Apocalypse Two 
R.W. Johnson
- A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide by Linda Melvern
Jean de Dieu, 11, was curled up, a ball of flesh and blood, the look in his eyes was a glance from nowhere . . . without vision; Marie-Ange, aged nine, was propped up against a tree trunk . . . her legs apart, and she was covered in excrement, sperm and blood . . . in her mouth was a penis, cut with a machete, that of her father . . . nearby in a ditch with stinking water were four bodies, cut up, piled up, their parents and older brothers.
Sights like this – recorded by an observer with Médecins sans Frontières – were common in Rwanda in April and May 1994, when Hutu extremists butchered up to a million people, mainly Tutsis but also Hutu moderates who were seen as ‘sell-outs’. The small United Nations force under Major-General Roméo Dallaire and the gallant contingent of the International Committee of the Red Cross under Philippe Gaillard had to confront them over and over again. This was one of the few real genocides of modern times. Apart from the Armenian massacres and the Holocaust, Pol Pot killed around two million people in Cambodia and the German administration of South West Africa killed 90 per cent of the Herero people in the early years of the last century. Part of the horror of Rwanda is that we think of genocide as belonging to an age we had left behind.
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R.W. Johnson, an emeritus fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, lives in Cape Town, where he is completing a book on South Africa since the advent of democracy.
Other articles by this contributor:
Mr Shepperd to you · Classes and Cultures: England 1918-51 by Ross McKibbin
How Mugabe came to power · R.W. Johnson talks to Wilfred Mhanda
Nerds, Rabbits and a General Lack of Testosterone · Major and Lamont
Burning Blankets · Robert Mugabe’s latest tidy-up
Rogue’s Paradise · The Russians and the Anglo-Boer War by Apollon Davidson and Irina Filatova
Where do we go from here? · Zimbabwe
Cads · Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War Two Espionage by Joseph Persico.
Her Boy · Mark Thatcher
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