Jewsweek
Jan 10 2005
Shmuley on ‘Hotel Rwanda’
Bill Clinton’s infamy with regards to Rwanda will tarnish his
presidency forever
by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach
Two things were on my mind as I watched Hotel Rwanda, the stunning
depiction of the 1994 Rwandan Tutsi extermination that was the
fastest genocide in the history of the world.
The first was Hollywood and how I owed it an apology for the many
times I railed against its degeneracy. A film this powerful shames
the world out of its indifference to the slaughter of helpless humans
and demonstrates the potential of movies to reach the places that
photos and words cannot.
The second was Bill Clinton, the great ’60s liberal romantic who
dreamed of becoming president in order to make the world a better
place. How would he deal with his shame, for the movie is more
damaging to his reputation than if Monica Lewinsky had handycamed the
leader of the free world inserting foreign objects into her privates.
Though Clinton is never mentioned in the movie explicitly, he is the
ghost that haunts the entire story — the most powerful man on earth
— who not only refused to intervene to save 800,000 people from
being hacked to death, but declined to even convene his Cabinet to
discuss the crisis.
How would the great liberal hope now face his Nobel Prize-winning
friend Toni Morrison who called him “America’s first black
president”? Would he still be invited by Oprah Winfrey to talk about
his $12 million autobiography once she focused on the fact that
Clinton had even refused to provide jamming aircraft to block Hutu
Power radio transmissions that orchestrated the massacres? The
$8,500-per-hour cost to the United States was determined by the
president’s administration be too exorbitant, even though, since
10,000 Rwandans were being killed each day, the cost came to $20 per
life.
And would Bill Clinton still be a hero to a new generation of
American youth once they found out that eight African nations, fed up
with American inaction to stop the butchery, agreed to send in their
own intervention force. All they asked from the United States was the
use of 50 armored personnel carriers, but the Clinton administration
refused to loan them and instead demanded $15 million, leaving the
carriers on a runway in Germany while the United Nations scrambled to
find the money. And while all this happened, an average of 334 poor
black Africans were dying every hour.
The Rwandan genocide was unique in the annals of modern genocide
insofar as the world has absolutely no excuse not to intervene. The
Ottoman Turks’ slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians took place during
the fog of the World War I. The same was true of the holocaust of 6
million European Jews, which gave Franklin Roosevelt the excuse that
defeating the Germans was the best way to stop the carnage.
The Khmer Rouge’s extermination of one third of Cambodia’s 7 million
citizens was done in a country that was utterly sealed off from the
rest of the world, thus granting the Western powers plausible denial
as to its occurrence. But with the Rwandan Genocide, the U.N.
commander, Gen. Romeo Dallaire of Canada, one of the few true heroes
of this otherwise cowardly tale, informed the world of both the Hutu
preparations for mass-murder as well as every development once the
genocide was in full swing.
The Clinton administration’s response constitutes one of the greatest
abominations of American history. Not only did the United States
refuse to intervene, but, to quote the New York Times, “it also used
its considerable power to discourage other Western powers from
intervening.”
The Clinton administration robbed Dallaire of any ability to protect
the unarmed men, women and children by demanding a total withdrawal
of all 2,500 U.N. peacekeepers, only later allowing a skeletal force
of 270 because of the strong pressure of African nations. The
administration adamancy that the United Nations be withdrawn was
taken as a clear signal by the Hutu Power militias that the West
cared nothing for poor African lives.
>From that time on, the fate of the Tutsis was sealed and the bodies
of hundreds of thousands of children with their parents littered the
country’s rivers and hills. The Clinton administration’s repellant
response only got worse with the State Department then prohibiting
the use of the word “genocide,” because that would have obligated the
United States to intervene.
To be fair, I should add the addendum that Clinton did go to Rwanda
in 1998 to apologize, albeit for three-and-a-half hours, his plane
not even shutting down its engines while he spoke. True to form, he
at least felt their pain.
Dec. 9, 2004, was the 56th anniversary of the approval of the
Genocide Convention by the United Nations General Assembly. But with
another genocide taking place in Sudan, and the United States
refusing to even pass a resolution condemning it, it is clear that
the world is still not ready to prevent entire groups being
exterminated.
It is also clear that no country, not even the United States, can be
trusted to prevent genocide. Even President Bush, the greatest
champion of democracy since Winston Churchill, has thusfar done too
little to help the wretched people of Darfur, where about 100,000
have already died.
Which leaves just you and me.
I believe that rather than merely blaming the amoral Bill Clintons of
the world for being indifferent to genocide, decent people everywhere
must take it upon themselves to coerce their governments into action
whenever a genocide occurs. A mass movement of participants should go
on strike for two days of every month — and carry out acts of civil
disobedience — until the great democracies take action to stop whole
groups from being exterminated.
I lament that I lack the global reach and influence to orchestrate
this movement and coordinate its activities. But surely if enough
people begin to adopt this measure, say on the 1st and 15th of every
month, someone with global influence will emerge to inspire and
orchestrate the campaign and we can shut down whole countries for two
days out of every month until those governments act. We must send a
clear message that there will be no business as usual while people
are slaughtered en masse. Radical situations call for radical
responses.
I recognize that controversy will ensue as to what constitutes a
genocide. But rather than tangle over the definition, let’s begin
with the Sudan, which the United States and other responsible
governments have already labeled a genocide. Let us go on strike for
two days out of every month until the Western democracies send troops
into the Sudan to kill the Janjaweed militias, or carry out air
strikes against the Sudanese government who are arming them.
I write these lines not from altruistic, but selfish motivation. I
simply do not wish to ever experience the kind of shame that Bill
Clinton is surely experiencing right now.
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