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January 23, 2006

Hotel Rwanda

Hotel Rwanda

Over the weekend Amanda and I watched the movie “Hotel Rwanda”, which depicts the genocide of the Tutsis by the Hutus from the perspective of a hotel manager at the Mille Collines in Kigali. The manager, played by Don Cheadle, used his position to shelter roughly 1,200 Tutsis until the U.N. was able to evacuate them to safety.

The film places a sizeable burden on the West for its failure to stop the genocide. Nick Nolte, playing the commander of the UN peacekeepers, gives an impassioned speech telling Cheadle that he and his fellow countrymen are dirt to the West; that Cheadle is “not even a nigger. You're an African.” Joaquin Phoenix, playing a reporter, tells Cheadle that his film of massacres will disturb Westerners, but it will not spur them to intervene. Setting aside the emotional content of the film, it is correct on the facts: the West did not intervene in Ruanda, and over a million Rwandans died in the fighting and the attempted genocide of the Tutsis.

This raised an interesting question, as the film is intended to. What responsibility do we have for such problems? The film makes it clear that the people of Ruanda were counting on foreign intervention to stop the bloodshed. The United States certainly had the ability to intervene in Ruanda if it so chose; the militias involved in the fighting could not have stood up to trained soldiers. But President Clinton decided that intervening in Rwanda was not in America's national interest, and there was no significant objection to this by the general public. Was this decision the right one?

From a strict national interest standpoint, this was the correct decision. The United States has no strategic interests in Rwanda. From a strictly rational basis, if the Hutus wipe out the Tutsis it will not affect our national security.

National security concerns aside, do we have a responsibility to prevent genocide when it occurs? Cain infamously asked “Am I my bother's keeper?” and this is the same question "Hotel Rwanda" raises. While the Christian religion answers the question with a clear yes, pure logic must take a different path.

If we decide that we have a responsibility to intervene to prevent genocide, we immediately face certain problems. First among these is how we prioritize our efforts. We currently have a commitment to the Balkans that appears to be indefinite. We have commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan that will go on for at least several more years. If we decide we are going to intervene in the Sudan, our available forces are limited. We could intervene in the Sudan if we put the entire active force in the field, but our ability to sustain that commitment world be minimal. And while the Sudan is the most well-known crisis situation in the world, it is not the only one. If we hare a responsibility to intervene, we have a corresponding responsibility to maximize the effects of our intervention based on lives saved, not based on addressing the squeaky wheels.

Equally difficult is the question of how to address areas where a regional power will oppose intervention. For example, how does a theory of responsibility deal with a place like Tibet or Nepal? Unless we restrict our responsibility to instances of clear genocide, it is quite likely we will see Chinese interventions in these states resulting in bloodshed. Intervening in this case would bring the West into direct conflict with China. Does our responsibility to protect innocent civilians extend to making war on another power? China is an extreme case, due to their possession of nuclear weapons. What of a lesser power such as Turkey? Turkey has had historical trouble with its Armenian and Kurdish minorities. Were Turkey to begin an ethic cleansing of these minorities, would our responsibility to protect innocent civilians override the West's historical relationship with Turkey? I raise these questions not to suggest that a responsibility to intervene in cases of genocide or ethnic cleansing is too hard, but to demonstrate that it is not merely a question of identifying instances where intervention is justified.

When is intervention justified? Is then a threshold of civilian deaths that must be crossed? Or is genocide the only case in which intervention is justified? (This is the source of the careful parsing used by U.S. government representatives when referring to the events in Rwanda as “genocidal acts” and not as “genocide.”) If we have a responsibility, we must have a clear understanding of where it begins and ends.

Despite the implication of "Hotel Rwanda,” the West as a group does not have a responsibility to prevent genocide or atrocities not performed by their citizens. Responsibility presupposes causation: if I accept a task, I am responsible to complete it, and if I perform an action I am responsible for the results of that action. But if someone else performs an action, I cannot be held responsible for its consequences, no matter how horrible. If those consequences will affect me, I do have a responsibility to eliminate or mitigate those effects on me, but I am still not responsible for the initial action. It is no different for nations.

But the history of nations includes far more deeply layered responsibility than an individual can amass. The killings in Rwanda went back, in part to the relationships of the Tutsis and Hutus to the Belgian government that ruled Rwanda. Does Belgium therefore retain some responsibility for the events in Rwanda? If so, how much? It could reasonably be assumed that the favored minority would face reprisals once decolonization was over. The Belgians did have some responsibility for the genocide in Ruanda. Not full responsibility, as the Hutus cannot escape culpability for their decision to slaughter the Tutsis. But Belgium did bear some responsibility for their role setting the conditions for the conflict.

How does limited responsibility translate into action? Logically, limited responsibility for a situation should result in limited responsibility to resolve the situation. When it comes to something like genocide a limited solution is difficult to reach. If the Belgians had acted to save 10% of the lives lost to genocide, would that cover their responsibility? What about working with the Rwandan government and the rebels to reduce the bloodshed? The answer depends on the degree of responsibility. If a nation has proximate responsibility, even if only partial, then that nation has a responsibility to do as much as it canto resolve the problem. If a nation has contributing responsibility, its responsibility for the ensuing problem is limited to doing what it can to mitigate the problem. In Ruanda, it was reasonable to expect the Belgian government to accept refugees into Belgium, to do what it could to rescue people at risk of genocide and to pressure the international community to do the same. I would not have been reasonable to expect the Belgian government to intervene militarily to stop the bloodshed, even assuming the Belgian military could have done so. While Belgium made errors that exacerbated the problems in Rwanda, genocide was not a rational response to those problems.

Having established the limits of responsibility for issues like genocide or ethnic cleansing, the answers can be expected to be emotionally unsatisfying. Watching the horrible things human beings can do to one another, it is only natural for people to conclude that something should be done. This is a laudable impulse, but it does not translate into a responsibility to do something. The difference is that between a choice to do something and an obligation to do something.

This has gone on long enough for one day, so I will close for now. At some point in the future I will get into the question of what should be done in cases of genocide.