Rwanda

"The international community failed Rwanda, and that must leave us always with a sense of bitter regret and abiding sorrow." U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan Ten years ago last week the most rapid genocide in recorded modern history began in Rwanda, an obscure Central Africa state about the size of Maryland. In about 100 days, an estimated 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and their Hutu supporters were slaughtered, most often hacked to death by machete. While this massacre took place, the United States, the United Nations and most Europe did nothing to prevent or to stop the slaughter.

Letter writer Paul R. Schlitz Jr. can't seem to grasp the fact that an acknowledgment of Iraq's potential to harbor weapons of mass destruction doesn't necessarily indicate current agreement with the decision to invade, nor does it require someone to justify the invasion ("Explain again why we invaded Iraq?" Jan. 4). It's simply an acknowledgment of the situation. We do not invade every country that has the potential to produce WMD. I would also point out that failure to acknowledge threats is no less dangerous than inflating threats.

WASHINGTON -- While world leaders gathered at the barbed wire and crematoriums of Auschwitz 60 years after the liberation of that Nazi death camp, Oscar nominee Don Cheadle gathered with members of Congress in Washington who are trying to stop a genocide that goes on today. In a crowded House hearing room, the star of Hotel Rwanda and members of Congress talked about their recent fact-finding mission to the strife-ridden Darfur region of Sudan. More than 70,000 innocent civilians are believed to have died and more than 1.8 million forced from their homes in a deadly ethnic cleansing campaign by the Janjaweed militia backed by the Sudanese government.

ALISON DES FORGES, 66 Scholar chronicled Rwanda's genocide Alison Des Forges, a human rights activist who drew the world's attention to the killings of hundreds of thousands of innocent people in Rwanda in the 1990s and chronicled the massacre, died Feb. 12 in the crash of a Continental Airlines passenger plane in Clarence Center, N.Y., near Buffalo. After April 6, 1994, when an airplane carrying Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down, members of the politically dominant Hutu group suddenly began to attack the Tutsi minority in an uncontrolled rampage of violence.

The victory of the Rwandan Patriotic Front army, led by Tutsi exiles, has stopped one human calamity: the genocide of minority Tutsi people in Rwanda by Hutu militia forces. Bodies are no longer piling up and polluting the rivers. But this same victory has also provoked a new catastrophe, the panic migration of a nation to a volcanic countryside in Zaire which lacks water, food and shelter to sustain more people.Now the victims are from the Hutu majority, who fled knowing of the methodical slaughter and expecting reprisals in kind.

The safest place for refugees from Rwanda is back in their homes. Goma and other places they went have no shelter, food, water or sanitation for them. That said, returning refugees represent a threat to their compatriots who never fled, should they bring disease back with them.Mercy lifts of medicine, water and water purification apparatus by the United States and other countries have already started to make a difference, at least in preventing present rates of disease from mounting. Despite initial glitches, the reopening of Kigali airport in Rwanda was a great feat with immediate benefits.

AMERICAN officials now say "bureaucracy" is to blame for delays in helping Rwanda.Of course, bureaucracy is everywhere; but the gray lament is a cop-out in this case. It diverts attention from the Clinton policy of avoiding a faraway case of genocide.Consider the 50 American armored personnel carriers the United Nations asked for weeks ago. A small U.N. force needs the vehicles before it enters Rwanda, but they still aren't available. U.S. officials say U.N. and Pentagon red tape has held them up.That's the latest reason -- after Washington dropped its opposition to dispatching a U.N. force at all -- why the U.N.'s African troops haven't yet gone to Rwanda.

IN THE world of humanitarian relief, the law of unintended consequences of good intentions is becoming ever more important.More than 1 million Rwandan people, most of them members of the Hutu clan, have been led out of Rwanda at the instigation of their own leaders. The Hutu faction had mercilessly slaughtered an estimated 500,000 Tutsis while the world community passively watched, cluck-clucking about man's continuing inhumanity to man but lifting nary a finger to stop the slaughter of the innocent children whose dying faces stared out at us for more than two months on evening news programs.

GOMA, Zaire -- Even as the stakes for hundreds of thousands of people are rising, even as crops are ripening and threatening to rot in the fields of Rwanda, the most important question for refugees cannot be answered.Are they safe going home to Rwanda?In the past three days, a swirl of fresh rumors has swept the refugee camps here: Ethnic Hutus are facing retaliatory attacks when they try to return home after their bitter civil war with the minority Tutsis.The reports are isolated but gaining credibility.

