08.25.09

My Comments on the Rwandan Portion of Me Against My Brother

Posted in Book Reviews, History, Uncategorized at 12:13 pm by Administrator

Before I move on to commenting on other books, I wanted to finish off my comments on Me Against My Brother.  The last portion is on Rwanda.  Again, Peterson shed a lot more light regarding the conflicts and subsequent 1994 Rwandan genocide and beyond.  Evidently, the tensions leading to the 1994 genocide had been brewing for a long time.  Many warning signs that something big was going to happen were ignored.  It’s understandable, as Peterson writes, that the U.S. wanted to remain hands-off especially coming from the heels of the Somali disaster in late 1993, but I think that it is inexcusable that the U.S. went further to pressure other nations to remain hands off.

Some of the additional things I learned from Peterson’s book regarding Rwanda is that the French government was involved with allowing and even encouraging the 1994 genocide (which only makes sense because the massive scale by which the genocide took place had to have been helped along.  Apparently it took “years” of planning for it to come to fruition).  Before all hell broke loose, there were already incidences of kidnappings and murders.  The bodies were disposed of in mass graves located right in the backyards of some government officials’ homes.  The Catholic church were even aware of the dangerously escalating tension, yet did nothing and even encouraged it.  I had known that the primary communications source to the murderers was the use of radio–RTLM, but I did not know that it was tied to the Rwandan president, Habyarimana’s own house.  Peterson wrote that when he arrived in Rwanda some Hutus could be seen “walking to work(killings)” with machetes and other instruments.  Once they even “waved” at him thinking that he was “French.”  They were obviously friendly to the French as they were considered their allies in this massacre.

While from the first I had learned of the 1994 Rwandan genocide I was appalled at the shear numbers and methods by which the massacres took place, Peterson helps to put it into perspective as he writes:

“Beyond Alex Bizimungu’s neighborhood–indeed throughout the maze of roads that spread weblike across the steep hills of Kigali, and onto every corner of Rwanda–the killing was massive and unprecedented in scale and speed.  The genocide that afflicted Rwanda for three months in 1994 was the bloodiest episode recorded in modern African history, and was more ruthlessly efficient in causing death than were Nazi Germany’s gas chambers.  Some 800,000 died, most of them in the first month of the bloodletting, though some estimate the death toll at greater than 1 million.  The nature of the killing, with so many thrown into pit latrines or buried and dissolving in dank mass graves, makes an accurate count impossible.  They were murdered eyeball to eyeball by friends and neighbors.  Often the only difference between killer and victim was the tribal distinction marked upon their identity cards.

A mathematical calculation of Rwanda’s national suicide makes the speed of any other recorded catastrophe or single act of war pale by comparison.  The two atomic bombs dropped upon the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed 200,000 people.  The toll of the entire four-year war between Serbs, Croats, and Muslims in the former Yugoslavia during the early 1990s also just topped 200,000.

Previous genocides and mass killings this century–of Armenians by the young Turks of the Ottoman Empire in 1915, against 6 million European Jews by Germany’s Third Reich in the 1930s and 1940s, and by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s–though in the end taking far more lives than Rwanda’s killing, proceeded at a slower burn for several years.  The mammoth death toll of 20 million Soviets achieved by Stalin stretched over two decades.

No system of genocide ever devised has been more efficient:  the daily kill rate was five times that of the Nazi death camps.  Extremist Hutu officials, army commanders, and militia thugs conspired to eliminate all Tutsis and moderate Hutus and to draw every Hutu into complicity.  For years they had prepared for this moment of genocide, organized for it, and manipulated a political system that required total, unquestioning obedience to authority.  So throughout the country, the heat of anti-Tutsi propaganda turned participation into a life-or death imperative.  Hutus were programmed to kill.

And the result was specifically Rwandan, or “very Swiss,” as the French historian Gerard Prunier, notes:  “Anarchy, rape, arson, and murder were all carried out according to plan and under supervised authority.  People were throwing repression to the winds,; yet at the same time even the Apocalypse had to be in accordance with official guidelines.”

The daily death rate averaged well more than 11,500 for two months, with surges as high as 45,000.  During this peak, one murder was committed every 2 seconds of every minute, of every hour, for days: and affliction befitting the Apocalypse.  Transfixed and aghast, the rest of the world watched, fiddled, then hid its eyes and did nothing.

Unless you had been a very close observer of Rwanda before the genocide, in those first days it was not clear what was happening, nor how organized it was. . .”

Peterson goes on to reveal more details regarding the Rwandan genocide including the aftermath wherein the Hutu were forced to flee to refugee camps when the Tutsis started to get the upper hand. At this time, foreign involvement began to make their appearance to the dismay of the Tutsi, who felt that the U.S. wanted to now take the credit for their success after months of “hands-off” policy.  At those refugee camps, the Hutu were feed and cared for with foreign aid.  The murderers were actually unwittingly supported and cared for with humanitarian aid. . . Within the refugee camps, among the true refugees/victims, hid the Hutu murders who continued to threaten the Tutsi.  In turn the Tutsi took matters into their own hands knowing that justice would not be carried out.  Thus murders continued as Tutsis exacted revenge.  Hutus disappeared and were likely murdered.  Many more people continued to die long after the 1994 genocide reached the ears and eyes of the West.  To this day many of the perpetrators have not been tried, and likely full justice is just impossible to attain.

On a quick side note, the effectiveness of radio propaganda was striking.   To think that ordinary citizens were whipped into such a frenzy that they were not only willing to commit murder, but actually did it.  It’s worrying to me when I see our current media where alarmists are spewing forth seeds of fear and dissension such as threats of “death panels,” “socialist takeovers,” or the most worrying is seeing the hints of racial unrest.  We live in perilous times, with very impressionistic people who lack truth and lack the will to seek it out.  I find people like Rush Limbaugh dangerous.  And to think I used to listen to that man. . .  I understand that we need to protect our freedoms and rights, but we need to do it responsibly, not carelessly by reactionary personalities.
But back to Me Against My Brother, I definitely give it a two thumbs up.  I know I seem to give most of my book comments two thumbs up, likely because the only books I’m inclined to write about are the ones that I found interesting.   This one is definitely enlightening, and I hope to be able to read more of the books or topics that it referenced.

Marlakins

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