When we said “never again,” we were kidding

“One death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic,” Joseph Stalin

Today is the anniversary of the start of the Rwandan genocide.  In the span of 100 days, 800,000 people were murdered with machetes.   That is the official death toll but it could be as high as one million.  I wrote about that here.  As this is the anniversary, I am watching Hotel Rwanda.  I have been lucky enough to have met Paul and Tatiana Rusesbagina and they inspire me every day.

A lifetime ago, I climbed Kilimanjaro.  After the climb we went to Odulpai Gorge, the site where the first human footprints were found.  Looking over the gorge gave me this great sense of connectivity — we are all from there.

One of my heroes is astrophysicist, Neil de Grasse Tyson. He has said, “We are all stardust.”  I love that idea and it sits at the heart of my atheism.  Looking up at the stars gives me the same sense that looking over that gorge did.

One of the advance trips I did for President Clinton was to Norway.  He was there to commemorate the life of Yitzak Rabin (side note: when he was assasinated I was in an Emily’s List press training, name drop alert: Chuck Todd was in my group, when they told us the news, it took my brain about ten minutes to comprehend them, it was weird, I knew all the words but could not grasp what they meant).  I watched Clinton give a speech about our DNA.  We share 99.99 percent with every other person on the planet.  This is what makes DNA evidence so powerful in criminal cases.  During that trip, Clinton met with the Israeli and Palestinian leadership. Like soap in the shower, peace in that part of the world often feels so close only to be lost in a short time.

We are unique and that is special.  When we celebrate our uniqueness, we celebrate our species.  When we use the tiny spaces that make us unique to divide us, we all suffer.  We are in this boat together.

Hutu, Tutsi.  Jew, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist (or atheist).  We are the same.

Paul Kagame led the revolt that ended the Rwandan genocide but he is not the savior he has been made out to be.  He didn’t really end the conflict, he just moved it next door to the Congo.  Dear President Kagame: please learn from Nelson Mandela.  Step down and prove you have created a real democracy.  Learn from George Washington who stepped down after one term.

And to end on a happier note, watch this.

No means no and never again needs to mean never again

Paul Rusesabagina and Don Cheadle

Another personal post, don’t worry it’s not as intense as the last one.

Today Paul Rusesabagina received the Tom Lantos Human Rights Prize.  I was lucky enough to be able to help out.  Paul is one of my heroes.  His actions during the Rwandan genocide not only saved the people in his hotel but he in an inspiration to people currently dealing with similar situations and those of us who are not but who want to help stop and prevent genocide.

We tend to think of genocide as something that happened a long tome ago in a galaxy far away but that is not true.  When the Rwandan genocide was occurring, Slobodan Milosovic was ethnically cleansing Bosnia.  I mention Bosnia for several reasons.  First of all, I was obsessed with Bosnia while the conflict was happening.  One excuse I hear from people about why we should not intervene in this place or that is that “those people have been fighting for centuries, there’s nothing we can do.”  In Africa, this sentiment is magnified by the thought that it is the ‘dark continent’ and there’s even less that we can do.  Bosnia should blow that idea out of the water.  Before Milosovic riled people up, Sarajevo was viewed as the ultimate example of racial harmony.  The “ethnic cleansing” was not caused by racial tension but this genocide was political opportunism.

I plan to write a more detailed piece on the current situation in Rwanda.  For now, I will just write that Rwanda is not the shiny example of reconciliation and peace.  Paul Kagame is not the new kind of African leader we all hoped it would be.  Since he took over, Rwanda has been fighting a proxy war in Congo and exploiting Congo’s natural resources.  Within Rwanda, Kagame allows no dissent.  There is no freedom of the press.  There is no freedom of expression.  Inside Congo, the genocide continues.  Rape is a common tool of war and it is being employed freely.

Back in 1994, I was obsessed with Bosnia and payed little attention to the horrors being perpetrated there.  I don’t know why I cared more about Bosnia than Rwanda.  In 2001, I went to work for the United Nations Information Centre in Washington, DC.  We received confidential dispatches from all over the globe.  While it was impossible to read all of them, I did read what was coming from Congo and it chilled my blood.  Some of the off the record stories I heard about the UN response to Rwanda did the same thing.  The then-Secretary General Kofi Annan said Rwanda represented the worst failure of the organization.  It was also his failure — and I have nothing but respect and admiration for him but he failed.  He was the head of the Department of Peace Keeping Operations.

For over a year, I sent out either a press release on Congo — families were jumping into alligator infested rivers to escape the rebels, masses of people were crowding UN offices and were told if they were caught on the street they would be killed — or some other communication to media about the situation.  A few reporters wrote stories just to make me stop sending them information.  It wasn’t much but it was all I could do.

Paul Rusesabagina did not intend to be a hero.  As awesome as he is, I wish he hadn’t become a hero.  I wish he was back in Rwanda running his hotel and this never happened.  But it did happen and he did become a hero.  In his speech at the Lantos ceremony, he said that he used words and persuasion to keep his guests and his family safe minute by minute — thinking all the while that he would be killed eventually — just to survive a little longer.

Senator Dianne Feinstein used to tell her staff, maybe she still says this, that people fail to do good things because they only want to do great things.  While we may not find ourselves in the position Paul was in, we can still make a difference.  We can educate ourselves and others and let our leaders know that when we say never again, we mean it.

