Just a few days ago I finished reading Shake Hands with the Devil, Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire's account of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. At the beginning of February I had heard him speak at the Holocaust Museum. He's an interesting man. A very high-ranking Canadian general who was chosen to "lead" the UN Peacekeeping Force in Rwanda. Obviously a powerful and skilled man. But also very different from the typical (or maybe more accurately, stereotypical) military man, as he is extremely compassionate, very liberal-minded, and quite forward with his emotions. He doesn't hide the fact that he suffers from post-traumatic stress syndrome, the highest ranking soldier in the world to admit to it. Honestly, I'm not sure how someone who lived through what he lived through could not suffer from it. I put "lead" in quotation marks above, because while he was the on-the-ground commander who was responsible for life and death decisions for both UN soldiers and Rwandan civilians, he was constantly having his strings pulled by the UN and in particular by its security council. Never receiving the men, the supply, or the intelligence to do what he needed to do, he, his troops, and the entire country of Rwanda were at the mercy of a bunch of bureacrats who had little, if any, concern for Rwanda.
While I think we all know that where we choose to use our military might has always been dictated by what that country has to offer us, our lack of concern for the world and humanity has never been so clear as it was in Rwanda. By we/us/our, I mean the United States, and I also mean the other powerful first-world nations - Germany, France, Britain, Belgium, etc. The soldiers who made up the UN peacekeeping team in Rwanda were mainly from countries who were not a whole lot better off than Rwanda - Senegal, Ghana, Bangladesh. The Belgians did send some soldiers, and ten of them died in Rwanda, but as representatives of the former colonial power who had set up the entire Hutu/Tutsi division, they weren't really the best choice for a peacekeeping mission. We didn't send troops, because honestly, we didn't care what happened in Rwanda. They had nothing to offer us. In fact, bureaucrats who were sent to evaluate what was going on during the first days of the genocide were so bold as to put into print: "We will recommend to our government not to intervene as the risks are high and all that is here are humans." Yes, just humans. No oil, no honor in battling communism (as the UN's most powerful nations were doing at the time in Yugoslavia). Nothing but people. Having recently suffered the loss of a handful of American lives in Somalia during the "Blackhawk Down" episode, America wasn't willing to risk any of our lives in order to protect the nearly one million Rwandans whose lives were at risk. Our lives were worth more. In fact, much more than you would ever guess. During the last weeks of Dallaire's stay in Rwanda, he received word from Washington that US calculations had indicated that it would take 85,000 Rwandan lives to justify the risking of the life of one American soldier. Apparently my life is worth 85,000 lives. Incredible. And disgusting. The entire population killed during the Rwandan genocide, 850,000 people, was only equivalent to 10 American lives.
It makes me feel ashamed to think that my country believes that. Yes, I like to think that my life is valuable. In fact, I know it is. But it's no more valuable than the life of someone else. Why should it be otherwise. Because I was born in a wealthy and developed country where I had the opportunity to be educated and to live a rich life, I am automatically a more valuable person? That's absurd. How can we justify this? How can we devalue the Rwandan lives so much? Is it because they are poor, and we are rich? Is it because they are uneducated, and we are educated? Is it because they are black Africa, and we are white America? I just don't understand.
Every person on this earth has value. That is Dallaire's message in this book. Incredibly, despite the absolute lack of humanity that he witnessed (both in watching Rwandans kill Rwandans and in watching as the rest of the world turned its collective head), Dallaire is still hopeful that this world can be a peaceful place. For that to happen, he says that we first must realize that no human is more human than any other human. We are all human. We are all valuable. We all deserve to live a full life. Let that be a lesson to us. In our every day life and in our worldy life. In the way we treat each person we encounter, in the expectations we set for our government and our leaders, in the way we look at the world, let's each remember that every person we meet is a valuable human being. Let's remember that humanity is not reserved for only the educated or the wealthy or the white, but applies to all people in all places. Let's all be human and humane.
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