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Rwanda ti år efter
1
Ghosts of Rwanda
General Roméo Dallaire
Øverstkommanderende for FN’s fredsbevarende styrker i
Rwanda 1993-1994
I tiden op til folkemordet advarede General Roméo Dallaire gang på
gang hovedkontoret i New York om en lurende katastrofe i Rwanda og
opfordrede til at gribe ind, men forgæves. I stedet måtte han frustreret
se sin styrke reduceret til 270 mand, hvilket i sidste ende forhindrede
UNAMIR i at stoppe massedrabene. I årene efter folkemordet kæmpede
Dallaire med enorm skyldfølelse og depressioner. Den dag i dag føler
han stadig både professionelt og moralsk ansvar for den mislykkedes
operation i Rwanda. I 2004 vendte han for første gang siden folkemordet
tilbage til Rwanda.
No cavalry coming over the hill
The Americans categorically [said], “No, there’s no way there’s going to
be a cease fire, so let’s pull everybody out and get out of that quagmire
and then see what happens afterwards.” [This] was a significant shift:
Forget any idea that somebody’s going to come and help you Dallaire,
or that your forces were going to actually do something positive. That
scenario brought an enormous gloom. I remember [a phone call from]
Maurice Baril [Dallaire’s superior in the UN headquarter]. [She] said,
“Tell Dallaire that there is no cavalry coming over the hill. None.”
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Polfoto
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Some people say an intervention would have been useless because they
were all dead. They weren’t all dead. They were still being killed and
slaughtered by the thousands and thousands. And so that became a point
of contention. And the argument was ridiculous. It’s just like the argument around the term “genocide.” I mean it’s a useless argument. Human
beings are being killed in the thousands, it could be in the hundreds of
thousands. You don’t need the term “genocide” to decide to help other
human beings. That whole exercise of numbers became a great perversion, because ultimately you don’t need four thousand bodies to say that
we’ve got a real problem. And the proof of that is that how many people
died in that market in Sarajevo? Sixty? The whole damn world got really
concerned, and the western world mobilized everybody they could to
respond to that. … It was just an absolute perverse exercise of developed
nations using excuses of sovereignty and nationalism and involvement
and self-interest, to argue the way around one of the most fundamental
premises: Are these people human? Do you have a capability? Then why
aren’t you doing something? Why is it that the black Africans sitting
there being slaughtered by the thousands get nothing? Why is it when
a bunch of white Europeans get slaughtered in Yugoslavia you can’t put
enough capability in there?
Rwanda will never ever leave me. It’s in the pores of my body. My soul
is in those hills, my spirit is with the spirits of all those people who
were slaughtered and killed that I know of, and many that I didn’t
know. … Fifty to sixty thousand people walking in the rain and the
mud to escape being killed, and seeing a person there beside the road
dying. We saw lots of them dying. And lots of those eyes still haunt
me, angry eyes or innocent eyes, no laughing eyes. But the worst eyes
that haunt me are the eyes of those people who were totally bewildered.
They’re looking at me with my blue beret and they’re saying, “What
in the hell happened? We were moving towards peace. You were there
as the guarantor of the mandate. How come I’m dying here?” Those
eyes dominated and they’re absolutely right. How come I failed? How
come my mission failed?
Republished with permission of FRONTLINE. This material was originally published on FRONTLINE’s April 2004 web site for its report
“Ghosts of Rwanda.”
www.pbs.org/frontline/shows/ghosts
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There were more people killed, injured, internally displaced and refugeed
in less than a hundred days in Rwanda than the whole of the Yugoslavian six or seven years of problems. I couldn’t keep nor reinforce my
small force, even feed it, and they were pouring tens of thousands of
troops into Yugoslavia and billions of dollars of aid, and they’re still
doing it…
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Ghosts of Rwanda
Kofi Annan
Ansvarlig for FN’s fredsbevarende operationer i 1994
Som den øverste civile chef for FN’s fredsbevarende operationer i 1994,
bærer Kofi Annan en del af ansvaret for den mislykkedes indsats i Rwanda.
Annan gav bl.a. ikke informationer videre til FN medlemslande om
den kritiske situation i landet og har efterfølgende indrømmet, at han
skulle have reageret på advarslerne fra FN-missionen i Rwanda. Annan
er i dag FN’s generalsekretær og arbejder bl.a. med nye standarder for
humanitær intervention.
Responsibility to protect
[Rwanda] was a very painful and traumatic experience, for me personally,
and I think, in some way, for the United Nations. It’s not something that
you forget. It’s an experience that becomes part of you, and part of your
whole experience as a human being.
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I would say the moment for me, which was extremely difficult to
comprehend and to accept, was when it was clear to everybody how
dangerous the situation is - the killings that were going on and were
about to happen, and we couldn’t get the troops. We couldn’t get
the governments to move. We approached about 80 governments,
trying to get offers of troops, and they wouldn’t give them to us.
For me, that was the most incomprehensible. … Shouldn’t the fact
that the killing was taking place and we knew [that] we were sending planes to remove others to safety - [Shouldn’t that] have moved
us to act? That insensitivity to the human condition and the plight
of others. Perhaps this was the one thing that shook me more than
anything else.
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Without [political will], there is very little you can do. But that does not
mean that those of us in the Secretariat do not have a role, because we
need to be able to press governments to do as much as we can. Ten years
on - I really wish I could have found a way, some way of getting more
help to them. I could have found a way of convincing the member states
that we need to send in a larger force. [But] there were counterforces. Yes,
there were governments who were pleading for everybody to withdraw,
to pull everybody out.
