<HTML><FONT FACE=arial,helvetica><A HREF="http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/09/power.htm">Click here: The Atlantic | September 2001 | Bystanders to Genocide | Power</A>
<BR>
<BR>The Atlantic Monthly | September 2001
<BR>
<BR>Bystanders to Genocide
<BR>
<BR>The author's exclusive interviews with scores of the participants in the
<BR>decision-making, together with her analysis of newly declassified documents,
<BR>yield a chilling narrative of self-serving caution and flaccid will—and
<BR>countless missed opportunities to mitigate a colossal crime
<BR>
<BR>by Samantha Power
<BR>
<BR>I. People Sitting in Offices
<BR>
<BR>In the course of a hundred days in 1994 the Hutu government of Rwanda and its
<BR>extremist allies very nearly succeeded in exterminating the country's Tutsi
<BR>minority. Using firearms, machetes, and a variety of garden implements, Hutu
<BR>militiamen, soldiers, and ordinary citizens murdered some 800,000 Tutsi and
<BR>politically moderate Hutu. It was the fastest, most efficient killing spree
<BR>of the twentieth century.
<BR>
<BR>A few years later, in a series in <I>The New Yorker</I>, Philip Gourevitch recounted
<BR>in horrific detail <A HREF="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0312243359/theatlanticmonthA/">the story</A> of the genocide and the world's failure to stop
<BR>it. President Bill Clinton, a famously avid reader, expressed shock. He sent
<BR>copies of Gourevitch's articles to his second-term national-security adviser,
<BR>Sandy Berger. The articles bore confused, angry, searching queries in the
<BR>margins. "Is what he's saying true?" Clinton wrote with a thick black
<BR>felt-tip pen beside heavily underlined paragraphs. "How did this happen?" he
<BR>asked, adding, "I want to get to the bottom of this." The President's urgency
<BR>and outrage were oddly timed. As the terror in Rwanda had unfolded, Clinton
<BR>had shown virtually no interest in stopping the genocide, and his
<BR>Administration had stood by as the death toll rose into the hundreds of
<BR>thousands.
<BR>
<BR>Why did the United States not do more for the Rwandans at the time of the
<BR>killings? Did the President really not know about the genocide, as his
<BR>marginalia suggested? Who were the people in his Administration who made the
<BR>life-and-death decisions that dictated U.S. policy? Why did they decide (or
<BR>decide not to decide) as they did? Were any voices inside or outside the U.S.
<BR>government demanding that the United States do more? If so, why weren't they
<BR>heeded? And most crucial, what could the United States have done to save
<BR>lives?
<BR>
<BR>So far people have explained the U.S. failure to respond to the Rwandan
<BR>genocide by claiming that the United States didn't know what was happening,
<BR>that it knew but didn't care, or that regardless of what it knew there was
<BR>nothing useful to be done. The account that follows is based on a three-year
<BR>investigation involving sixty interviews with senior, mid-level, and junior
<BR>State Department, Defense Department, and National Security Council officials
<BR>who helped to shape or inform U.S. policy. It also reflects dozens of
<BR>interviews with Rwandan, European, and United Nations officials and with
<BR>peacekeepers, journalists, and nongovernmental workers in Rwanda. Thanks to
<BR>the National Security Archive (<A HREF="http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/">www.nsarchive.org</A>), a nonprofit organization
<BR>that uses the Freedom of Information Act to secure the release of classified
<BR>U.S. documents, this account also draws on hundreds of pages of newly
<BR>available government records. This material provides a clearer picture than
<BR>was previously possible of the interplay among people, motives, and events.
<BR>It reveals that the U.S. government knew enough about the genocide early on
<BR>to save lives, but passed up countless opportunities to intervene...
<BR><FONT SIZE=3>
<BR>Leo Casey
<BR>United Federation of Teachers
<BR>260 Park Avenue South
<BR>New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
<BR>
<BR>Power concedes nothing without a demand.
<BR>It never has, and it never will.
<BR>If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
<BR>Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who
<BR>want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and
<BR>lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.
<BR><P ALIGN=CENTER>-- Frederick Douglass --
<BR></P></FONT></HTML>