Ghost Of Rwanda Summary

In April of 1994 the African nation of Rwanda was involved in a civil war between two of its major ethnicities, the Hutu and the Tutsis. Almost overnight, a state-sponsored genocidal campaign took the lives of nearly 800,00 Rwandans while the international community turned a blind eye. In Ghosts of Rwanda we saw the stories of the individuals who failed to act at the hands of international organizations, those who stood up with hope and tried to save lives, and those who survived through the massacre and lived to tell their stores.

The beginning of the Rwandan massacre can be traced to the death of President Habyarimana. After his plane was shot down, Hutu extremists seized control of the government and began killing an average of 8,000 Tutsi Rwandans daily over the next 100 days. Shortly after Hutu extremists took over the government, their gunmen began killing moderate Hutu politicians and Tutsi leaders. Radio transmissions were sent all across the nation with instructions to systematically destroy all Tutsi people. When the U.S. ambassador in Rwanda tried to notify Washington that the killings were not political, but genocidal, the U.S. decided to evacuate all Americans. The U.N. advised their head of the peacekeeping force, General Dallaire, not to intervene and to avoid arms conflict. After one week of fighting, Belgium decided to withdraw their troops from the U.N. force after ten of their soldiers were tortured and killed by Hutu extremists. Days later the U.S. and U.N. Security Council voted to withdraw 90% of the peacekeepers in Rwanda, after Human Rights Watch demanded them to use the word genocide and take action. By evacuating their forces and turning a blind eye, they removed themselves from the legal obligation of ...

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... I think we will still run into troubles with intervention. Unfortunately, the United Nations needs resources from individual states to take action, and until we lose our individual grips on security and strive for complex interdependence, no state will willingly take the risk of intervention in any genocidal situation. We can hope that Rwanda has taught us to respond immediately to save lives, but the international community requires a great deal of cooperation and understanding that just isn’t necessarily there in circumstances like Rwanda.

Hundreds of thousands of innocent lives were lost before any substantial humanitarian efforts were made. The indifference of the international community failed the people of Rwanda. History does not remember omission, but it will remember the lives lost, and we will forever question what could have been done to save them.