Rwanda: a story too terrible to believe

Magnus Linklater
Times Online
March 02, 2005

The silence of those who knew about the massacres speaks eloquently of the world’s indifference.

I AM SORRY there were no Oscars for Hotel Rwanda. A movie that had the courage to take on a subject as unpopular and shaming as genocide in Africa just might have pricked the conscience of the jurors; it tells a moving story about courage and humanity in the face of unimaginable horror. In the end, however, the grizzled familiarity of Clint Eastwood was preferred.

Powerful as it is, Hotel Rwanda remains only fiction — a dramatic portrayal of events rather than history itself. The harsh reality of what actually happened in Rwanda and how the world failed to intervene still seems hard for us to take. Ten years ago, Linda Melvern, an investigative journalist, set out to uncover the truth about the massacres, and why the United Nations, whose troops were on the ground, was so ineffective in preventing them happening. She began to turn up some uncomfortable facts about those who had turned a blind eye to murder, but her first book, A People Betrayed, struggled to find a publisher. The big names all turned it down, leaving it to a small London imprint, Zed Books, to bring it out.

Worse was to follow. Impressed by the extent of her findings, the new Government in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, offered Melvern open access to its files on the genocide, including a full confession by the Prime Minister who had presided over the slaughter. Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, gave her permission, against all the rules, to examine the archive of the Security Council, which revealed the awful story of cowardice and apathy which allowed the genocide to run its course. General Romeo Dallaire, the hero-commander of the UN forces in Rwanda, who stayed behind in a vain attempt to protect the Tutsi victims, gave her his co-operation. In the introduction to his own book, he called her work “the best overall account of the background to the genocide, and the failure to prevent it . . .”

Yet her second book, Conspiracy to Murder, met with indifference. Encompassing all the new material, it is a devastating account of the West’s failure to act, in the face of clear evidence that a planned genocide was taking place. It too found a small publisher, Verso, and came out last year, on the tenth anniversary of the killings. But it was given not one review. No mention in the press, no references in heavy-weight journals, no acknowledgement in the many articles written about Rwanda, many of which drew extensively on her research.

There is only one possible explanation: it is that the story she tells is still too terrible for us to accept — not just the killing, but the world’s abject failure to learn from a previous holocaust. Little more than a decade ago, a million people were slaughtered, not in a tribal war but in a systematic and well-planned conspiracy. In the book, we discover how the UN Security Council heard the truth through a series of explicit warnings from Dallaire and others, and how it found ways of avoiding action. The French are particularly culpable. They had helped to train the Hutu army which carried out the bulk of the massacre, but when the killings began, the French soldiers pulled out taking with them not the victims, but their own citizens, including relatives of the Hutu extremists.

The French were not the only ones to abandon their Rwandan allies. The Belgians also left, watching as those to whom they had pledged protection were killed in front of their eyes. The United States, so traumatised by the way its troops had been humiliated in Somalia, was interested only in evacuating its own citizens. No one could have been ignorant of what was happening on the ground. Dallaire sent a steady stream of messages back to the Security Council, warning its members that the killing had begun. Although he estimated that he needed only 5,000 troops to prevent the killing, no member state was willing to provide them. Instead, there were delays, excuses, requests for more time, indecision and inaction. Boutros-Boutros Ghali, the UN Secretary-General at the time, failed to provide the leadership required to galvanise world opinion. The membership of the Security Council was equally culpable. Dallaire called it “inexcusable apathy . . . completely beyond comprehension and moral acceptability”. The British role is a deeply troubling one. At the United Nations, it consisted of downplaying and discouraging all talk of genocide, since that would have required the UN to take action. Back at home, it meant routinely telling Parliament that the conflict was “a civil war”, a bloody tribal affair in which it would be inadvisable to intervene. When, finally, the UN did ask for troops, Britain hung back, arguing that this was a French theatre, not a British one. It is interesting to note that Rwanda scarcely figures in any of the memoirs of ministers who served in the Major Government.

Silence, as Melvern points out, was the worldwide response to mass murder. The media contributed to it by ignoring the story when it mattered most. That silence continues to be deafening.

Copyright 2005 Times Newspapers Ltd.