As I wrote before, I am fascinated by Philip Gourevitch's book, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda. Rather than chatter on about the text, or paraphrase it, I'm want to simply quote from the thing, and say: See? See?
The utopian premise of the Genocide Convention had been that a moral imperative to prevent efforts to exterminate whole peoples should be the overriding interest animating the action of an international community of autonomous states. This is a radical notion, fundamentally at odds, as so much of the internationalist experiment has proven to be, with the principle of sovereignty. States have never acted for purely disinterested humanitarian reasons: the novel idea was that the protection of humanity was in every state's interest, and it was well understood in the aftermath of World War II that action against genocide would require a willingness to use force and to risk the lives of one's own. The belief was that the price to the world of such a risk would not be as great as the price of inaction. But whose world were the drafters of the Genocide Convention--and the refugee conventions, which soon followed--thinking of?
I first traveled to Rwanda via Brussels on May 8, 1995. The European papers were full of commemorative articles marking the fiftieth anniversary of V-E Day. The Herald Tribune had reprinted its entire frontpage from May 8, 1945, and the articles impressed me with their fighting spirit: smash the Germans, conquer, then bring justice, then reconstruct. The European Wall Street Journal carried news of a poll which found that, fifty years after the fact, sixty-five percent of Germans believed that it was a good thing their country had been defeated. And I wondered: Can we imagine such an outcome for any of the wars of today?
Rwanda had presented the world with the most unambiguous case of genocide since Hitler's war against the Jews, and the world sent blankets, beans, and bandages to (post-genocide refugee camps) controlled by the killers, apparently hoping that everybody would behave nicely in the future.
The West's post-Holocaust pledge that genocide would never again be tolerated proved to be hollow, and for all the fine sentiments inspired by the memory of Auschwitz, the problem remains that denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good.
Image Credit: Jim Nachtwey's photograph of a machete pile left by Rwandan Hutus fleeing across the border to refugee camps in the DRC (then Zaire) at the tail end of the genocide.
Comments