Beginning 30 years ago this month, the Rwandan genocide unfolded quickly between April 7 and July 15, 1994. In that short time, an estimated 500,000-800,000 people were killed.
When Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down on April 6, 1994, a crisis committee of Hutu extremists managed to seize power. They murdered Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, a moderate Hutu, and launched a campaign of slaughter against the Tutsis. Early calls for intervention by international observers were ignored and deflected. Instead, states sought to engage with the extremists, encouraging them to implement the Arusha Accords that had been agreed to the previous August. The failure of the United Nations to expand the remit of its peacekeepers on the ground—hamstrung by a Chapter 6 mandate that limited its activities to implement the Arusha Accords—left soldiers powerless to stop the killing happening right in front of them. The murder of 10 Belgian U.N. troops brought back flashbacks of the deaths of 18 U.S. troops in another U.N. mission in Somalia in 1993. Two weeks after the genocide began, and despite daily coverage of the situation in newspapers around the world, the U.N. Security Council reduced the U.N. troop presence in Rwanda from 2,500 to 250. The genocide continued unabated, stopping only when the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front, led by Paul Kagame, arrived in Kigali and then pursued the génocidaires to Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo).
Rwanda became shorthand for the moral failures of a state-bound, realist foreign-policy order. The U.N. processes relied too much on being invited in by sovereign states. Humanitarian legal scholar Fernando Tesón argued in his 2001 paper “The Liberal Case for Humanitarian Intervention” that “external intervention is (at least) morally permissible to end that injustice” of “governmental tyranny.” In this case, it seemed that politics—international and domestic—had gotten in the way of saving human lives, and it was this conviction that shaped both politics and culture around the topic of foreign intervention for the next 30 years.
Frustrated by government inaction, people turned to charities and took matters into their own hands. Films, books, and new NGOs alike celebrated individual acts of heroic intervention in Africa. But states also responded to growing cultural pressure to avoid another Rwanda. The trend built slowly at first and then reached its pop culture peak between 2005 and 2011.
Black Hawk Down, a film about the failed 1993 intervention in Somalia, was released at the very end of 2001. The U.S. forces are depicted as morally right, there to oust an illegitimate, apolitical warlord who was allowing Somali people to starve. The film’s protagonist explains: “We can either help, or we can sit back and watch the country destroy itself on CNN.” The general who initiated the Battle of Mogadishu argues with his Somali counterpart, citing, “300,000 dead and counting. That’s not a war … that’s genocide.”
Hotel Rwanda, released in 2004, tells the story of the genocide from the perspective of one man: Paul Rusesabagina, a Rwandan Oskar Schindler. It was perhaps meaningful that Schindler’s List had been released only a few months before the Rwandan genocide began, influencing much of the debate in the press about whether or not Rwanda should be termed a genocide or whether “tribal” or “ethnic” warfare was more appropriate. For a generation born at the end of America’s Vietnam “quagmire,” the lessons from that conflict seemed less relevant than the stories of U.S. inaction in the early days of the Holocaust. Instead, they turned to the moral clarity offered by the bravery of individuals such as Rusesabagina in Rwanda or Schindler in Germany.
Reporters during the Rwandan genocide had found Americans’ ability to look away frustrating—a San Francisco Examiner article in July 1994 complained that “we are better at avoiding pain than anybody else on Earth.” Blood Diamond, released in 2006, is set during Sierra Leone’s civil war. In the film, while Leonardo DiCaprio has the antihero’s arc, Jennifer Connelly’s hard-elbowed reporter is the true hero of the story, not only reporting but effecting an international agreement about diamond certification.
This emphasis on witnessing and raising awareness fit well with the rising star of Doctors Without Borders. The organization’s working principles included “a duty to raise awareness of their plight to ultimately help improve their situation.” Doctors Without Borders had generated interest when it explicitly called for military intervention in Rwanda. Although it had been founded after the 1968 Biafran crisis and had operated in a number of different conflict zones since, its popularity took off after Rwanda, and it even featured in an Oscar-nominated documentary in 2008. Its remit—to work in areas in crisis or conflict “based solely on … independent assessment of medical needs,” with impartiality and neutrality—was an attractive one for a new generation horrified by states’ willingness to regard national sovereignty as paramount and to base decisions about intervention on party political considerations.