I wish I had been able to galvanize … the member states to act, or at
least to get them to have a genuine debate, open genuine debate as to
whether they should go or not. But, of course, that is also difficult when
the council meets behind closed doors and only comes to the public to
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Polfoto
vote. So the positions they take, the arguments that are made are not
known to the public.
When [I am] faced with the question, whether I think that we can avoid
the Rwandas of tomorrow, and that if we were to be confronted with a
new Rwanda, is the world ready to do it? Will the world move in to stop
it? And my answer is, I really don’t know. I wish I can say yes, but I am
not convinced that we will see the kind of political will and the action
required to stop it. [Therefore] I would want to send a message to societies
around the world, societies on the verge of conflict. They need to find a
way of dialoguing with each other and avoid situations where they turn
on each other and begin to kill each other, whether with guns or with
machetes. Because the world may not come to their aid.
Republished with permission of FRONTLINE. This material was originally published on FRONTLINE’s April 2004 web site for its report
“Ghosts of Rwanda.”
www.pbs.org/frontline/shows/ghosts
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[An experience like Rwanda] makes you more determined to speak
out, to press, to try and see if you can work with others to put in
systems that will, if not shame the governments, at least allow the
organization to move a bit more. This is one of the reasons why I
have been pressing this whole idea of the responsibility to protect quicker deployment of U.N. forces, using our standby arrangements
better [and] getting other governments to sign on to participate in
peacekeeping operations.
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Ghosts of Rwanda
Philippe Gaillard
Ledede i 1993-1994 Det Internationale Røde Kors’ delegation
i Rwanda
I 12 måneder ledede Gaillard Røde Kors’ arbejde i Rwanda. Da konflikten
var på sit højeste og alle andre organisationer forlod landet, forblev Røde
Kors i Rwanda som den eneste humanitære hjælpeorganisation. Selvom
mere end 50 Røde Kors medarbejdere blev dræbt under folkemordet,
overvejede Gaillard aldrig at trække sig ud af landet, og det lykkedes
organisationen at redde mellem 60.000 og 70.000 Rwandanesere. I dag
leder Gaillard Røde Kors’ delegation i Lima, Peru.
Speaking Out
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From the very beginning, we started to go out with our ambulances, both the
Rwandan Red Cross and the ICRC, evacuating wounded people, [people]
“not finished off.” On the 14th of April 1994, volunteers of the Rwandan
Red Cross told me that their ambulance had been stopped. They had six
“not finished off” Tutsi people in the ambulance who were taken out by the
militia and just killed on the side of the road. The volunteers were completely
shocked. How do you deal with this kind of information? I decided to call
my headquarters in Geneva. My counterpart in Geneva asked me, “Do
you think we could make it public?” And then you think twice, because
if you make it public, then people might kill you. But we decided to do it
and the following day, it was everywhere: on BBC, Reuters, Radio France
Internationale. And then we had a promise that the Red Cross ambulances
would be respected. So these six people didn’t die for nothing. Because of
their deaths, hundreds of other people could be saved.
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I remember a couple of phone calls from BBC London [always] asking
me the same question, “What’s your estimation of the number of people
killed?” and I told them at least 250,000. One week later they called
again and asked me, “What’s your estimation today?” So I told them,
“You can double it. Five hundred thousand people have been killed.”
One week later they made a last call and I answered, “Listen, after half
a million, sir, I stopped counting.”
I had to speak, to be outspoken, in such a context. When you’re seeing
it every day in the streets, in your hospital, on the roads …If you don’t
at least speak out clearly, you are participating in the genocide. It’s a responsibility to speak out. It did not change anything, and it …[did not]
move the international community. If my organization, which is usually
not outspoken would have told me, “Please Philippe, don’t talk so much,”
I would have left the organization. You cannot be silent. And they never
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Foto: ICRC/Claude Glunz
told me to shut up. I had a lot of support. We were on the phone with
Geneva every day. Just in terms of human resources, for instance … we
asked for more support, because we needed surgeons, nurses, this kind
of very specialised staff, and they arrived within days.
I’m not affected any more by horrors. Horrors are meaningless, nonsense.
But beautiful things are miracles. This is our job, to find beauty, create
beauty in the very core of horror.
We have been able, after the genocide, to reunite thousands of children
with their families. And this is to create beauty within the horror. I will
never in my life go back to Rwanda. Not at all because this would remind
me of awful things. I don’t want to meet again with people we have saved,
because it’s too strong. It’s unbearable. It’s too beautiful.
Republished with permission of FRONTLINE. This material was originally published on FRONTLINE’s April 2004 web site for its report
“Ghosts of Rwanda.”
www.pbs.org/frontline/shows/ghosts
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Tens of thousands of people would have been killed without our presence there, and this helps. I’m ashamed to say that, but it’s somehow
a satisfaction that Dallaire could not have, unfortunately. I think this
is the reason why he is still deeply wounded while my scars are OK. I
don’t feel guilty. I never felt guilty. Dallaire felt guilty all the time. He
should not feel guilty. He did what he could; he could not do much. He
was abandoned by his own organization. The so-called “international
community” in New York, decided not to give a shit about what was
happening in Rwanda. From the very beginning of the genocide the
U.N. was logistically and politically a phantom. They didn’t make any
difference, because they decided not to do anything.
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Ghosts of Rwanda