Rwanda

Violence in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, was mounting at least as early as August 1993.  UN force commander Lt. Col. Romeo Dallaire wrote to the DPKO in January of 1994 stating that he had a reliable source informing him of the preparations already in place for the commencement of the genocide (as well as an attack on the Belgian-supplied troops to provoke their withdrawal), but even in the face of this information, the DPKO, the Secretary General, the Security Council...everyone chose to do nothing.

There is no question that the international apathy was in part due to Rwanda's status: it is a land-locked country with no natural resources to make it worthwhile to invest in: there is no short-term benefit, never mind long-term.

But on the other hand, it points to a far more insidious problem at the UN: bureaucracy.

Traub seems to be among those who might be inclined to blame the UN mission leader and forces commander for the fiasco in Yugoslavia/Croatia; on the other hand they could be defended for sticking doggedly to the letter and law of their mission mandate.

Dallaire's account is filled with impassioned frustration at the administrative bumbling of the DPKO, the DPKO blames the bureaucracy around presentation to the Security Council, Boutros-Ghali blamed the member nations and the member nations blamed the Council.  To me, the problem seems to be one of losing sight of the truth in human terms in order to try to rationalise a future response structure to a problem that will never be repeated.  In Kuwait, Hussein tried to make himself ruler of the whole Arabian peninsular and to control the oil supplies; in Srebrenica and Kosov, Milosevic tried to rid himself off the ethnic minorities that "threatened" his power; and in Rwanda, the Interahamwe tried to destroy the Tutsis utterly for their representation of past Belgian oppression/colonisation.  Each situation looks similar to the others but is unique because of the time and culture it took place in, so legislating for it and preparing for a repeat scenario is moot.

However, I am fast realising that I am in as much danger of becoming embroiled in these politics as any other writer because in writing we are only ever capable of dealing with theories and statistics, hearsay and second-hand information.

Whatever else may be true, the fact remains that the price of doing nothing is far higher than the price of acting but the world rarely sees it that way.

Traub explains the problem of the UN as a preference for peace over justice, and the cost of this preference is that the criminals escape justice for far too long (Milosevic was not prosecuted at the Hague until 1999, by which time he was responsible for the most appalling account of mass murder in Europe since the Holocaust including 7,500 males in Srebrenica alone and 800,000 Albanians in Kosovo), and peace is shattered in the process.

I am going to lay aside Traub's book unfinished.  Not because it is not interesting, but because it represents a past that cannot be undone, and which learning about will only sadden and demoralise me.  If I look to the future from under the cloud of the past, how can I make that future brighter?

From here on out I will return to human rights activism, instead of sticking to human rights history.