Welcome to 2009

From the news the past few weeks, 2009 looks a lot like 2008.  That will suck if it continues.

·         Polls = “lies, damned lies and statistics.”  One added benefit to Barack Obama’s election would be the cessation of the endless polling the news networks did during the campaign cycle.  Wow, was I wrong about that.  The polls have shifted from which candidate people support for the 2008 campaign to which GOP candidate is most favored (it’s Sarah Palin right now) to beat Obama and/or how much confidence the public – including the same Republicans who are already lining up to support Palin – has in Obama.  WTF?  Can’t the guy take office before the snarkiness starts?  Apparently not.

·         Petty, partisan politics are over.   Uh, not in the US.  Just as Minnesota says Al Franken won, Norm Coleman and his pals in the Senate vow to fight on.  Granted, with an election so close, it’s hard to blame them.  It’s how they got the White House in 2000.  The other split seems to be in how the GOP machine will respond to President Obama.  So far they have released obnoxious and racist videos.  When called on the blatant racism of “Barak the magic negro” their response was “it was a joke.”  Yeah, so were your response to Katrina, our participation in the ICC or adherence to the Geneva Conventions the economy and your general ability to govern.  See, none of us are laughing at those either.

·         No, really – everything I do it totally legal.   One might think that if one governor is in the newspaper every day over a ‘pay for play’ scandal that if you maybe did the same thing, you might not want to subject yourself to anything that requires Senate confirmation.  Poor, silly Bill Richardson.  Of course, the adage that ‘those in glass houses should not throw stones’ never did mean much to politicians.  Nice.

·         Just because I am about to be impeached does mean I lose my rights to govern.  Speaking of Governor Blogojevich, he hasn’t actually been indicted on anything.  I understand that the ‘appearance of impropriety is worse than the impropriety itself.’  I do but legally he has the right to appoint anyone, who meets the requirements to be a Senator, to the Senate.  He could make things easier on Harry Reid, but why should he?  He should because anyone he appoints will be tainted and that may make it harder to them to keep the seat in 2010 when they have to run again.  A veto proof Senate would be, well, I can’t say how strongly I feel about it because then I would have to list this post as ‘offensive’ but it would be awesome.

·         Winter is cold and there is still plenty of war to go around.  After 10 days in Florida and too many hours of CNN/the Weather Channel, I can tell you that in the winter most of the US is cold and people still try to kill each other all over the world.  Israel is pounding Gaza (and I do blame Hamas for this), conflicts continue in the DR Congo & Darfur and pirates are taking ships off the horn of Africa.  Good times.

 

I know I sound glib here and promise that is not my goal.  It’s hard for me not to not be cynical about the state of the world.  The US made great progress by electing Barack Obama but we have a long way to go in terms of the rest of the planet, our role in it and what we do within our borders.  Democracy does not equal stability and peace.  The US is not the only country on earth and political corruption runs rampant.  We get the government that we settle for.  

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“Wars exist to teach Americans geography.”

Someone said that, though I will admit that I do not know who.  You can look it up.  Although her political future may be unclear right now, Governor Sarah Palin proved several things.  She appealed to many people because she seemed to be like ‘average’ Americans.   If some reports and plenty of anecdotal evidence is to be believed, her knowledge of geography may be one area where she and the many of us are in sync.  While her ignorance of facts like that Africa is a continent and not a country and what countries are in North America is particularly scary because she could very well have become the president, that we care so little about the world outside our borders, state or national, is depressing.  (http://www.cnn.com/2006/EDUCATION/05/02/geog.test/index.html)

Much of the world celebrated Barack Obama’s win along with us and that is a good thing.  We may not know who they are but they know us.  What’s more disturbing about the report above is this:

Fewer than three in 10 think it important to know the locations of countries in the news and just 14 percent believe speaking another language is a necessary skill.

When I sat down to write something about this topic I wanted to write about the current crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  I was going to start by talking referencing the situation there with my experience as a UN employee and mention that while the US become more and more focused on Iraq and the atrocities Saddam Hussein had committed I was focused on a more dire situation, that of the DRC.  Then, like now, rebels were killing innocent civilians and the reports I saw were too horrible to repeat here.  At the time I did what I could to get the US press to care but in the year I worked on this, only one paper wrote an article (the Denver Post) and I think that was just to shut me up.  Maybe we can only focus on one international issue at a time.  Maybe it is because few people could find it on a map, though few can find Iraq on a map, too.  I think it is because we have this idea that Africa is a dark and dangerous place.  We expect them to kill each other so we are not surprised when they do.

As with the Rwandan crisis in the 1990s, a lot of coverage of recent events has focused on the ethnic aspect and once again we hear it repeated that these people have been fighting since the beginning of time.  As I have said before, this is not true but we all know that doesn’t matter.  We look for reasons not to intervene and cling to them.  Granted we have a lot on our plate right now, with the economic crisis, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, even the Middle East peace process is taking a back seat to more pressing issues.  I do not want to see American troops deployed all over the world but I would like to see people take a greater interest in the planet we all inhabit.  Not only would greater understanding help in times of crisis but in better times.  It should go without saying that we have a vested interest in learning more about the world but I guess not.

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