April 7th marks the tenth anniversary of the Rwanda massacre. Rwanda, the inland "country of a thousand hills" in central Africa, held a grand assembly in the capital Kigali to commemorate this special day. In the National Stadium of Rwanda, the banner slogan "Never Happen" was particularly eye-catching. 65,000 guests from all walks of life were in a heavy mood. The singing of mourning for innocent dead was low and many people burst into tears.
UN Secretary-General Annan issued a statement on the same day, saying: "Neither the UN Security Council nor the member states were able to pay enough attention to the increasing number of signs of disaster." The UN General Assembly also set April 7th each year as "Reflecting on the Rwanda Holocaust International Day" to reflect on the past and warn the future.
The scene of the Holocaust is so horrible to see
that the Holocaust Memorial Center in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, has just been completed. Prior to this, Rwanda had set up 7 Holocaust memorials across the country. The reporter made a special trip to visit the two memorials of Epimakai and Nitalama located southeast of Kigali.
The Epimakai Memorial was originally a church, located in the town of Niammata, with a school and a hospital on both sides. When the reporter just walked to the entrance of the memorial hall, the instructor pointed to the gap in the iron door and said that it was opened by a gun. At that time, 3,000 Tutsi people rushed into the church to avoid the Hutu extremists and locked themselves inside. Unexpectedly, the chain of the door was opened by guns. The mob broke in and took the 3,000 inside. All the people were killed. Walking into the church, I suddenly felt a gloomy atmosphere. The oncoming pulpit was covered with a blood-stained white cloth, and dense gun holes were all over the walls.
Under the guidance of the instructor, the reporter came to the back of the church. The three huge basements built here were divided into squares, filled with the bones of the victims of the Holocaust. According to reports, during the massacre, 20,000 people were brutally killed in this area. Many people were driven to the mountains and then killed. It kills alive.
Passing through the banana forest, the reporter came to the Nitalama Church Memorial Hall. The two small churches here are relatively simple, all surrounded by red bricks. During the 1994 massacre, nearby people came here to pray to escape the scourge of killing and were killed alive. The rows of low concrete benches are surrounded by blood-stained clothes. From time to time, at the entrance, you can see skeletal bones, and flies are constantly flying. At that time, the crowd inside also sealed up all the doors and windows of the church, but the red-eyed thugs still opened the doors and windows and killed everyone.
Why did the human tragedy happen?
The direct fuse of the Rwanda massacre was the crash of the presidential plane. On the evening of April 6, 1994, Rwandan President Habyarimana and Burundi President Ntaryamira returned to the capital of Rwanda Kigali by the same plane after they went to the Tanzanian capital to attend the summit on regional peace. The plane was not expected. It crashed while landing at the airport, killing the two presidents and their entourage. After the incident, there were different legends about who the murderer was, and the two tribes were suspicious of each other, and the situation in Kigali deteriorated rapidly. The next day, the Presidential Guard composed of Hutu abducted and killed Tutsi Prime Minister Uvirangiimana and three ministers, and formed a provisional government at the same time; on the 8th, the Tutsi rebel "Patriotic Front" "Refused to recognize the provisional government that excluded it, and announced its march to the capital. At this point, the Rwandan civil war broke out again. With the fierce fighting between the two factions on the front line, Hutu extremists slaughtered the Tutsi and Hutu moderates across the country and implemented a policy of genocide. Tribal massacres have occurred even in remote mountainous areas. Women and children who fled trucks after trucks were killed, and corpses by the roadside ditch were everywhere, which was terrible. In just a hundred days, nearly a million innocent people were brutally killed, more than 2 million refugees fled abroad, and more than 2 million people were displaced.
The massacre was a result of long-term colonial rule. The Hutu and Tutsi are the two major tribes of Rwanda, accounting for 85% and 14% of the country’s total population, respectively. Before the Europeans came to Rwanda, there was no contradiction between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes. The colonialists implemented the policy of "using the barbarian against barbarian" in Lu, creating contradictions between the two tribes in turn, so as to sow the seeds of discord between the two. Before the 1960s, the Tutsi tribe occupied a dominant position and owned most of the land. In 1959, when the Hutu took power and redistributed the land, many Tutsi nobles had to flee to neighboring countries. Rwanda became independent in 1962, and many tribal homicides occurred before and after independence, causing a large number of refugees to flee, and tribal conflicts further deepened.
