled and the full extent of the carnage understood, that sense shifted to regret. It was a moral wound, a black mark that showed that maybe we aren’t the people we say we are.

Then-U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright told Frontline told the documentary Ghosts of Rwanda that it was her biggest regret from her time in the Clinton Administration, “because it is a huge tragedy, and something that sits very heavy on all our souls.”

But then she says something that bubbles up my ever-simmering pot of rage: “I wish it had been possible for us to do more… I have reviewed the record a lot, and I don't think actually that we could have done more. I just wish that it had not been something that the international community was not capable of dealing with.”

Albright goes on to say that “the information wasn’t there and the wherewithal wasn’t there to do it.” If there’s one thing we know about the United States, it's that when there’s a will, there is wherewithal. And shortly after the Rwandan genocide ended, the U.S. and NATO found the wherewithal to launch a military response in the former Yugoslavia. It was four years and thousands of deaths too late, but it happened.

Also, Albright saying that no one knew what was going on in Rwanda is absurd. Because there were U.N. peacekeepers on the ground before the bloodshed started.

What happened?

In 1994, the small central/east African nation of Rwanda was a powder keg. Then on April 6, a plane carrying Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira, both Hutus, was shot down. A few months earlier, Habyarimana had signed a peace treaty with the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi militia led by now-Rwandan President Paul Kagame (and who threw Paul Rusesabagina AKA the guy from “Hotel Rwanda” in prison) that had attempted to overthrow Habyarimana’s government. 

Right-wing Hutus blamed Kagame for the assassination. Kagame blamed the right-wing Hutus, saying they used it to justify the long-planned genocide of Tutsis. It’s still unknown who shot down the plane. But it was the spark that ignited one of the shortest and most deadly genocides recorded—an estimated 800,000 to 1 million people were murdered, mostly Tutsis and some moderate Hutus who did not support the violence. The total was about 10% of the total Rwandan population, and about 70% of the minority Tutsi population, murdered in 100 days.

U.N. peacekeepers were in Rwanda to enforce the peace treaty when the violence broke out. But as the violence spread, and Belgian peacekeepers were attacked, their commands were to focus on evacuating Europeans, not preventing violence against Rwandans. 

“Major international leaders were ready to collaborate on the common goal of evacuating their own citizens and expatriate employees, but they refused any joint intervention to save Rwandan lives,” Alison Des Forges writes in her report for Human Rights Watch, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda. “Instead they focused on issues of immediate importance for their own countries: Belgium on extricating its peacekeepers with a minimum of dishonor; the U.S. on avoiding committing resources to a crisis remote from U.S. concerns; and France on protecting its client and its zone of Francophone influence. Meanwhile most staff at the U.N. were fixed on averting another failure in peacekeeping operations, even at the cost of Rwandan lives. Rather than undertake innovative and potentially costly ways to halt the slaughter, international leaders and the U.N. staff treated the extermination campaign as an unfortunate consequence of the war and devoted their energies to trying to obtain a cease-fire between the belligerents. They waited two weeks before taking action and then [that action] was to reduce the number of peacekeepers in Rwanda.”

That U.N. peacekeepers were told not to prioritize actually keeping the peace is abhorrent in itself, but it is especially so given Europe’s history in Rwanda and with the conflict between Hutus and Tutsis. During the colonial era, Rwanda was occupied by Germany as part of German East Africa from 1894 to 1918. When Germany lost World War I, the League of Nations transferred Rwanda’s occupation to Belgium, a nation that distinguished itself for its spectacular brutality amidst a particularly brutal era.

The Germans and Belgians deliberately drew Rwanda’s boundaries to have a large majority group, the Hutus, and a minority group, the Tutsis, same as Rwanda’s neighbor, Burundi. In both countries, the occupiers granted the Tutsi minority greater privileges and power over the Hutu majority. Can you imagine if an occupying force had conquered Germany and maybe two French provinces, then made the French an upper caste with dominion over local government, law enforcement, military, and industry for the entire territory? That is what Europe did in its colonies all over the world to intentionally foment animosity and violence between ethnic or religious groups so those groups would not unite to overthrow their occupiers. That divide-and-conquer tactic was already in place when Belgium occupied Rwanda in 1918, but the Belgians exacerbated those tensions.

As decolonization began to spread across the continent, Belgium realized that a popular vote in Rwanda would result in a Hutu takeover and switched sides, supporting the Hutu empowerment party. From 1959, when the Tutsi monarch died, until 1962 when Rwanda became an independent nation, Belgium did nothing as the ethnic group that had enforced their occupation for decades was murdered and driven out of the country. Many Tutsis escaped to Uganda, where they formed paramilitary groups, like the RPF run by Kagame, and launched occasional attacks into Rwandan territory. The attacks did little except exacerbate tensions and justify Hutus enacting violence on the remaining Tutsis living in Rwanda. It didn’t help that in Burundi the Tutsis had retained power and in 1972, the Tutsi-led government killed an estimated 75,000 educated Hutus—“just about anyone who could read,” according to The Guardian.  

Beginning in the 1970’s, Tutsi refugees in Uganda were allowed to leave refugee camps and start building lives, but when political leadership changed, they were forced to either re-enter the refugee camps, cross back into Rwanda, or face threats of violence. Many joined the RPF, and in 1990, the militia invaded Rwanda. During the three-year civil war, Uganda supplied the rebels with weapons in spite of several U.N., African and Rwandan treaties and charters saying not to do so. And the United States looked the other way. 

The war reached a stalemate, and both sides signed a peace agreement that included an agreement that both Hutus and Tutsis would share political power. U.N. peacekeepers entered the country. Then the plane was shot down.

I’m not going to do a direct comparison with the war in Gaza, in part because one deep dive into a genocide is enough. But from what I know, there’s two important ways I’m sure these conflicts overlap: lots of people have blood on their hands, no matter how thoroughly they try to wipe them clean and look the other way. 

America and Europe, particularly when it comes to our colonial history, have conveniently short memories. Decades after the Rwandan genocide, the U.S. and the U.K. actually had the gall to push back against the use of the word “genocide” in a U.N. resolution recognizing the genocide. And, ten, twenty years from now, I’m sure they’ll do the same thing when the rest of world recognizes that what is happening in Gaza now is a genocide.

A critical part of growing older is accepting and taking responsibility for your actions and actually doing better in the future—not saying you will and then doing the same thing. Even if the U.S. and Europe try to erase and control the narrative of their past involvement with atrocities, everyone else in the world remembers and can see that we are making the same mistakes over and over again. They are waiting for us to grow up. 

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