Magnum Photos Agency, based in NYC, who represent some of the best names in photography, including my favorite artist Steve McCurry, has started an "In Motion" series, a multimedia project examining certain events. Slate magazine featured "Rwanda on Trial," a photo essay commemorating the mass trials that began 10 years ago for the perpetrators of the mass genocide that rocked the country. Today, Rwanda is prosperous, stable, and setting a model for progress on the continent; ten years ago the story was drastically different. Here are a few of these haunting photos, courtesy of Zena Koo at Magnum in Motion.
Related, I read Samantha Power's wonderful book, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, some time back, which delved into this conflict with wonderful clarity. Seeing that she was back in the news recently for her Hillary Clinton comments, heres a clip from her book about the genocide in Rwanda (with a few of my own comments). She has a new book out as well, Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World, which is on my shortlist for reading, once I get through Jared Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel.
Rwanda: Mostly in a Listening Mode
…the Rwandan genocide would prove to be fastest, most efficient killing spree of the twentieth century. In 100 days, 800,000 Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu were murdered. The United States did almost nothing to try to stop it. Ahead of the April 6 plane crash (which killed the President and started the violence) the United States ignored extensive early warnings about immanent mass violence. It denied Belgian requests to reinforce the peacekeeping mission. When the massacres started, not only did the Clinton administration not send troops to Rwanda to contest the slaughter, but it refused countless other options (radio jamming, humanitarian aid, airlifts, any type of intervention at all). President Clinton did not convene a single meeting of his senior foreign policy advisors to discuss US options for Rwanda. His top aides rarely condemned the slaughter. The US did not deploy its technical assets to jam Rwanda hate radio (which was the gasoline for the violence—this equipment was not sent because of cost! $8500/hour!!), it did not lobby to have genocidal Rwanda government’s ambassador expelled from the United Nations…Washington demanded the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers from Rwanda and then refused to authorize the deployment of UN reinforcements….Clinton knew…there were no costs to avoiding Rwanda all together. Thus, the United States again stood on the sidelines…
…Romeo Dallaire (Head of the UN peacekeeping force)…says: “when the plane went down (President's plane, that is), we actually expected around 50,000 plus dead. Can you imagine having that expectation in Europe? Racism slips in so it changed our expectations”
