‘Our’ Shame: International Responsibility for the Rwandan Genocide

Abstract

By the time the genocide was over, I was so angry, at America, America the beautiful, America the brave2 In 1994, countries around the world failed to respond to the genocide of the Rwandan Tutsis. As the Tutsis were systematically persecuted and murdered on the basis of who they were, nation states and the United Nations refused to name the killings as 'genocide' and delayed in providing any economic, political or military support to stop them. The United Nations, an organisation founded on principles of global solidarity, had a peacekeeping force in Rwanda at the time of the genocide, but this force was denied the mandate and the means to protect the Rwandan Tutsis from the persecution that they were facing. Both inside and outside the United Nations structure, there was a wholesale turning away from the genocide of the Tutsis and its implications for the rest of the world.3 The international failure to prevent, or stop, the Rwandan genocide acts as a piercing challenge to widespread cultural beliefs about the meaning and implications of the crime of genocide. Genocide - the intentional and organised attempt to exterminate a defined group of people - is popularly deemed to be the 'crime of crimes'.4 It is the ultimate inhumanity that constitutes a threat to all of humanity.5 Nation states, the United Nations and the more amorphous 'international community' are each understood to bear a moral and a legal obligation to prevent or stop acts of genocide.6 Thus, what can it mean when genocide not only occurs, but is ignored? In the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, the international failure to stop the killings has been understood as a shameful reaction to a crime that demanded a more interventionist response. In particular, it has been conceptualised as a matter of Western shame, as a matter of Western countries - such as the United States of America, Britain, Belgium and France failing to live up to societal expectations of them. Yet, despite these widespread criticisms of the international response, there have been no legal consequences flowing from this event - no countries have been prosecuted or punished for their failure to fulfil their legal obligation to prevent the crime of genocide. In general, questions of legal accountability for the international response have been sidelined, in favour of an emphasis on the social and moral implications of this event. This article reflects on these contemporary approaches to the international response, as a way of interrogating how they make it possible to drink about the questions of international responsibility and accountability raised by this occurrence. I explore these socially ascendant understandings of the international failure as an event of Western shame with reference to academic and non-academic investigations into the international response, such as academic research, human rights reports, investigative journalism and documentary films. As a whole, these investigative texts are a key site at which the international response has been constituted as a matter of Western shame and, thus, they are good illustrations of this broader way of thinking about this event. In line with a tradition of poststructuralist and postcolonial approaches to law, human rights and humanitarianism,7 my analysis of these investigative texts is premised upon a recognition of their productivity. These representations of the international response are interesting, that is, because they actively constitute what this event can, and does, mean. They are the sites at which the legal, social and political issues relating to the international failure are thought and rethought. Moreover, as I will demonstrate, they are also the location at which certain - racialised and gendered - subjects are imagined. I argue that conceptualising the international response to the Rwandan genocide as a matter of Western shame, as a matter of Western countries failing to live up to societal expectations of them, is not natural or inevitable. …