by Yesterday, at the final of the Kent Schools Public Speaking Competition, a young boy stepped up to the podium. "What have we learned from history?" he asked. "We have learned that no good comes from killing people". And he went on to speak eloquently, first of World War II: "There has never been another major war," he said.True, there has not. The uneasy peace of the Cold War did not descend into outright conflict, though it was a near thing: the world very nearly went up in nuclear flames in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1963. But have we really learned, or did we just find other weapons? War can be fought in many ways. Then he went on to describe, in poignant terms, the Rwandan massacres of 1994. He explained the unhealed tribal rifts that underpinned Rwandan society at that time. He commented that people who had lived together for years in apparent harmony suddenly turned on each other. In the course of three months, hundreds of thousands of people were brutally murdered. The Rwandan genocide was indeed one of the most terrible events of our time. For those who have forgotten it - or who perhaps, being young, have never known about it - this is the (self-proclaimed) United Human Rights Council's description* of what happened: On April 6, 1994, a plane carrying President Habyarimana, a Hutu, was shot down. Violence began almost immediately after that.
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Frances Coppola considers the following as important: genocide, refugees, war
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Yesterday, at the final of the Kent Schools Public Speaking Competition, a young boy stepped up to the podium.
True, there has not. The uneasy peace of the Cold War did not descend into outright conflict, though it was a near thing: the world very nearly went up in nuclear flames in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1963. But have we really learned, or did we just find other weapons? War can be fought in many ways.
On April 6, 1994, a plane carrying President Habyarimana, a Hutu, was shot down. Violence began almost immediately after that. Under the cover of war, Hutu extremists launched their plans to destroy the entire Tutsi civilian population. Political leaders who might have been able to take charge of the situation and other high profile opponents of the Hutu extremist plans were killed immediately. Tutsi and people suspected of being Tutsi were killed in their homes and as they tried to flee at roadblocks set up across the country during the genocide. Entire families were killed at a time. Women were systematically and brutally raped. It is estimated that some 200,000 people participated in the perpetration of the Rwandan genocide.
In the weeks after April 6, 1994, 800,000 men, women, and children perished in the Rwandan genocide, perhaps as many as three quarters of the Tutsi population. At the same time, thousands of Hutu were murdered because they opposed the killing campaign and the forces directing it.
Then there is Darfur. This is the Holocaust Museum's account:
When the western region of Darfur experienced increasingly violent internal disputes over access to land and power in the 1990s, the Sudanese government responded by rewarding and arming local leaders who shared its ideology. Fighting began in Darfur when members of the Fur, Zaghawa, and Masalit ethnic groups created the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and attacked a government airfield on April 25, 2003. Another rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), joined the fight against the Sudanese government armed forces.
In response to the April 2003 rebel attack, the Sudanese government began recruiting local militias and transforming them into semi-regularized forces known as the Janjaweed. A period of intensive, systematic targeting of the civilian populations from the Fur, Zaghawa, and Masaalit ethnic groups resulted in the deaths of at least 200,000 people between 2003 and 2005 alone. More than two million people—a third of the population—were displaced.
The attacks often began with government planes bombing villages, followed by combined Janjaweed and Sudanese Armed Forces attacks on the ground. Villagers were killed, tortured and raped during attacks, and thousands of villages were destroyed. The greatest civilian tolls came during the forced flight that followed. Pushed into the desert without water or food supplies, many civilians perished due to malnutrition and disease.
Additionally, in the early years of the conflict, the government obstructed the delivery of aid to these vulnerable groups. Millions of displaced civilians settled into enormous camps, many on the outskirts of major towns in Darfur. Over 200,000 fled across the border into Chad.
Nor is Darfur the only place where genocide continues. Today, Yazidis, Christians and Shi-ite Muslims are being murdered in their thousands by the monstrous ISIS, itself born of inept and ill-advised Western military interventions in the Middle East. As in the Rwandan and Bosnian genocides, those murdered are mainly men and older women. Younger women, girls and small boys suffer a different fate. In Bosnia, it is estimated that between 20 and 50 thousand women and girls were raped. Today, women and girls seized by ISIS become sex slaves: they are the spoils of war. Boy children are taken by ISIS to train as soldiers. Slavery takes many forms.The conflict in Darfur continued well beyond this intensive phase, with the core effects of the genocide unaddressed, and today, violence continues sporadically across the region.
And genocide goes by many names. If we call it something else, we can pretend it isn't happening. We can pretend murderers aren't really murderers, and refugees aren't really refugees. We can justify doing nothing about it. What shall we call it today?
No good comes of killing people. But what have we really learned from our history?
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Image from the Baltimore Sun.
* The United Human Rights Council describes itself as an "Armenian youth committee". It is nothing to do with the United Nations, though its name and logo are clearly intended to suggest this. I have used its description of the Rwanda genocide here because it is accurate and succinct. This should not be taken as recommendation of the website.