Murder Most Foul

To stop genocide, the U.S. must learn to intervene more carefully.

Charles Peña from the November 2002 issue

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In Rwanda, those Tutsi who tried to flee their homes (ostensibly to seek safety across the border) were snared and butchered at checkpoints. Children of Hutu and Tutsi who had intermarried were categorized as Tutsi and killed. In one instance, a 3-year-old pleaded for his life after seeing his brothers and sisters killed: "Please don't kill me. I'll never be Tutsi again." Power writes that "the killers, unblinking, struck him down." Clearly, the Hutu were engaged in genocide, trying to exterminate the Tutsi systematically. Indeed, lists of victims had been prepared ahead of time. All this took place while a United Nations peacekeeping force was stationed in Rwanda's capital, Kigali.

Although it took time to recognize that genocide was occurring and to distinguish the mass killings of Tutsi from the inevitable casualties of Rwandan civil war or even ethnic cleansing, it is hard to imagine a more clear-cut case of genocide and the ensuing moral imperative for the United States to act. Recognizing genocide rests on a confluence of evidence. Mass killing based on ethnicity is clearly a necessary, but not sufficient, condition. That Tutsi were not allowed to flee to safety made it clear that extermination rather than ethnic cleansing was the goal.

That the killings were widespread throughout the country, not just in the area surrounding Kigali, is another piece of evidence. But it is no one single thing, and it's evidence accumulated over a period of time (in this case, probably several weeks).

One of the reasons that the U.S. failed to act in Rwanda was the disastrous American military operation in Somalia, not long before, that had resulted in the deaths of 18 Army Rangers. Scarred by a firefight gone bad on a humanitarian intervention mission that was neither vital nor important to U.S. national security interests, U.S. policy makers were paralyzed when it came to taking necessary action in Rwanda. Moreover, American politicians, pundits, and the public expressed little or no interest in Rwanda. Not only was the Pentagon opposed to military action, but there was no constituency expressing outrage. The sad and shameful truth is that American politics and policy would allow the U.S. to become engaged in Bosnia-Herzegovina because it was in Europe, but not in Rwanda because it was in Africa.

In the end, some 500,000 Rwandans were killed in 100 days. The United States should have acted. But the limits of what U.S. intervention can realistically accomplish also need recognition. Writing in the January/February 2000 issue of Foreign Affairs, Alan J. Kuperman argues that "although some lives could have been saved by intervention of any size at any point during the genocide, the hard truth is that even a large force deployed immediately upon reports of attempted genocide would not have been able to save even half the ultimate victims."

The rapidity of the Rwanda murders was staggering. The largest number of killings took place within three weeks of President Habrayimana's plane crash (nearly 300,000 Tutsi -- almost half the Rwandan Tutsi population -- were killed). Even if 5,000 U.S. troops could have prevented the killings (a claim originally made by the U.N. commanding general in Rwanda, Canadian Maj. Gen. Romeo Dallaire), whether they could have been deployed in time is questionable. Moving troops and equipment likely would have taken several weeks (made more difficult by the necessity of an airlift, the slowest way to transport large numbers of troops and equipment).

At best -- if the order to deploy had been issued immediately after President Habrayimana's plane crash -- those troops would have arrived only after several hundred thousand Tutsi had already been killed. Realistically, such an order would have come a week or two later, after there was irrefutable evidence that genocide was occurring. This is not an excuse for inaction, but simply to highlight the fact that, at least in the case of Rwanda, intervention would not have averted genocide, though it could have saved a great many lives. It also points to the tragic fact that it may not be possible to prevent genocide (because there must be strong evidence that genocide is occurring to warrant intervention) but only that further genocide might be stopped once it has started.

What is the lesson of Rwanda? That the more the U.S. involves itself in every crisis, the more every crisis begins to look the same. Without being able to make clear distinctions between crises -- without maintaining political will -- it is easier to marginalize and ignore the important ones.

Moreover, U.S. military resources are finite. If stretched too thin by attempting to address the myriad humanitarian crises that continue to erupt, there may not be enough critical military mass to take action when true genocide is occurring.

Indeed, the more narrowly the United States defines its national security interests, and the less engaged and entangled U.S. foreign policy is with nonvital interests around the world, the more likely that genocide will be quickly recognized and forcefully targeted.

That is exactly the point of Power's compelling narrative: The horror and tragedy of genocide is a moral issue that transcends national interest. But to prevent another Rwanda, the United States must also have the wisdom to avoid another Somalia.