How the
West turned blind eye despite general's 'genocide
fax' (Filed: 06/04/2004)
Alec Russell, who covered the aftermath of the
massacres, reports
A little over 10 years ago, Maj Gen Romeo Dallaire,
the French-Canadian commander of a United Nations peacekeeping force
in Rwanda, sent an urgent telegram to Kofi Annan, then UN head of
peacekeeping, in New York.
It should be pinned up in the foreign ministries of
the West as a permanent reminder of the most ignominious episode in
late 20th-century foreign affairs.
Gen Dallaire's message in January 1994 is now known
as the "genocide fax". Villages were awash with imported machetes,
he cautioned.
Rwanda had become so militarised that extremist Hutus
could "exterminate up to 1,000 in 20 minutes".
He was just about right in his analysis of the
efficacy of the machete against minority Tutsis. As Hutu militiamen
soon found in that blazingly hot April 10 years ago, even the most
muscular of forearms needs a rest. Once the genocide was in full
swing Hutu militiamen would often take breathers, flanked by heaps
of corpses and "pens" of waiting victims, and offer passers-by the
chance of some freelance butchery.
But Gen Dallaire's prescience and grim utilitarian
accuracy were scant comfort for the targets of the genocidaires. His
cable was buried. The West turned a blind eye. And for 100 days the
Hutu extremists had their way as western spokesmen bent over
backwards to avoid using the emotive term genocide which they feared
would trigger calls for intervention.
There are many factors in the West's reluctance to
intervene to stop the killing. Europe was fixated by the civil war
still raging in Bosnia. America was haunted by the "Black Hawk Down"
debacle in Somalia six months earlier, when the deaths of 18
American soldiers led to a rapid and ignominious withdrawal of
American forces.
The international media were for a while not fully
focused on the tragedy as the world was celebrating the handover of
power in South Africa.
Mr Annan, as he conceded last week, did not press
hard enough. But the real failure, as Richard Holbrooke, one of Bill
Clinton's senior officials, said last weekend in the Washington
Post, was a "failure of will and a failure of courage" by the
western powers.
Four years after the genocide, Mr Clinton visited
Kigali and claimed that he was not fully aware of the scale of the
horror.
But as Gen Dallaire said at the time, the UN had been
beating the drum for months for more troops - and as the recent
release of contemporary intelligence reports has confirmed, the
western powers knew exactly what was happening in Rwanda.
By early July, when the genocide was over, Gen
Dallaire was a broken man. Wild-eyed, he roved the UN headquarters
in the capital, Kigali, fulminating at the West's cowardice and
"racism".
He was convinced that a swift detachment of a further
2,500 soldiers could have prevented the genocide. This, after all,
was not a heavily armed, anarchic state like Somalia. There was a
well-organised, state-run mass murder, largely committed by machete,
hoe or club.
A key moment came early on when 10 Belgian
peacekeepers were killed by Hutu extremists when trying to rescue
politicians from a mob. It was a moment worthy of Evelyn Waugh's
bleakest satires. The peacekeepers were ordered to disarm to avoid
provoking the mob. They were promptly chopped up by machetes.
In a stroke, all the old western caricatures of
Africa were reinforced and so there was little outcry when America
demanded a full UN withdrawal. Then, even as the horror started to
dominate front pages, American officials deleted the word "genocide"
from UN statements.
The West did finally intervene - but on the wrong
side. The French sent several thousand elite troops. But it soon
emerged that their primary role was to protect the remnants of the
Hutu government, a traditional client of Paris, from the
Tutsi-dominated rebels who swept in from Uganda in the last weeks of
the genocide, and now remain in power.
If Gen Dallaire was a saddened and embittered man, so
too were the French colonels who entertained passing correspondents
in the "French zone" and openly conceded that they had never
expected to be defending genocidaires.
Over the next few days we can expect endless promises
of "Never again". Gen Dallaire is not so sure that the West would
intervene in the event of a repeat. "Rwandans simply don't count,"
he said. |