Ignorance Is Bliss

In the course of a hundred days in 1994 the Hutu government of Rwanda and its extremist allies very nearly succeeded in exterminating the country's Tutsi minority. Using firearms, machetes, and a variety of garden implements, Hutu militiamen, soldiers, and ordinary citizens murdered some 800,000 Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu. It was the fastest, most efficient killing spree of the twentieth century.

A few years later, in a series in The New Yorker, Philip Gourevitch recounted in horrific detail the story of the genocide and the world's failure to stop it. President Bill Clinton, a famously avid reader, expressed shock. He sent copies of Gourevitch's articles to his second-term national-security adviser, Sandy Berger. The articles bore confused, angry, searching queries in the margins. "Is what he's saying true?" Clinton wrote with a thick black felt-tip pen beside heavily underlined paragraphs. "How did this happen?" he asked, adding, "I want to get to the bottom of this." The President's urgency and outrage were oddly timed. As the terror in Rwanda had unfolded, Clinton had shown virtually no interest in stopping the genocide, and his Administration had stood by as the death toll rose into the hundreds of thousands. Why? Why have we, as mankind, not learned out lesson? Did Hitler's regime not convince us? That's barely history...it's recent history; we've already forgotten. Why is this continuing to happen on our watch?

In short, the same forces that work against democracies going to war work against intervening to stop genocide. For one, it is not perceived at the highest levels to be in our national interest. Second, the cost of intervening with American troops, or even careful high altitude bombing, are seen to exceed the political costs of possible casualties, or those imposed by the always present opposition. Third, such intervention runs counter to the prevailing world view of the State Department, commentators, and the foreign policy establishment, which is real politics (stability, don't rock the status quo, our national interests are the dominant consideration). Third, the U.S. would probably have to intervene alone (not even the UN will provide political cover). Lastly and most important, the American public is uninterested, unmoved, and doesn't care.

When the public has become aroused, and the media is screaming for action, Congress and the administration hear it. Then there were the massacres and genocide in Bosnia. We stayed out of it, until public pressure was such as to make the political costs of nonintervention unacceptable.

President Bill Clinton's administration knew Rwanda was being engulfed by genocide in April 1994 but buried the information to justify its inaction, according to classified documents made available for the first time. Senior officials privately used the word genocide within 16 days of the start of the killings, but chose not to do so publicly because the president had already decided not to intervene. Intelligence reports obtained using the US Freedom of Information Act show the cabinet and almost certainly the president had been told of a planned "final solution to eliminate all Tutsis" before the slaughter reached its peak.

Here's my concern. My concern is not with President Clinton (although he was wrong on many occasions, especially here). My concern is not with our government and the United Nations not becoming more involved (even though they should). My greatest concern is of the Church and its inactivity towards the rest of the world. Can the Church stop genocide? No, probably not. However, we could prevent it. Think about it...