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When good people do nothing ...

By Pamela Bone
April 3, 2004

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The Age's Sandy Scheltema was the first Australian news photographer to arrive in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide. This small boy, photographed by Scheltema, had been found by soldiers of the Rwandan Patriotic Front and taken to a centre for displaced children near the Ugandan border.

The bullet holes still ran up the stairs of the Meridien Hotel in Kigali when I stayed there in 1996. There were strange stains and tears on the wallpaper in my bedroom, and the door, which might once have been forced open, didn't shut properly.

That was two years after the genocide. I was struck by the politeness of the Rwandan people. The hotel receptionist leaned across the desk and clasped the hands of the guests - not of the Western guests but of Rwandans - in both her own. This is the form of greeting commonly used in Rwanda. How could such a people have descended into madness?

For once, the word "decimate" is used correctly. It means to kill one in 10 of a population, and this is what happened in Rwanda. More than 800,000 were killed in 100 days. The daily killing rate was said to be three times that of the Holocaust.

What are the necessary conditions for a genocide to take place? Though each has its particular, terrible set of circumstances, there are commonalities. There needs to be concerted, government-level incitement. One part of the population must be convinced the targeted group is the cause of its troubles. There needs to be envy and resentment. There needs to be a culture of obedience. There needs to be dehumanisation of the targeted group. Then there needs to be meticulous planning.

There was envy: the German and, later, Belgian colonisers, following eugenic theories of the time, thought the tall, fine-boned Tutsis were a superior race to the smaller, darker Hutus, and preferred them. Thus the Tutsis became the landowners and cattle owners. When the genocide was planned, the government promised the Hutus that, in return for murdering their neighbours, Tutsi lands would be theirs.

There was a culture of obedience and there was dehumanisation. As Jews were portrayed as rats in Nazi Germany, in Rwanda Tutsis were called inyenzi (cockroaches). The government-owned radio exhorted Hutus to do their duty, fill the graves, kill the cockroaches.

And there was planning. While the killing was commonly described in Western media as spontaneous tribal conflict, it was, in fact, a carefully planned exercise by men who wore Western suits and spoke three languages. The evidence of planning was in the registering of all Tutsi families, the training camps for Hutu killers and the roadblocks set up around the country on the night the president's plane was shot down.

Every necessary condition for genocide was there in Rwanda. Yet it could still have been stopped. For three months before, UN peacekeepers received intelligence that mass killings were planned. That intelligence was cabled to UN headquarters in New York, where it was received by the then head of peacekeeping operations, Kofi Annan. The UN commander in Rwanda, General Romeo Dallaire, wanted permission to seize stockpiles of weapons, but Annan refused.

On April 20, the Security Council voted to withdraw all but a few UN troops. Later, Dallaire was to tell the Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda that if he'd had a well-armed force of 5000 he could have halted the genocide in a week.

The world powers were reluctant to describe the killings as genocide because, under the 1948 Genocide Convention, that would have meant they were obliged to act. So "never again" happened again.

In 1997, gunmen burst into a girls' school in Rwanda and told the students to stand up and divide into groups of Hutu and Tutsi. The girls refused, saying "We are all Rwandans here". Most were shot.

Today, it is considered impolite to ask Rwandans if they are Hutu or Tutsi. In that there is hope.


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