Vol. 23 No. 12 · 21 June 2001
pages 10-12 | 3671 words
Apocalypse Two
R.W. Johnson
- A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide by Linda Melvern
Zed, 272 pp, £16.95, September 2000, ISBN 1 85649 831 X
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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Letters
Vol. 23 No. 15 · 9 August 2001
From Elaine Windrich
R.W. Johnson should have told us (LRB, 21 June) that his list of Hutu 'reprisal killings' of Tutsis, which begins with 1962 and ends with 1993, is partial. They began in 1959 and there were ten in all. He notifies us of five. He also tells us that the plane of the Rwandan President, Habyarimana, was shot down on 5 April, but it was on 6 April – the day the genocide began and on which it is now commemorated every year, and not only in Rwanda. Johnson says that the killings were carried out in 'April and May', but they continued into July. General Dallaire was not 'the head of the UN Assistance Mission' in Rwanda, but the military commander. J.R. Booh-Booh was the 'head'. Johnson identifies Herman Cohen as Clinton's Assistant Secretary of State for Africa. But he was a member of the Bush Administration. How could Cohen have been 'so busy in Rwanda in 1994' when he was out of office? Finally, Clinton did not withdraw his troops from Somalia 'on the spot' after the deaths of 18 US Rangers in 1993, but gave six months' notice of doing so.
Elaine Windrich
Stanford University
R.W. Johnson writes: I plead guilty of absent-mindedness on Herman Cohen's tenure. And of sloppy writing on the matter of the withdrawal of US troops from Somalia: it was the announcement that was immediate. Yes, I might have listed every single massacre and alleged massacre of Tutsis in the thirty or forty years before the 1994 genocide and I might have called Booh-Booh by his full title, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General to Rwanda, but everybody used (and uses) the acronym UNAMIR (UN Assistance Mission to Rwanda) to denote the UN military force or, as I say, 'the small force under Dallaire', which was all that counted at the time. Booh-Booh was quite ineffectual.
