Shouldering Responsibility for Rwanda

I want to comment on two articles I read which discussed issues of responsibility both during and after the naming and occurrence of a genocide.

The first is "Israel Urged to Comply with UN War-Crimes Tribunals" from the Jerusalem Post (Sun. Dec. 31, 1995 by Sue Fishkoff). It is about pressures on Israel to comply with international tribunals set up by the UN Security Council to prosecute war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The reasons for Israel to get involved are based on the connection of the Jewish history and link to genocide - and the responsibility and investment in fighting it:

"It's unlikely that any witnesses or suspects are in Israel, but Israel and the Jewish people have a special reason for wanting to align themselves with international tribunals charging people with genocide," Goldstone [South African Supreme Court justice and chief prosecutor for both tribunals] said.

The notion of "never again" and the responsibility of at least reiterating that message, is implicated in this comment. In this case there was a failure to prevent genocide and Israel is being called upon to help bring the Rwandan genocide to light and to justice.

This notion of responsibility is complicated by the second article I read, "Whose Fight Is It" from the New York Times (Sun. May 22, 1994 by Brian Urquhart) which uses the situation in Rwanda to question the role and responsibility of the UN and its member states. The article is a general critique of the UN and its problem of ineffectiveness, though Urquhart pointedly asks: "What is the responsibility of United Nations members for disasters like Rwanda and Bosnia that do not directly affect their national security and other interests? In fact, is there an international responsibility that arises from membership in the U.N.?"

This is something Malkki brings up in the first chapter of Purity and Exile, in noting the general silence in the media about the 1972 massacres in Burundi, commenting "One frequent response, when it was not silence, was to express shock at what was happening while noting that it would be 'improper' to interfere in the internal affairs of a sovereign state," especially internal affairs portrayed as "tribal bloodshed," "civil war," and "peasant uprising[s]" (35). The ways in which the Burundi massacres were classified in the media and by other nation-states allowed a shrugging off of responsibility, one that we continued to see in the UN and its member states' inaction during the Rwandan genocide. How an event is defined clearly has implications about who is responsible and in what capacity. The killings in Rwanda being named a genocide created a notion of Israeli responsibility in participating in war tribunals. Sadly, though not surprisingly, that was a responsiblity invoked in the wake of the killings. The real question is of a responsibility to step in and try to prevent killing while it is happening. Who can it be put upon?