To do nothing...

At first reading, and first thought, I can't help but be outraged by the inaction of the "international community" during the Rwandan Genocide. I really feel that there is a moral obligation there to stop large scale violence like this instead of just letting them "figure it out" on their own.

However, there is something to be said about neutrality and inaction. France was arguably the only world power to intervene during the genocide and look what they did. They supported a regime that was committing mass murder (or at least that's Kinzer's interpretation of it). It wouldn't surprise me if France had good intentions with what it was doing. Perhaps the French saw the Hutu government as the victim here and was doing what it thought best in order to promote peace and security. I certainly don't know the details so I can't say. However, I think it illustrates an important point: that is is damn near impossible to know who to support and who to blame. Now, we might say that in this case it was obvious that the government was the bad guy and the RPF was the good guy. But I don't think it was that straight forward. The genocide was wrong, but can we expect the international community to figure out what caused it and who the actors were in such a short period of time? France jumped in to save the situation and arguably made it worse. Most of the time, we simply don't know the details.

I'm not saying that doing nothing was the right course of action, but I am trying to think of what might have happened had we intervened. I think that if we came in and stopped the war, the RPF would never have come to power. The UN may have simply brokered a deal between the RPF and the Hutu regime and kept the thugs in power. The same systems, governments, and thugs would continue to exist and destroy the people's chance at peace. The UN would have given a top-down western solution to the countries problems. But maybe because the UN did nothing the people of Rwanda were able to create their own change in government and build a bottom-up reform. They were able to oust their regime and build a better system than anyone has ever imagined possible. I mean, what would have happened if Germany jumped in during the Revolutionary War and stood between the British and Americans in order to stop the fighting and promote peace. Would we have been able to create the reforms that were needed?

Sometimes it takes a tragedy to create the needed change. Rwanda seems to be doing reasonably well today. If we would have intervened, I don't know if I can say that it would be doing as well. I doubt that Kagame and other leaders would have been able to come to power seeing as much of the west ruled him out as a terrorist.

This puts us in a sticky situation though. I feel very strongly about not standing idly by while people are being butchered. But I also hate to see when the international community rushes in somewhere to save the day when it has no idea who the players are and what the real situation is. It's far too easy to support the bad guys without even knowing it.