Doctors Without Borders’ mission was a blueprint for the delivery of all kinds of aid and assistance, building to a “without borders” fever pitch in the early 2000s: Aviation Without Borders, Translators Without Borders, Reporters Without Borders, World Chefs Without Borders, Libraries Without Borders, Geoscientists Without Borders, Statistics Without Borders. In the humanitarian space, it was clear that borders were the problem. Borders gave sovereign states the ability to decline U.N. interventions. Borders were anachronistic in an era of globalization, when, as British Prime Minister Tony Blair explained in April 1999, “many of our domestic problems are caused on the other side of the world.”
Africa in particular became a focus for concerns about the effect of borders on creating an impermeable legal sovereignty that protected genocidal states. Preexisting Western perceptions of the illegitimacy of African states, and of the continent’s people suffering as victims of global politics, became the foundation for intervention. Rwanda’s genocide had been explained away in some circles as being a “tribal” conflict, an “old power struggle” as the Herald-Sun in Durham, North Carolina, explained at the time. But for others, the genocide was described as the legacy of a colonialism that created ethnicities to divide and rule and then left them trapped within the same fake, colonial borders after independence. “Belgium’s policy was explicitly racist,” reported the Beacon Journal in Akron, Ohio, in June 1994. Both of these positions framed African nation-states as inorganic constructs that were meaningless except to the corrupt governments that abused their people. John Stremlau, a former U.S. State Department official, argued in 2000 that wars in “[w]eak, authoritarian African governments” resulted “from bad governance.” Lord of War (2005), Sahara (2005), and The Last King of Scotland (2006) all caricatured power-hungry, emotionally unstable African dictators. And so it was “our responsibility” to protect Africa’s victims from Africa’s warlords.
Individualizing that responsibility was celebrated in the pop culture depictions of African crises. In The Constant Gardener (2005), Rachel Weisz’s character wants to help a family that had been in the hospital with her, but she is told that “there are millions of people. They all need help.” She responds: “Yeah, but these are three people that we can help.” In 2006, Dave Eggers published the novel What Is the What, based on the true story of Valentino Achak Deng, a Sudanese refugee. It soon became freshman reading at universities across the United States. Book clubs were invited to reflect on the book’s closing lines, which address the reader, “All the while I will know that you are there. How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist.” It also became the basis for a new NGO focused on children in Africa, seeded with the proceeds from the book.
In the United States, charitable donations to NGOs reached a dramatic new peak in 2005-06. ForDarfur.org was set up by some college students in 2007 to raise awareness through a series of concerts, raising more than $1 million for Doctors Without Borders. A 2010 report noted that, worldwide, NGOs “raise more money for development assistance than the entire UN system.” The philosopher Peter Singer worried in 2006 about how much a human life was worth and whether paying for it ourselves through philanthropy was preferable to the state using taxes. When the state paid for humanitarian and development aid, “much of it is directed where it best suits U.S. strategic interests” rather than to moral causes, he argued.
But this cultural pressure to act morally was building on governments too. In 2000, the British government sent troops to help end Sierra Leone’s civil war. Britain celebrated its success as a new form of “surgical intervention,” leading to a belief in the possibility of robust humanitarian intervention in conflicts around the world—a form of intervention that would stop violence against innocents without taking sides and without casualties. Blair advocated for “just war, based not on any territorial ambitions but on values.” Even before 9/11, the lessons of the intervention in Sierra Leone seemed to be that, as the journalist Simon Akam explains in The Changing of the Guard: The British Army Since 9/11, “going far away and trying to do good with a rifle actually works.”
