Remembering Rwanda

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Remembering Rwanda

04/07/2004

On April 5, 1994, my wife and I were watching television when news broke of an airplane crash in Kigali, Rwanda.

"Five hundred thousand people will die because of that crash," I said, when the reporter stated that the presidents of both Rwanda and neighboring Burundi had been on the plane. Within a few weeks, it appeared that I somewhat underestimated the carnage. It was probably closer to 800,000, and the round number figure of a million is often alleged.

The crash turned out to have been caused not by bad weather or pilot error, but by two missiles that hit the plane as it approached the Kigali airport, and to this day the question of who was responsible for firing the missiles is a matter of contentious debate. On March 10 of this year, the plane's "black box" was found, not at the decade-old crash site, but in a filing cabinet at the United Nations.

Hillary-like, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan bestirred himself from his principal occupation, covering up the Iraqi Oil for Food scandal, to declare that it was just an administrative snafu that caused the black box to lie around all these years. Critics suspect otherwise. The Rwandans think the French were involved in covering up their culpability. The French think current Rwandan President Paul Kagami was behind the downing of the plane, and both sides are suspicious of the UN's role.

Getting to the bottom of all that is obviously of some importance to many people, but it is not what I want to focus on here.

Ten years before the crash, author Thurston Clarke visited Rwanda on a round-the-middle-of-the-world journey chronicled in his excellent 1988 book, Equator. He found the country unnervingly prosperous, especially given that there had already been two rounds of genocide, one in 1959 which claimed a hundred thousand lives, and another in 1972, which claimed twice that number.

Behind all of this carnage is a tribal confrontation between the Hutu and Tutsi (spelled Tusi by Clarke) tribes. Clarke's summation is as good as any. "By tradition," he writes, "the Tusi were feudal aristocrats who owned herds of lyre-horned cattle, and the Hutu were serfs who milked Tusi cows, farmed their fields, and paid tribute. Hutu and Tusi physiques matched their status. The Tusi had stork legs, bony fingers, and fine-featured faces, and looked dangerously brittle, as if hard work would snap them like a twig. The Hutu were squashed, like medieval peasants."

When the colonial powers, Germans and then Belgians, left, democracy came to the region, and as one would suspect, there were more peasants than aristocrats. Thus the Hutus took over.

So which do you prefer, a country in which one group enslaves another, or a one-man-one-vote democracy in which the groups take turns killing each other by the tens of thousands?

The baneful spirit of tribe is a problem not limited to equatorial Africa. It rears its ugly head in Ireland, Spain, Yugoslavia, Israel, Iraq and dozens of other places, too. And you can't just draw political boundaries and cry out, "Serbs to the left, Croats to the right," or somesuch either. The wending and intermixing of peoples from prehistoric times forward makes for a puzzle unsolvable by geographic manipulation.

(As a 13-year-old, I came up with a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict consisting of moving the Jews - or the Arabs, I didn't much care which - to Baja California, which I supposed to be virtually uninhabited. This is the problem with hanging a National Geographic map of the world on the wall of a boy's bedroom.)

In all the world, the multiethnic country with the least tribal conflict is almost surely the United States. For all the cries about intolerance and prejudice - indeed, perhaps because of all those cries, we manage to get along remarkably well, with something very close to liberty and justice for all.

We would very much like the rest of the world to do likewise. We just have a very difficult time figuring out how to make it happen. Iraq is an attempt to use force to catalyze (not impose, but catalyze) precisely such a solution - to set up conditions in which Sunni, Kurd and Shi'a can build a society in which all can engage in the pursuit of happiness without the assumption that happiness for me is contingent on misery for you.

It is by no means clear the attempt will succeed, at least in the short run.

Elsewhere in the world, different tactics may be attempted. In Rwanda, we did nothing. Bill Clinton apologized, four years later, for having ignored the 1994 genocide.

But maybe it was the right policy after all. Today, Rwanda is again making progress toward reconciliation and prosperity. Things there appear to be at least back to where they were in 1988, when Clarke visited. Will it stick this time? Or is another round of killing inevitable? As with the current situation in Iraq, we just don't know.

Diplomacy, financial aid, armed force, benign neglect - we apply policy as best we can think to do in a given place at a given time. The only other course is isolation, and as 9/11 demonstrated, that doesn't work either.

So let us take up the American burden. It's a heavy one to be sure, and we may fail. But if we don't try, we've failed already.

http://www.theoptimate.com/2041/