Here’s an interview with Philip Gourevitch, author of We Regret to Inform You … about the genocide in Rwanda.
The interviewer asked him about the concept of “UN Safe Zones”, which now, in light of all the events in the past decade or so, needs to be questioned.
People in Kosovo were slaughtered within the UN Safe Zone. The same is true for Rwanda. All of the blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers stood by in their safe zone, letting the Serbs move in closer and closer until everybody was massacred.
Gourevitch said, “If somebody says, you’re a lucky man, you’re in a UN safe haven – you are about to get killed. It’s the most terrifying thing anybody could tell you. If somebody tells you you’re in a UN safe haven, run for your life!”
Other interesting observations he makes:
What happened in Rwanda is here was this UN force, and if you ask Rwandans, “Look, it was obviously getting very, very hairy here in the months before the genocide, why did you stay? You saw it coming didn’t you?” Well, nobody saw it coming, they saw things getting very hairy. All of them will say that among other reasons it was because the UN was there.
Now the UN will say, “We never promised to protect them.” Well perhaps not, but look at East Timor. What happened in East Timor? We always say, should we intervene? We already intervened. We had the UN in there encouraging people to get involved in a risky political transition, to engage in elections. We were encouraging them to step out on a limb that exposed them to tremendous political danger. We made no provision for their protection, although they seemed to assume it. Look at Srebrenica. That’s the story: it’s the promise of protection that we don’t mean to back up. And it makes us in some way villains in stories where we might be better off saying honestly you’d better fend for yourselves, defend yourselves if you must.
And this as well:
In the following section Gourevitch talks about the naïve humanitarian response to the terrible refugee situation outside of Rwanda following the genocide. What actually happened was this: the genocidal maniacs, thousands and thousands of them (the entire country participated in the genocide), all fled the country in droves, fearing retribution from those they left behind, those they DIDN’T kill, and they all packed into refugee camps where they were cared for as though they were normal refugees and not murderers fleeing from the scene of the crime.
Do you remember the horrific footage on the news at the time? A plague broke out in this refugee camp, corpses clogging the rivers, and the international response was huge. Shipping in tons of food, blankets, medical supplies. Meanwhile, the international community had JUST IGNORED a genocide which occurred basically over a one-week period. I must reiterate: the dying people in these refugee camps were not innocent victims of plague and misery. They had just killed 800,000 people BY HAND in two weeks.
Anyway, here is what Gourevitch had to say about that:
Humanitarianism generally has professed neutrality. Neutrality in the face of genocide seems to me to be complicity. It’s an absurd position. Why would anybody … what is appealing about neutrality in the face of a genocide? Zero. Yet this was the position. Objectivity is different than neutrality, and objectivity would allow one to say objectively these are war criminals. But neutrality requires you to say, these are war criminals, have a sandwich, have a blanket. Oh, is that a Kalishnikov, please don’t show it to me. Oh, you’re going to show it to me, please don’t shoot me. Oh you shot me, have a sandwich. It was that pathetic. They were being used like the staff at a Mafia hotel.
So I say to Kofi Annan: I think that your organization’s actions in Rwanda were UNHELPFUL. I think that the way the UN behaved in Srebenica was UNHELPFUL.