In October 1990, a three-year civil war broke out between the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a Tutsi refugee organization residing in Uganda, and the Hutu government forces. Although the two sides signed a peace agreement in August 1993, they eventually failed due to grievances. It was implemented, and a full-scale civil war broke out again when the president was killed in 1994.
Where did the Western intervention go.
On April 6, at the International Symposium on Genocide in Rwanda, Dallaire, a retired Canadian general who had led the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda, pointed out that the Rwanda massacre could have been avoided only because the international community was close to it. No action was taken to stop it.
Before the massacre in Rwanda, there were clear signs. On January 11, 1994, three months before the massacre, Dallaire had a foreboding of a possible massacre. He sent a telegram to the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations, reporting that Rwandan Hutu armed forces were hoarding weapons and were preparing to respond. The Tutsi people are killing, and the Tutsi people are in danger. However, the UN Peacekeeping Operations Department rejected Dallaire's request on the grounds of "exceeding authority." Then, Dallaire was ordered to inform the ambassadors of Belgium, France and the United States to Rwanda that the Hutu was stepping up preparations for war, but it still did not attract attention. On April 7, the female prime minister of Rwanda was brutally murdered on the way. Hutu soldiers also killed 10 Belgian peacekeepers who were ordered to escort her. Belgium therefore decided to withdraw all peacekeeping forces. The Belgian troops are the best equipped in the Rwanda peacekeeping force. Their withdrawal not only put the UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda into trouble, but also contributed to the arrogance of the Hutu militia.
After the massacre began, the UN Security Council tried to take action, but due to the indifference and non-intervention policies of the United States and Britain, it has not been able to take effective action. The United States suffered a setback in Somalia a few months ago. Albright, the US ambassador to the United Nations, suggested that only a "minimal" presence in Kigali should be retained to show the "determination" of the United Nations.
General Dallaire believed that when the situation deteriorated rapidly, many Tutsi people did not choose to flee and stayed because of their trust in the peacekeeping forces, but they were abandoned unexpectedly. He said that to stop this massacre, in fact, only 5,000 well-equipped and clearly authorized UN troops are needed.
"African lives are worthless" The
Rwanda massacre is a great tragedy for the whole world. Western powers have the ability to stop but have not acted, and it is hard to shirk the blame. People cannot help asking: Where is the superpower that acts as the "world police"? In the final analysis, this is closely linked to Western values and interests. A senior U.S. government official once said: “We don’t care what happens in Rwanda or Burundi. U.S. interests are not there. These boring humanitarian issues cannot be confused with important issues such as the Middle East and North Korea.” Some Rwandan officials have complained privately. The promotion of democratization in the West led to the massacre of Lu. They said: "Democracy in third world countries is first of all the right to survive. The current central issue is economic development. People are dead, what else is democracy!"
South Africa "Business Daily" "In a comment on April 5, he pointedly pointed out that in the eyes of Western powers, "African lives are worthless." General Dallaire emphasized that Western powers were responsible for the Holocaust. He criticized the United States and other Western countries for "only caring about countries that are valuable to them." Rwanda's former sovereign state, Belgium, even "abandoned" Rwanda during the Holocaust. Dallaire finally suggested: "The United Nations should play a greater role in preventing Western powers from pushing mankind into an insecure state." Harvard University professor Samantha Pavol wrote in "The Hell Dilemma-The United States and According to the book Era of Extinction, all of this was directed by Americans. Pavol even said mercilessly: "The U.S. habitual thinking is interest, and this interest is reflected in oil and votes."
In October 2003, Dallaire published the monograph "Shaking Hands with the Devil". He believes that this is a book about "failure": the failure belongs to the Rwandan peacekeeping force, because under their noses, Hutu extremists brutally killed nearly a million innocent people; the failure belongs to several Western powers, Because they were capable but failed to stop the massacre in time; the failure belonged to the United Nations, which failed to support the small number of aid troops in trouble. In his profound self-blame, he believes that as a commander, he is a member of this failed collective.
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