Genocide!

This week Rwanda marked the 10th anniversary of the 1994 genocide that was, according to many reports, triggered by the shooting down of the Hutu presidential plane when it was attempting to land at Kigali airport on April 6 of that year. The Hutu president of Rwanda and the president of neighboring Burundi were killed. The crippled plane, by some extra ordinary coincidence landed in the garden of the presidential palace. There are reports that Tutsi rebels fired the rocket, which brought the plane down.
The massacre started in Kigali and spread to the countryside when the crash signaled the Hutu extremists to start a systematic liquidation of minority ethnic Tutsis and any Hutu opponents of the regime.
At its peak the killing in Rwanda is said to have been 10 times faster than the mechanized killing machine the Nazis employed to exterminate the Jews in the Second World War. In the neighborhood of a million people were literally slaughtered to death in the space of 100 days.
Information has surfaced of late that the Rwanda mass killings were carefully planned, far in advance and quite contrary to the spontaneous and uncontrollable outpouring of hatred that could not have been stopped.
The information reveals that not only were the killings planned in detail by a relatively small group of extremists Hutu politicians from northern Rwanda but that they were able to obtain support from abroad. Genocide was apparently openly discussed in cabinet meetings.
Investigations of bank records have revealed that in 1994 the Hutu Government of Rwanda purchased three quarters of a million dollars worth of machetes from China, enough to arm one in every third male. The machetes turned into weapons of mass murder soon after the presidential plane crashed.
President Paul Kagame has accused the international community of deliberately failing to prevent the genocide. “How could a million lives of the Rwandan people be regarded as insignificant?” he asks. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who was head of peace keeping at the time of the genocide, has accepted institutional and personal blame for not doing more to prevent the mass slaughter in Rwanda. The then President of the United States, Bill Clinton traveled to Kigali to offer a personal apology.
The United Nations commander in Rwanda tried to sound the alarm to the UN Security Council of the impending disaster but no one was listening and the UN failed to reinforce the small UN peacekeeping force that was deployed in the country. In fact, no one was interested in saving Rwandans and the bulk of the UN force was ordered to leave instead.
The inability of the international community to prevent genocide cannot be explained only by lack of information or poor understanding of the situation. Alarm bell rings only for those who are listening.
As the world observed a one-minute silence on April 7th to remember the victims of the genocide ten year later, some are asking if the international community has learned anything from that experience. Is there a resolve to prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again? Perhaps keeping alive the memory of past acts of genocide is good way of stiffening the resolve to act, should threats of genocide appear again on this continent.
Greater efforts must be made to interpret the warning signs and respond to them adequately by the international community, but prevention of genocide must not rest solely on the shoulders of the international community. More responsibility lies with the African continent itself.
What have African governments done to fight against political, economic and social marginalization and discrimination? What are we doing to build dialogue that would promote understanding and respect for one another or to fight intolerance, discrimination, racism or respect for human rights and human dignity?