Rwanda and Genocide in the 20th Century
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Alain Destexhe, in Rwanda and Genocide in the Twentieth Century, describes the massacres of half a million Tutsis in Rwanda, places that genocide in its historical context, explains how such a holocaust could occur just fifty years after Hitler, and calls for punishment of the guilty by an international tribunal to forestall another genocide in the future. The book is brief but powerful, leaving the clear impression that what has happened in Rwanda is truly among the three most horrible mass murders in the century. The author is relentless in focusing on the fact that the international community allowed this horror to occur, did little to stop it, funnelled its efforts into largely after-the-fact humanitarianism, and failed to punish the guilty and thus deter future genocide. The author suggests that the world has learned little from the genocides of the Armenians and Jews earlier in the century. He argues that unless the world takes forceful action against the perpetrators of the slaughter of Tutsis, more such genocides are certain to happen in a world in which conflict is increasingly seen as "non-structured," "destructured," or "identity-based" (vii). Destexhe argues that the leaders of the world view the Tutsi-Hutu "conflict" as local, ethnic-based, and difficult to fathom or sort out. However, the local, ethnic, religious and "identity-based" divisions in Bosnia did not stop international involvement, because that "conflict" took place in the middle of Europe and thre
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r the Jews with little or no risk of protest or opposition from other countries (25).
The author notes that only with the wide-scale participation of the people of a nation can such an organized plan of mass murder be carried out. This was true in the Turks' slaughter of the Armenians, in the Germans' slaughter of the Jews, and it was just as true in the Hutus' slaughter of the Tutsis.
The author presents these arguments and the facts underlying them with an average of fifteen or so footnotes per chapter. The documentation is varied, with an emphasis on the analytical rather than the statistical. However, almost all of what Destexhe covers is well-documented, from the Armenian to the Jewish to the Tutsi genocides. The author is honest about the difficulty of ascertaining the exact number of deaths in the Tutsi case:
Day-by-day, as the death toll increased, the reality that a genocide was underway became clearer. By the end of April, it was estimated that 100,000 people had been killed, by mid-May 200,000, and by the end of May half a million (49).
A tragic confluence of events led to the abstention of the world from any meaningful effort to stop the genocide. Destexhe writes that no such action could occur without the leaders
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Approximate Word count = 1552
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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