As the Pentagon gears up warily to send U.S. troops into Rwanda on what is described as a strictly humanitarian mission, American diplomats at the United Nations are pushing for an end to the international community's ill-starred intervention in Somalia. These contradictory policies send a stark message about how this country is trying, not too coherently, to cope with the chaos sweeping so much of Africa.When President Bush sent U.S. troops to Somalia in late 1992, that was also supposed to be a strictly humanitarian operation.

Goucher College has suspended a visiting professor from Rwanda after being told he stands accused of participating in the 1994 genocide that killed some 800,000 people in the African nation. Leopold Munyakazi, who taught French last semester, was removed from teaching duties in December after school officials learned of an indictment by a prosecutor in Rwanda. Among the charges is that he revealed hiding spots of ethnic Tutsis who were targeted by machete-wielding Hutu militias. Munyakazi denies the allegations.

NAIROBI, Kenya - The ringleader of the 1994 Rwanda genocide was sentenced yesterday to life in prison for his role in the early days of an ethnic slaughter that eventually killed an estimated 800,000 people. Theoneste Bagosora, 67, was the highest-ranking military officer convicted at the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. The former colonel's prosecution was viewed as a significant step in efforts to punish war crimes. "This victory sends a message to people like the warlords in Darfur or those committing horrendous rapes and killing in Congo," said Barbara Mulvaney, a Southern California attorney who served as chief prosecutor.

KIGALI, Rwanda - Today I will be celebrating the Fourth of July in a different context than ever before. In Rwanda, July 4 is a holiday that commemorates the liberation of the country from the genocidal regime that murdered 1 million Tutsis and tens of thousands of Hutu political moderates who were committed to freedom and democracy, from April to July of 1994. It is a celebratory day, for it marks the end of the genocide and the establishment of a nonracist state that upholds the principles of liberty, equality and the peaceful coexistence of all Rwandans.

HA NOHANA, Lesotho -- Teboho Mahate was shivering. He had trouble keeping his balance. He couldn't talk, and he had bitten his tongue. A seizure. "Any pain anywhere?" asked Dr. Jennifer Furin. Teboho, 14, held his head. Furin looked into his eyes, checking for dilated pupils. She turned him on his side and, in English along with a few words in this nation's native Sesotho, told him to lie in a fetal position. He barely quivered as she slipped in a needle for a spinal tap. The diagnosis: life-threatening meningitis.

When Leslie Lewis Sword, daughter of business tycoon Reginald F. Lewis, told her father when she was young that she wanted to be an actor, he gave her advice she still thinks about today: "You don't just have to be an actor. You can be a director. A producer. You can own the theater." This week, Sword - now an actress, writer, producer and businesswoman - will perform 10 roles in Miracle in Rwanda, a one-woman play she created with Edward Vilga. Her performance at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture will kick off a celebration weekend to honor what would have been her father's 65th birthday.

They range from Luis Moreno-Ocampo, prosecutor of the Hague-based International Criminal Court, to Adam Sterling, a grass-roots organizer first seen hawking leaflets to apathetic strollers in Santa Monica, Calif. Success and failure in Darfur's life-or-death context generate excruciating tension. In this movie, the attempt of a World Food Program director, Pablo Recalde, to run delivery trucks through volatile territory sparks more nail-biting anxiety than any starship battle in a space opera.

The peace-keepers' watchword in crises should emulate the physicians' Hippocratic oath: First, do no harm. The French offer to speed troops into Rwanda risks violating it. But such is the frustration at mounting an African-manned United Nations expedition that Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali approves the French plan and the Security Council is poised to approve it.Rwandans are dying. Militia of Hutu youths, instructed by the army, are methodically slaughtering educated Hutus and all manner of the Tutsi minority, even in U.N.-protected camps.

KIGALI, Rwanda -- American jets and Ethiopian forces recently conducted strikes in Somalia in support of that nation's fledgling democratic government. The event received passing notice in the United States, but to those of us working in East Africa, and specifically in Rwanda, it was cause for optimism. It demonstrated the willingness of Ethiopia and Somalia to put aside past differences and unite against radical Islamists who threaten both. It suggested that an era of thinking and acting regionally may have arrived in East Africa.

There were lots of nationally renowned speakers in town worth listening to this spring. All of them came with a cause. Broadcaster Tavis Smiley stopped at a local church in April to talk about his book, Covenant With Black America, which is a New York Times best-seller. He was promoting the book and its goal -- to uplift and empower African- Americans. Many of us saw Hotel Rwanda, a movie that depicted the massacre of hundreds of thousands of people in Rwanda. Rwanda hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina, who lived through the events and saved many lives, came to town in April to give insights to the massacre as part of his book tour.