Book reviews: Mass murder most foul – Armenian Directory & News

The Globe and Mail (Canada)
May 12, 2007 Saturday

BOOK REVIEW; GENOCIDE; Pg. D6

Mass murder most foul

by GERALD CAPLAN

NOT ON OUR WATCH
The Mission to End Genocide
in Darfur and Beyond
By Don Cheadle
and John Prendergast
Hyperion, 250 pages, $18.95

THE DEVIL CAME ON HORSEBACK
Bearing Witness
to the Genocide in Darfur
By Brian Steidle
and Gretchen Steidle Wallace
Public Affairs, 230 pages, $30

EXTRAORDINARY EVIL
A Brief History of Genocide
By Barbara Coloroso
Viking Canada, 248 pages, $30

THE BISHOP OF RWANDA
Finding Forgiveness Amidst
a Pile of Bones
By John Rucyahana
Thomas Nelson,
231 pages, $24.99

DARFUR
The Ambiguous Genocide
By Gérard Prunier
Cornell University Press,
236 pages, $30.50

No one writes about genocide neutrally or with detachment. Even
serious and objective scholars of genocide, of whom there are a good
number, are driven by a desire to end the phenomenon they’re writing
about. This is hardly surprising, since any other purpose would be
perverse. To explore such a grisly subject for its own sake would
open the scholar up to awkward questions about mental stability.

Of the authors under consideration here, only Gérard Prunier would
make any pretense to scholarship. He is a genuine authority on the
two highest-profile genocides of recent memory. Prunier’s quirky but
indispensable study of the Rwandan genocide – during which he advised
the government of France on its disastrous intervention – was
followed two years ago by his little book on Darfur. Now comes a
revised edition, bringing the tragedy a little more up to date, but
still ending a year ago with the failed "Darfur Peace Agreement" of
May 5, 2006.

In my original unenthusiastic review of this book for this newspaper,
I suggested that Prunier convinced the reader of the great complexity
of the subject by the sheer density of his presentation. His added
chapter largely continues this unfortunate style. But it also reminds
readers of Prunier’s constant themes: the bad faith, callousness and
venality of almost everyone involved in these crises, local and
foreign. On the one hand, Prunier is certain that genocide was not
inevitable in either situation. On the other, given the malign nature
he convincingly assigns to most of the actors, it’s hard to see how
it could have been avoided. Of course, it was not avoided in Rwanda,
and Darfur seems ever more likely to fulfill its awful fate of being
"the next Rwanda."

That’s exactly what the authors of all the other books hope to
prevent. None is a scholar of genocide, although Barbara Coloroso has
learned a good deal about the Turkish genocide against the Armenians,
the Nazi extermination of the Jews and Roma, and the Rwandan Hutu
extremists’ annihilation of their country’s Tutsi, while John
Prendergast has a wealth of understanding of the Sudan and other
troubled parts of Africa. Their books are really about genocide
prevention, but their readers – and there should be a multitude –
will learn much about some of the most ghoulish events of the past
100 years.

Don Cheadle, Prendergast’s co-author and a Hollywood star who played
a courageous Rwandan citizen in Hotel Rwanda and a Cockney rascal in
Ocean’s Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen, does not claim substantive
expertise. But he believes citizens can influence their governments
even if they’re not celebrities, and wants to pass along lessons
learned.

Anglican Bishop John Rucyahana is a Rwandan who wants to share his
view that his God can help reconcile the killers and their victims in
his still-traumatized land. And Brian Steidle, a former U.S. marine
writing with the assistance of his sister, hopes his remarkable
experiences in Darfur will persuade readers that they must join the
struggle to pressure Western governments, above all his own, to end
the slow-motion genocide in western Sudan.

Aside from Bishop John (as he is called by his parishioners), it’s
worth observing that all authors here are Westerners. All but Prunier
are Americans, all but Cheadle are white. A kind of colonial remnant
continues to exist when it comes to mainstream publications about
Africa’s plight, something that’s not true of studies of the Armenian
genocide or the Holocaust. It’s another form of underdevelopment that
needs to be remedied.

Still, all these volumes are valuable in one way or another, and the
Bishop’s is worth reading for reasons he would barely grasp. Bishop
John is a Tutsi – as the book cover prominently notes – who spent
most of his life in Uganda, his family having fled Rwanda after a
very early anti-Tutsi pogrom. He didn’t return to stay until four
years after the genocide. He is outspoken about the overall
complicity of Rwanda’s Christian churches, including his own
Anglicans, in the genocide, although he rightly points out that his
hierarchy apologized for its sins while the more powerful Catholics
still refuse to do so. This is well known to all students of the
genocide, but it is important testimony.