Africa saw 15 new U.N. missions launched between 1994 and 2007, roughly half of the new peacekeeping operations launched between 1994 and 2015. These interventions marked a 123 percent increase on the rate of interventions per year on the preceding period from the end of the World War II. Mentions of “humanitarian intervention” grew by a third between 1994 and 2010 as the concept of “coercive action against a state to protect people within its borders from suffering grave harm” took hold as a separate type of military campaign, distinct from wars and peacekeeping missions.
Samantha Power’s A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide was released in 2002, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 and making the argument that the United States failed to intervene in Rwanda because policymakers claimed intervention wasn’t in the “national interest.” Discontent about government failures to intervene—not only in Rwanda but also in the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia in 1995—encouraged the campaign for new norms such as the “Responsibility to Protect,” or R2P. Led by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty beginning in 2001, the campaign for a U.N. resolution on R2P was an attempt to use international law and institutions to bind states into universal promises to intervene in other states during humanitarian crises. R2P attempted to take the politics out of the state’s decision-making. Although genocide prevention had been a principle that came out of World War II, the U.N.-guaranteed inviolability of sovereign authority had made intervening in a potential genocide committed by the state difficult and unilateral intervention nearly impossible. R2P, adopted in 2005, meant that if a state was seen to be committing atrocities against its population, any other government had the responsibility to intervene on behalf of those suffering. It was an attempt to create a mechanism that would trigger automatic action, to take the politics out of decisions about when and where to intervene. Calling attention to genocide would trigger action.
The Save Darfur coalition saw itself as that trigger. Founded in 2004 by more than 180 organizations, including the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the coalition framed the crisis in Darfur as something everyone could agree on as an atrocity with no political angle—unlike, for instance, Iraq. It encouraged both college students who identified with the Civil Rights Movement in the United States and “communities of faith” to reach out to their representatives in Congress or become a “Darfur ambassador” to raise funds and awareness in their communities and at their universities. Save Darfur developed into a campaign that one scholar called “arguably the largest international social movement since anti-apartheid.”
Condoleezza Rice’s plea in the winter of 2000, as an advisor to George W. Bush’s presidential campaign, to abandon the Clintonian idea that “the United States is exercising power legitimately only when it is doing so on behalf of someone or something else” had been jettisoned by Save Darfur’s strange agreement between neoconservatives and liberal interventionists that humanitarianism was apolitical. A petition on the Save Darfur coalition’s website addressed Bush directly, pointing out to him that “during your first year in the White House, you wrote in the margins of a report on the Rwandan genocide, ‘Not on my watch.’” The petition asked the president to “support a stronger multi-national force to protect the civilians of Darfur.” In 2006, Save Darfur organized a rally in Washington, with speakers including Barack Obama, Rusesabagina, and U.S. Marine Corps Capt. Brian Steidle, whose book about the Darfur conflict, The Devil Came on Horseback, was made into a documentary film in 2007. Bush told members of the coalition that they “represent the best of our country.” In 2007, the U.N. arrived in Darfur.
The coalition between the new humanitarianism and military action in Africa was captured in the 2011 film Machine Gun Preacher. It told the story of Sam Childers (played by Gerard Butler), the epitome of the white savior, an American born-again Christian. Childers had, according to his memoir, singlehandedly—and supported by church fundraising back in the United States—raised a militia force in southern Sudan to counter the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army. But soon, a series of exposés, including about Childers, began to erode trust in the model of new humanitarianism. The scandal surrounding the work of Greg Mortenson’s Central Asia Institute in Afghanistan in 2011 was followed by the brief buzz of Invisible Children’s flashy Kony 2012 media campaign to stir up support for U.S. intervention in northern Uganda to overthrow the Lord’s Resistance Army. But Kony 2012, which attempted to capitalize on the sentiment that had driven the earlier intervention period, was met with internet derision and government inaction. Radi-Aid, a Norwegian campaign mocking the charity sector’s depiction of Africa as a continent of victims, was launched in 2012, marking the emergence of skepticism about the deployment of tropes about Africa as a call for action – and fundraising. By 2022, one survey found that less than half of Americans trusted NGOs.
