The discussion in class today on how to define a genocide reminded me of an article I'd read recently, titled "Bystanders to Genocide." The article, written by Samantha Power, the controversial journalist who has written extensively on genocides, focuses exclusively on the Rwandan Genocide. However, many of the points she makes about the genocide relate directly to the larger debate on how to define genocide. In her article, Power notes that one of the main impediments for intervening in the genocide was American officials unwillingness to define what was happening as a "genocide." If what was going on in Rwanda wasn't a genocide, then the United States had no legal or moral obligation to get involved in a country that had no economic or strategic importance for it.
Often when we discuss genocide, we ask whether there was an intention to destroy a people. The interesting thing in the case of Rwanda was that the Hutus clearly intended to decimate the Tutsi population, which was reported time and time again by American and U.N. officials on the ground, but there still remained a hesitation to label the massacres a "genocide." To this point, Power writes,
A discussion paper on Rwanda,
prepared by an official in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and dated May
1, testifies to the nature of official thinking. Regarding issues that might be
brought up at the next interagency working group, it stated,
1. Genocide Investigation: Language that calls for an international
investigation of human rights abuses and possible violations of the genocide
convention. Be Careful. Legal at State was worried about this yesterday—Genocide
finding could commit [the U.S. government] to actually "do
something." [Emphasis added.] As the death toll mounted in Rwanda, American officials came under increasing pressure by the international community and American media alike to acknowledge what was going on in Rwanda. According to Power's research, "State Department officials were authorized to state publicly only that acts of genocide had occurred." Of course in this case, the term, as we discussed in class, was only being used as a euphemism for the horrors of the genocide. Mimicking our debate in class, at one point during the genocide, a journalist questioned State Department spokesperson Christine Shelly, asking her, "How many acts of genocide does it take to make genocide ?" Shelly was unable to answer.
Another part of the problem when it came to using the term "genocide" was officials' willingness to be blinded by the civil war aspect of the Rwandan Genocide. As we've discussed in class and read in the works of scholars like Stanley Milgram and Jay Winter, war can often mobilize a population against an internal enemy, making it easier to commit acts of genocide. However, war can also hide a genocide. In the case of Rwanda, Tutsi rebel forces were fighting the Hutu-dominated government while at the same time, government-sponsored killing units attacked Tutsi and moderate Hutus. For American government officials, Rwanda looked more like a case of civil war than a genocide—and civil wars were something they had no desire to get entangled in. However, it was also easier for officials to declare the massacres of civilians to be unfortunate "collateral damage." If the deaths could fall under the label of "civil war," there was no reason for American intervention, which was costly not only in terms of dollars, but also in soldiers lives and—more importantly—politicians' ratings.
Because the American government was not willing to "use the 'g word,'" as Ronald Suny so aptly wrote, it did not intervene in a genocide that led to the deaths of almost a million people. The genocide debate doesn't only occur among historians and students of history years after the fact, but is in fact ongoing during the genocide itself. This is something we must consider as we continue to discuss the meaning of genocide and the importance of applying the term.
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