But for me, the wonder of the book is that the horrors of the
genocide – including the sadistic rape and murder of his niece – seem
never for one second to have shaken Bishop John’s abiding faith in
God and Jesus. God could have stopped it, he believes, but of course
didn’t. Why? "God is God and does what He wills." I am glad for
people whose faith gives them comfort through the blackest night, but
I am always wary that they may also be susceptible to believing far
more terrible things. But if the Bishop can use his God to bring more
peace of mind to his troubled land, we can only applaud.

Brian Steidle saw many of those unspeakable deeds in Darfur early in
the latest crisis. But while they were perpetrated in Rwanda by
Christians against other Christians, the genocidaires in Darfur were
Muslims killing Muslims. And, as in Rwanda, in the most gruesome and
disgusting ways possible. With Steidle observing, entire villages
were looted and then burned to the ground by the janjaweed militias
(the devils who come on horseback). Camps for displaced persons, the
wretched of the wretched, were bulldozed by Sudanese government
troops. Although they knew Steidle was in the area, people were
burned alive in huts. Steidle was literally observing. He was one of
three Americans serving in Darfur as unarmed military observers for
the African Union’s flimsy mission there. (His paymaster was a
mysterious civilian American contracting company, mentioned
repeatedly but never named, who paid him "a six-figure salary.") And
as far as he was concerned, he and his fellow monitors were virtually
useless.

They were not allowed to protect civilians or arrest perps. They
merely observed and reported, although he eventually clued in that
most of their reports never got seen by anyone. Just as the failure
of the United Nations to bolster its mission in Rwanda signalled to
the Hutu conspirators that they could indeed get away with mass
murder, so Steidle’s empty assignment "sent a loud message to the
government of Sudan: There was no meaningful opposition to its
systematic genocide." Steidle returned to the United States and has
dedicated himself to mobilizing support for serious intervention.

Steidle’s book, while revealing in many ways as a call to action, is
entirely devoid of any political analysis. It gives no sense of why
the world has so flagrantly failed Darfuris. For that, readers need
to turn to Not on Our Watch. Everyone knows why China has refused to
tackle the Sudanese over Darfur. Everyone should know why the United
States has failed equally. But for some unfathomable reason, John
Prendergast – a lifelong battler for social justice – is one of the
few who reminds his fellow Americans that George W. Bush’s
administration’s collusion with the government of Sudan on
counterterrorism issues deeply compromises its capacity to influence
events in Darfur: "Many of the senior Sudanese officials who now
offer information to the CIA are also the principal orchestrators of
genocidal crime." Cheadle and Prendergast have written opinion pieces
in both The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post revealing all,
yet the world looks to Bush for leadership.

Their little book is also a valuable how-to for citizens wanting to
get involved in pressuring their government, and a who’s who of the
many Darfur solidarity groups, some with direct links to Canada, that
are actively lobbying to end the horror before there’s no one left to
save.

Barbara Coloroso also has close ties to Canada, with great fans
across the country. I’m one. She and I vigorously discussed the main
arguments she raises in Extraordinary Evil, her latest book, and she
quotes my own writings on genocide several times. After our
exchanges, I was unsure how she was going to make the leap from
bullying to genocide; after reading the book, I still am. But in the
way her admirers have come to expect, Coloroso always succeeds in
challenging and provoking. Like the best public intellectuals, even
when you suspect you really don’t agree with her, she forces you to
think.

Coloroso writes: "The progression from taunting to hacking a child to
death is not a great leap but actually a short walk." Even an
unregenerate pessimist like me hopes that’s not true. It’s a
horrifying thought, but can’t be dismissed on that ground alone. What
are the implications if it’s true? There are conundrums here. Leaders
of genocides may have been bullies by definition, but many were so
much more: calculating, shrewd, sophisticated, educated. And as most
genocide authorities agree, including Coloroso and me, much of the
genocidal killing is carried out by ordinary people who are
temporarily persuaded to commit crimes they would have thought
themselves incapable of only hours before. They weren’t the
schoolyard bullies; they were you and me.

Coloroso is withering about bystanders who allow atrocities to
continue without a murmur. There are no bystanders in this bevy of
writers. If they ran the Security Council, you can believe that the
tragedy in Darfur would soon be ended, hundreds of thousands of lives
saved. If they could do it, so can our governments. They show us the
need and the means. Now it’s up to us.

Gerald Caplan is author of Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide, and
other writings on genocide.