could the rwandan genocide have been prevented - genocide.docVIP

COULD THE RWANDAN GENOCIDE HAVE BEEN PREVENTED? By Dr. Gregory H. Stanton In 1994, 500,000 to one million Rwandan Tutsis along with thousands of moderate Hutus, were murdered in the clearest case of genocide since the Holocaust. The world withdrew and watched. To borrow a Biblical metaphor, we passed by on the other side. Samantha Power, in her searing article in The Atlantic Monthly, “Bystanders to Genocide: Why the United States Let the Rwandan Tragedy Happen,” and in her book, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, says “The story of U.S. policy during the genocide in Rwanda is not a story of willful complicity with evil. U.S. officials did not sit around and conspire to allow genocide to happen. But whatever their convictions about ‘never again,’ many of them did sit around, and they most certainly did allow genocide to happen.” Ms. Power concludes that her extensive research, including interviews with most of the U.S. policy makers who made the decisions, “reveals that the U.S. government knew enough about the genocide early on to save lives, but passed up countless opportunities to intervene.” Early Warnings There were plenty of “early warnings” of the Rwandan genocide, but they were systematically ignored. The best book on the Rwandan genocide, Linda Melvern’s superb A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide sets them forth in detail. To list just a few, in the spring of 1992, the Belgian ambassador in Kigali, Johan Swinner warned his government that the Akazu, a secret group of Hutu Power advocates organized around the President’s wife, “is planning the extermination of the Tutsi of Rwanda to resolve once and for all, in their own way, the ethnic problem….” In October 1992, Professor Filip Reyntjens organized a press conference in the Belgian Senate in which he described how Hutu Power death squads were operating and named their leaders, including Colonel Théoneste Bagasora, who later coordinated the genoc