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The Lessons of Rwanda
Omaar was in Brussels when the killing broke out but quickly found her way to Rwanda. Last week she recalled a visit to a health-care facility in 1994: "I saw blood in the cubicles for premature babies, huge piles of identity cards, toothbrushes, photograph albums, letters … I promised the people who endured what they did [that I would] make sure that the world found out what happened … that I would never forget them."
Omaar has spent 14 years attempting to understand that African holocaust. "I'm not so naive as to believe in the slogan 'Never again,' because [collective violence] happens all the time," she says. But she believes Rwanda shows the horrific consequence when such violence happens with impunity, when the belief is allowed to spread that there is no cost for taking human life. Omaar has also learned that education is no cure. Doctors, politicians and teachers were as brutally complicit as everyone else. Those who shielded their neighbors from violence—at huge personal risk—were "almost universally peasants … It was very shocking to me that education isn't, in the way you want it to be, the answer." The ultimate, and disheartening, lesson of Rwanda may be that there is no foolproof antidote to genocidal madness—short of creating a universe in which all human life is equally revered.
© 2008
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Member Comments
Posted By: Toni Kamau @ 04/23/2008 2:11:27 AM
Comment: Education isn't the answer. Thanks for this wisdom. The truth is even worse. Education has no value on its own. If not rooted on a solid morale background it can easily be misused as a tool to gain personal benefits to the detriment of the majority of the less privileged in a society. This wisdom is proven every day by the educated African elite...just look to Kenya, where the educated elite scavenges on the poor.
Posted By: Betosu @ 04/20/2008 7:36:12 AM
Comment: The Vatican???s refusal to acknowledge the role of the catholic church and the active participation numerous priests in the genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda is in my mind as I follow the Pope???s visit to the US, his apologies for the sex abuse inflicted on American children by catholic priests and his denunciation of the ???monster??? Nazi regime. How about the monster Rwandan clergy responsible for genocide crimes that the Vatican continues to protect all over Europe? I can only be convinced of the sincerity of the Pope when Rwanda gets apology for this horrendous failure of the church, compensation for the victims, and the arrest of fugitive clergy. Otherwise it seems like a case of special justice only for those who can put together a class action suit.
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Posted By: Mzalendo @ 04/17/2008 5:36:18 PM
Comment: I think we often see bad things happening 'over there' as something 'those people' do and somehow feel immune from it and rarely think that it can happen to us as well.
Watching and reflecting on the Rwanda genocide made me realise how easy it is with the right circumstances for ordinary people to do terrible things to each other. The violence in Kenya recently made my theory a reality. Affluence is the buffer that protects much of the world from terrible violence. Poverty and deprivation and competition for scarce resources make it easier to marginalise those we are in competition with and what better way to decide who the 'them' are- people from a different, race, tribe, religion etc are an easy target.
Our duty then it to speak up when we see our 'leaders' guiding us down a path that will more likely than not lead to violence or worse genocide. It does not solve the underlying problems, just creates a whole set of issues to contend with.
Never again is great rhetric, but like Ms Omaar says, even I know better than to believe it.