The Jerusalem Post
December 29, 2004, Wednesday
Use people power against genocide
by: Shmuley Boteach
Leaders will always fail to act. We must force them to. The writer, a
rabbi and best-selling author, hosts a daily radio show syndicated on
the Talk America radio network.
Two things were on my mind as I watched Hotel Rwanda, the stunning
depiction of the 1994 Rwandan Tutsi extermination that was the
fastest genocide in the history of the world.
The first was Hollywood, and how I owed it an apology for the many
times I have railed against its degeneracy.
A film this powerful shames the world out of its indifference to the
slaughter of helpless humans and demonstrates the potential of movies
to reach the places photos and words cannot. The second was Bill
Clinton, the great 60’s liberal romantic, who dreamed of becoming
president in order to make the world a better place.
How would he deal with his shame? The movie is more damaging to his
reputation than if Monica Lewinsky had equipped herself with a
handycam.
Though Clinton is never mentioned explicitly in the movie, he is the
ghost that haunts the entire story, the most powerful man on earth,
who not only refused to intervene to save 800,000 people from being
hacked to death but declined to even convene his cabinet to discuss
the crisis.
How would the great liberal hope now face his Nobel- prize winning
friend Toni Morrison, who called him “America’s first black
President”?
Would he still be invited by Oprah Winfrey to talk about his $
12-million autobiography once she focused on the fact that Clinton
had even refused to provide jamming aircraft to block the Hutu Power
radio transmissions that orchestrated the massacres?
The $ 8,500-per-hour cost to the United States was determined by the
president’s administration be too exorbitant, even though, since
10,000 Rwandans were being killed each day, the cost came to $ 20 per
life.
And would Bill Clinton still be a hero to a new generation of
American youth once they found out that eight African nations, fed up
with American inaction to stop the butchery, agreed to send in their
own intervention force?
All they asked from the US was the use of 50 armored personnel
carriers, but the Clinton administration refused to loan them and
instead demanded $ 15 million, leaving the carriers on a runway in
Germany while the UN scrambled to find the money.
While all this happened, an average of 334 poor black Africans were
dying every hour.
THE RWANDAN genocide was unique in the annals of modern genocide
insofar as the world had absolutely no excuse not to intervene.
The Ottoman Turks’ slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians took place
during the fog of the First World War. The same was true of the
Holocaust of six million European Jews, which gave Franklin Roosevelt
the excuse that defeating the Germans was the best way to stop the
carnage.
The Khmer Rouge’s extermination of one third of Cambodia’s seven
million citizens was done in a country that was utterly sealed off
from the rest of the world, thus granting the Western powers
plausible deniability as to its occurrence.
But with the Rwandan genocide, UN commander General Romeo Dallaire of
Canada, one of the few true heroes of this otherwise cowardly tale,
informed the world of both the Hutu preparations for mass murder and
every development once the genocide was in full swing.
The Clinton administration’s response constitutes one of the greatest
abominations of American history.
Not only did the United States refuse to intervene, but, to quote The
New York Times, “it also used its considerable power to discourage
other Western powers from intervening.”
The Clinton administration robbed Dallaire of any ability to protect
the unarmed men, women, and children by demanding a total withdrawal
of all 2,500 UN peacekeepers, only later allowing a skeletal force of
270 because of the strong pressure of African nations.
The administration’s insistence that the UN be withdrawn was taken as
a clear signal by the Hutu Power militias that the West cared nothing
for poor African lives.
>From that time on the fate of the Tutsis was sealed, and the bodies
of hundreds of thousands of children, with their parents’, littered
Rwanda’s rivers and hills.
The Clinton administration’s repellant response only got worse, with
the State Department then prohibiting use of the word “genocide,”
because that would have obligated the US to intervene.
To be fair, I should add that Clinton did go to Rwanda in 1998 to
apologize – though only for three-and-a-half hours, his plane not
even shutting down its engines while he spoke.
True to form, he at least felt their pain.
DECEMBER 9, 2004 was the 56th anniversary of the approval of the
Genocide Convention by the United Nations General Assembly.
But with another genocide taking place in Sudan and the UN refusing
to even pass a resolution condemning it, it is clear the world is
still not ready to prevent entire groups being exterminated.
It is also clear that no country, not even the United States, can be
trusted to prevent genocide.
Even President Bush, the greatest champion of democracy since Winston
Churchill, has thus far done too little to help the wretched people
of Darfur, where about 100,000 have already died.
Which leaves just you and me.
I believe that rather than merely blame world leaders for being
indifferent to genocide, decent people everywhere must take it upon
themselves to coerce their governments into action whenever a
genocide occurs.
There should be a mass strike, along with other acts of civil
disobedience, for two days of every month until the great democracies
take action to stop whole groups being exterminated.
Surely if enough people began to act someone with global influence
will emerge to inspire and orchestrate the campaign. We could shut
down whole countries twice a month until those governments act.
Mass slaughter requires a mass response.
Let’s begin with the Sudan, whom the US and other responsible
governments have already labeled guilty of a genocide.
Let us strike until the Western democracies send troops into the
Sudan to stop the Janjaweed militias, or carry out air strikes
against the Sudanese government that is arming them.