>The west says to Rwanda and Yugoslavia:
>
>"You are savages who are clearly incapable of living together without
>murdering each other. If we leave you to your own business then you will
>carry on in this way for generations to come. [...]
Well it's odd to single out Rwanda as example of Western interventionism, since the West's outrageous behavior during the Rwanda genocide was precisely the opposite: utter paralysis and disinterest.
Recall that as all those hundreds of thousands of Rwandan corpses mounted higher and higher, it was the (all-too-ignored) _nonpermanent_ members of the UN Security Council that showed the strongest committment to action and repeatedly called for forces to be sent to Rwanda. In contrast it was the major western powers who for months steadfastly avoided any hint of the G-word, knowing the obligations that would accompany acknowledgement of systematic genocide.
Instead the West stood by, clucking away about tribalism and how nothing could really be done about the primitives anyway. Of course both claims--ancient "tribal" animosities, generating an an anarchic orgy of "chaos"--were bullshit. It would have taken minimal addition to the UN peacekeeping troops already in Rwanda to stop the systematic genocide. (A genocide long planned by the faction which carried out the internal coup, and whose first targets were moderate _Hutus_--so much for ancient tribalism). But instead the UN forces were ordered to pack up.
As for the timeless tribalism arguments, hopefully there's no need to unpack that primitivism here. However, even better-intended anti-interventionist arguments sometimes parallel the primordialist ones when they extract situations in places like Rwanda from their complex histories, then cast them as local problems which "outsiders" ought not meddle in. The West has already been "meddling" in Rwandan history for centuries, in ways directly linked to the conditions allowing the genocide to take place. From the very designations of Hutu and Tusti as separate class-ethnicities (unthinkable before colonial rule), to Rwanda's place in an unequal global economic system, to the inhuman impositions of structural adjustment programs which wracked the population in the early nineties after coffee prices plummeted, to the circumstances surrounding the signing of the Arusha accords, and on and on. So the moment when close to a million Rwandans are being systematically slaughtered seems a pretty odd time to get all full of anti-interventionist pudeur.
And in fact, when the Rwanda genocide was taking place, those trying to rally some activism around the issue were met not just with the cynical inertia of Western governments, but by lots of left anti-interventionism as well. Which is significant because of course the sleazy Clinton administration put out its feelers early on, as it always does, to see what kind of public reaction it would get if it pressured the UN to stay clear of Rwanda. The administration was met with indifference.
Where was the left? Why weren't they holding the administration's feet to the fire? Why weren't they joining their voices with those in less powerful countries who out of the most basic sense of humanity were calling for international peacekeeping forces? ...Rwanda's case raises lots of issues about "intervention" that the left hasn't grappled with enough. Issues lost sight of in the wake NATO's bombing of Belgrade. They're issues of a piece with the rest of this thread, because capitalism, the nation-state, etc., are never going to be left behind if in the meantime the left wants no truck with international forums such as the UN until American hegemony has been totally vanquished.
Maureen