Support for muscular interventionism also began to wane. In 2011, R2P had been invoked officially by the U.N. for the first and only time to authorize intervention in Libya. The results were chaotic. Witnessing the U.S. invocation of a humanitarian responsibility in Iraq and the apparently cynical deployment of R2P in Libya may have put people off. Surgical interventions were rare—more commonly, U.N. peacekeeping missions lasted years, even decades. Soldiers died. And humanitarian aid, delivered neutrally, often meant treating and feeding both victims and their would-be killers. By the time Power, as U.S. ambassador to the U.N., had the president’s ear to do something about civilians being targeted by the Assad regime’s chemical weapons in Syria, the mood had shifted. There would be no U.S. intervention there in 2013. In Africa, the 2014 hashtag #BringBackOurGirls, issued from Nigeria in the wake of the Chibok abductions, generated a 38-person rescue team and an attempted drone intervention, but when they arrived, the scale of the bigger civil war against Boko Haram, and the hundreds of other victims of the militant group’s attacks, dwarfed the search for these specific girls. The hope that interventions and humanitarian aid would end wars was replaced by a cynicism that intervention only escalated them or made them messier. The belief in an ideal, apolitical victim turned out to be a fantasy.
As the 30th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide approaches, we are witnessing a shift from the post-Rwanda liberal humanitarian legacy in Africa. The Tigray war in Ethiopia and the Sudanese civil war have sparked interest from U.S. policymakers, who have raised concerns about ethnic cleansing. But the default position of the administration and the U.N. has been to speak to the leaders of these countries and work with them in ensuring humanitarian aid access for civilians and pressing for peace talks. In fact, the U.N. has launched only one intervention in Africa since 2007: MINUSMA in Mali, in 2013. The arrival of the U.N. peacekeepers there followed the intervention of the heads of state of the Economic Community of West African States. They established a framework agreement that would appoint an interim president and transitional government following the conquest of Gao, Timbuktu, and Kidal by armed Islamist groups. That transitional government invited the U.N. to assist with various aspects of rebuilding the state and stabilizing the security situation. The majority of the U.N. troops operating in MINUSMA were from the wider West African region. The U.N. left in December 2023.
Now, there are no active U.N. peacekeeping operations in Africa for the first time since 1989. And while private military contractors from the United States, South Africa, France, and Germany all operate on the continent, scrutiny of Russia’s headline-dominating Wagner Group and its post-Prigozhin incarnation, Africa Corps, suggests that the public perception of these interventions is overwhelmingly negative.
The legacy of Rwanda was the belief that people in the United States and Europe weren’t sufficiently informed about the genocide and that if they had been, they would have pressured their leaders to do the right thing and intervene, something that would have been welcomed by the victims. The legacy of that particular story was potent, shaping humanitarian policy for decades. But the story was also not entirely right. When intervention finally began to be discussed by the United States and France in June 1994, “Rwanda’s Tutsi-led rebel movement denounced it” as politically motivated, the Morning News in Florence, South Carolina, reported.
Rwanda itself has since developed a complicated public image, with Kagame still in power 30 years later and its recent involvement with Britain’s legally contested attempts to resettle migrants. Many of those migrants have come from or traveled through sites of failed interventions. The British government wants to send them to Rwanda because of an increased concern, emanating from critics of globalization on the left and right, about defending borders. People are turning once again to states as sovereign entities to be cajoled and persuaded but with ultimate authority over the policies and politics within their borders. Intervention, on the other hand, means spending political capital. It means choosing a side. And choices about intervention have to reckon with the fact that in war, there is always politics.
Foreign Policy is a releasing a four-episode podcast next month on Paul Rusesabagina, who as a hotel manager in Kigali during the genocide helped save the lives of more than a thousand Rwandans.
The post The Long Cultural Legacy of the Rwandan Genocide appeared first on Foreign Policy.
