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December 2000

A People Betrayed: The role of the west in the Rwanda genocide By Linda Melvern Zed Books Click on the title to buy the book

Six hundred thousand people died in Rwanda in 1994," moderator Jim Lehrer reminded Al Gore and George W. Bush during the second presidential debate this past October. "There was no U.S. intervention, no intervention from the outside world. Was that a mistake?"

It was at that moment, I think, when the exchange between Gore and Bush went from insipid to obscene.

"I think in retrospect we were too late getting in there," the vice president replied, as if the Clinton administration had merely overslept. And, in any case, the U.S. should only intervene when "we tried everything else," explained the man whose administration had tried nothing. Only "if we can really make the difference with military forces," Gore said, even though the U.N. commander in Rwanda had informed the Security Council early on that he could quickly halt the genocide with a mere 2,500 well-equipped troops. The U.S. must "have allies," Gore said, "willing and able to go and carry a big part of the burden." This from the vice president whose Pentagon chiefs proposed--after Ghana volunteered soldiers for a Rwandan intervention force--to lease the U.N. four dozen near-obsolete armored personnel carriers for $4 million plus $6 million shipping and handling.

The massacre of thousands of Tutsis at the hands of Rwanda's Hutu majority in April 1994 is a topic that has already provoked countless articles, hundreds of reports and studies, and some 50 books; it is one of the most meticulously documented genocides in history. That Al Gore can nevertheless stand before a national television audience and mouth such platitudes may explain why Linda Melvern has written A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda's Genocide. Melvern, a British investigative journalist with a talent for legwork, has devoted herself to the genocide's considerable international dimension. And the result--a wide-ranging account of the actions and inactions of shady arms dealers, inept bureaucrats, and cowardly politicians--still shocks six years after the fact.

Certain French and Egyptian officials, for instance, might legitimately be considered accomplices to the killing. The French, absurdly obsessed with anglophone plots in central Africa, have always been close to the Hutu leadership; the son of then-president François Mitterand, who ran African policy out of his father's office, was friends with the Hutu Rwandan president and his wife--the latter a ringleader of the genocide, who afterwards took up residence in Paris. The French, Melvern shows, supplied weapons and ammunition to the genocide planners before, during, and even after the massacres. Worse, French troops intervened decisively on behalf of the killers at least twice: once in 1993 to halt an incursion by the Paul Kagame-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (which might have prevented the genocide entirely) and again in 1994, allowing the Hutu leaders to escape to France and their foot soldiers to Zaire.

Egypt was the other main supplier of weapons to Rwanda, and in the book's most explosive section, Melvern documents the involvement of Boutros Boutros-Ghali--then Egypt's minister of foreign affairs, and later U.N. secretary-general during the 1994 genocide. In 1990, it was Boutros-Ghali who approved a secret $26 million arms sale to Rwanda, weapons stockpiled by the Hutu as part of the fairly public, long-term preparations for the genocide. (French banks, for their part, helped launder the international aid money that was used to pay for that and other arms shipments, including the purchase of some 580,000 machetes from China.) And it was Boutros-Ghali who, as the genocide progressed, ignored the increasingly urgent faxes from his peacekeeping commander begging for more men, gasoline, and equipment.

But Boutros-Ghali was far from the only scoundrel. Melvern's account of the U.N. Security Council deliberations that spring confirms what was obvious from the general U.N. paralysis. The Western powers, including the U.S., spent most of April 1994 pretending the genocide was a civil war. Repeatedly, they instructed the peacekeepers to negotiate a cease-fire--"rather like wanting Hitler to reach a ceasefire with the Jews," as one diplomat tells the author. And the Clinton Administration, still smarting from the U.S.'s failed excursion to Somalia, argued at times for the peacekeepers to withdraw altogether.

Still, although Melvern is clearly a diligent reporter, A People Betrayed is a mediocre, oddly unilluminating book, lacking either the explanatory power of Gerard Prunier's The Rwanda Crisis or the brutal eloquence of Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families. Part of this has to do with the book's sloppy prose and lack of structure. Melvern's technique of juxtaposing events on the ground with deliberation among and between U.N. bodies, foreign governments, and international organizations is especially annoying; the cumulative effect is chaotic rather than edifying, like thousands of newspaper-style paragraphs flung together in roughly chronological order.

But the book ultimately fails because of a more fundamental weakness. There is nothing inherently wrong with a broad condemnation of the Western response to Rwanda, but Melvern has no real thesis--no standard for when, why, and how nations should intervene in future Rwandas. Melvern's implicit equation of the French and U.S. roles, for instance, isn't so much unfair as unhelpful. The French government was actively complicit in the violence; the Clinton Administration, after Somalia and already under pressure from isolationist Republicans in Congress, was simply unwilling to waste political capital on further African misadventures. Both responses were, of course, reprehensible. But France's geopolitical ambitions pose an entirely different obstacle to genocide prevention than the Clinton Administration's momentary political vulnerability.

Indeed, it is quite clear by the end of Melvern's book how the West failed in Rwanda. But we are left with almost no sense of why it failed, of the perverse interplay between various domestic squabbles, budget issues, bureaucratic rivalries, and international distractions that, in the end, conspired to deflect attention from Rwanda--all things that Al Gore seemed blithely unaware of during the debate. Though Melvern clearly believes that the occurrence of genocide provides all the rationale required for intervention, the substance of her own book proves otherwise.