The statistics seep out of Rwanda like blood from an open wound: more than 1 million refugees, 200,000 deaths, 34 orphans and Red Cross workers murdered, 25 bodies an hour clogging the Kagera River as it flows into neighboring Tanzania. The world reaction has been a paralyzing mixture of horror and helplessness, and the lesson is a dispiriting one: We may know how to feed people, but we don't know how to force them to stop killing each other.
Almost 50 years after the founding of the United Nations, the veneer of civilization can still seem very thin indeed. And if white Europeans -- or North Americans -- are tempted to dismiss the savagery in Rwanda as an African disease, all they have to do is look at Bosnia. Serbs and Muslims use mortars. Hutus and Tutsis use machetes. But their victims are just as dead.
It is not just the rule of law that seems so fragile at such moments. It is the whole concept of nationhood. Rwanda, like the former Yugoslavia, is an ersatz country, lines on a map that ignore underlying patterns of tribal and ethnic rivalry. Reconciling those tribal loyalties with national allegiances is a very long and difficult process. It is not impossible, as Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk, Yitzhak Rabin and Yassir Arafat are now demonstrating. But Rwanda and Bosnia have yet to produce a generation of founding fathers, leaders willing to give peace a higher priority than revenge.
The absence of such leaders makes the role of the United States -- and its allies -- all the more murky. It is commonplace to note that foreign policy decisions are increasingly driven by pictures: starving children in Somalia, emaciated prisoners in Bosnia, panicky Kurdish refugees in Northern Iraq. But now the world's response to such suffering is constricted by conflicting images: American soldiers dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, thugs rampaging through the harbor in Port-au-Prince. Peacekeepers can quickly become hostages, or victims. As President Clinton notes, the lesson of Somalia is that foreign forces cannot enter a conflict thinking they are dealing with "only a humanitarian crisis." Often, the real problem is providing order, not food. "We must not be naive," he says.
Yet, despite the complexities of the Rwandan tragedy, there is almost certainly a role for the organized world community to play; it can do its best to feed the hungry, heal the sick, save the orphans. As in Bosnia and Haiti, the diplomatic tools for bringing about a political settlement are very limited: embargoes, sanctions, pressure for peace talks. They still must be tried. Even though it might be that in some places, at some times, the feverish cycle of hatred and retribution has to burn itself out.
In the midst of their nightmare, the people of Kigali can find a flicker of hope in two other African cities, Cairo and Johannesburg. As events last week in both places prove, the cycle of fratricide can, eventually, end. Reconciliation might, eventually, be possible.
