The last week has seen the twentieth anniversary of one of the most terrible moments of modern history – the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. As many as 1 million people, mostly from the Tutsi ethnic group, were murdered over a period of just 100 days by members of the country’s other major ethnic group, the Hutu (to emphasize the utter senselessness of the entire episode, it is worth noting that the categories of Hutu and Tutsi were artificial distinctions put in place by the former European colonizers of the area). Meanwhile, the UN and countries with a stake in the region like the US, UK, and Belgium simply stood by and watched – the massacre ended not with an intervention from peacekeeping troops, but with an armed fightback from Tutsi militia groups.
Memorials have been held to commemorate the events and the loss of life, and as with all such cases of genocide, the world has promised ‘never again’. And yet, we have found ourselves in such a confusing place in world geopolitics over the past two decades that we have in fact continued to let similar events occur, and we find it almost impossible to agree over when an intervention is necessary.
Take Syria for example, where it seems chemical weapons are being used against civilian populations, and where a constant flood of refugees is trying to make it to the Turkish border to escape the fighting which has gone on for three years now. Look at Afghanistan, where we initially allowed (and even supported) the insanity of the Taliban and its attempts to destroy the country from within, before eventually turning against them when they were deemed to have gone too far. In Africa, we have the Darfur crisis – the world talked a lot, but there was very little action. Essentially, we simply watched again, and even now Sudan has not been punished for its actions in the region. We are now seeing similar massacres and instability playing out in South Sudan and the Central African Republic, and we have no idea what to do.
In fact, even directly after the Rwandan genocide we continued to stand by and watch as ethnic conflicts ripped Central Africa apart in the Congo wars – in which Rwanda was a key aggressor. The West felt that it could not intervene because it had a duty to support the new post-genocide Tutsi government in Rwanda, even if that government was responsible for creating a similar situation across the border.
We are left with a seemingly simple, but actually almost impossibly complicated question: what should the world do in situations like this? When we see poor, innocent civilians who get caught up in these political, religious, or ethnic wars, we have an immediate reaction of wanting to do something to help. We hear calls for humanitarian intervention and assume that if we send in the strong militaries of the developed nations, the fighting will be over quickly. This is a natural response. But the past decade of extremely questionable interventions – in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in oil-rich Libya but not in US-friendly dictatorial Egypt, and now Russia in the Crimea – has tarnished the very idea of humanitarian motives. It is now assumed that any time a Western nation sends its troops to ‘stabilize’ a region, it is doing so out of self-interest rather than a genuine desire to help. We always assume an ulterior motive, and are probably right to do so.
Twenty years on from the Rwandan genocide, this is an equally important thing to notice and to think about – the fact that we seem to have painted ourselves into an unfortunate corner that delegitimizes the very idea of a peaceful, humanitarian intervention to assist people who need help and to stop massacres and genocide. This is a very unfortunate situation indeed, and one which will only be overcome if Western nations begin to act more honestly and with much better motives – motives to help people, rather than to make a profit from suffering.
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