Abstract
Rwanda represents “the undervalued genocide”—hardly a noble distinction. The phrase brings to the fore something troubling about the Rwandan genocide. Almost everyone pays lip service to this genocide by acknowledging its horror. And anyone who knows the least about it will invariably express regret and bemoan the international community’s failure to act. Yet, soon after those with bleeding hearts express these laments, they quickly resort either to some form of Rwanda bashing or, even worse, to complete silence as if Rwanda no longer exists. This chapter attempts to understand it, “it” being not so much the Rwandan genocide as the evaluations of and reactions to it.
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Notes
Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Student Edition (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985).
A great deal of my historical information about Rwanda and the genocide comes from Alison Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999). Des Forges wrote one the definitive works on Rwanda and, on February 12, 2009, tragically and ironically, died in a plane crash in my hometown of Clarence Center, New York. For an annotated survey of research on Rwanda, see Rene Lemarchand, Rwanda: The State of Research. Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence (2013). http://www.massviolence.org/rwanda-the-state-of-research, 742.
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Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, andthe Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 38.
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Ethnic cleansing is the forced population transfers within a state’s borders. See Michael P. Roch, “Forced Displacement in Former Yugoslavia: A Crime Under International Law?” Dickinson Journal of International Law 14 (1995): 1. It is not per se a criminal offence. It was not included in ICTY or ICTR Statutes but was included in ICC.
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Ravi Bhavnani and David Backer, “Localized Ethnic Conflict and Genocide: Accounting for Differences in Rwanda and Burundi,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 44, no. 3 (June 2000): 283–306.
Astri Suhke and Bruce Jones, “Preventative Diplomacy in Rwanda: Failure to Act or Failure of Actions?” In Opportunities Missed. Opportunities Seized: Preventive Diplomacy in Post—Cold War World, ed. Bruce W. Jentleson (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 256.
R. J. Rummel, Statistics on Democide: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1997), chap. 9.
Philip Verwimp, “Testing the Double-Genocide Thesis for Central and Southern Rwanda,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution 47, no. 4 (2003): 423–42.
Timothy Longman, Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (New York: Verso, 2000).
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© 2016 Thomas W. Simon
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Simon, T.W. (2016). Rwanda. In: Genocide, Torture, and Terrorism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137415110_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137415110_4
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