Analysis Of Shattered, By Eric Walters

The documentary “Ghost in Rwanda” illustrates the devastation of the 1994 Genocide where approximately eight hundred thousand Rwandans were exterminated by their own government. The genocide was a result of ongoing conflicts between the Hutu, the ethnic majority in Rwanda, and the Tutsi the ethnic minority. The United Nation assisted in the establishment of a peace agreement between the two warring parties and sent General Romeo Dallaire, UN Force Commander, to Rwanda to ensure the terms of the agreement were honored. Dallaire had never seen action and welcomed opportunity to make a difference supporting peace in Africa. The peace mission was especially important to Dalliaire in light of recent U.N. failures to maintain peace in Somalia and Bosnia.

The massacre in Rwanda began in April 1994 and ended in July 1994, it lasted a total of 100 days. In Rwanda there are two main ethnic groups the Tutsi and Hutu. The goal of the genocide was to get rid of all of the Tutsi nation (Rwandan Genocide of 1994, March 25, 2011). The Tutsi nation was a popular nation in Rwanda. A man named, Romeo Dellaire, was the general. He led the peacekeeping mission on the behalf of Canada. Romeo Dellaire saw many things in the war and it provoked him to become an advocate for the victims of the genocide (Romeo Dellaire, April 4, 2008). As families of Rwanda finally got to go home after a long 100 days of being in camps, away from home and treated poorly, they were walking to ships. One elderly lady said “I hear there is peace in Rwanda” Rwandan Refugees Treck Home, March 18, 2003). “The first of Rwanda’s long march of refugees was a single file line of ragged but relatively healthy families,” (Rwandan Refugees Trek Home, March 18,

Michael Shaara was born in 1928 in Jersey City, New Jersey and graduated from Rutgers University. Shaara’s first novel, The Broken Place, was published in 1968. Shaara, for his second novel The Killer Angels, got most of his inspiration from a visit to Gettysburg. Shaara saw the battlefield and learned about the battle and its significance. In 1974, The Killer Angels was published. But to the surprise of many, it won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Literature. Aside from writing, Shaara served as a paratrooper in the Airborne Division for five years. In 1961 he joined the faculty of Florida State University, where he is an associate professor of English. In 1988 Shaara died of a heart attack.

During the genocide some of the Tutsi tribe began to leave their home country to seek prosperity and happiness. These dreams never were accomplished. Even know they left Rwanda, entire villages containing their friends and or family member were decimated. The Tutsi tribe will never be the same, nor will the Hutu tribe. The Rwandan genocide was a very gruesome genocide, the Hutu tribe encouraged their members to kill as many Tutsi tribe members as they could, and expressed it openingly through the use of propaganda. The killing methods executed throughout the Rwandan genocide is what differentiates this genocide from most, the tools that predominantly used were: machetes, grenades, guns, and rape were very common. The use of rape spiked the amount of people with HIV/AIDS, and many Tutsi women were deliberately infection with this disease by the enemy Hutu tribe men. It seems no overstatement to portray the Rwandan genocide of 1994 as a “failure of humanity,” to use the words of the commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), Canadian General Roméo Dallaire. There are many sparks to the genocide, however, the only main ones which many historians still argue the importance of them over today are, the population differences among tribes, the difference of professions, and the spike in total

The UN organized many peace missions to Rwanda during 1993 to 1996, the largest was UNAMIR in which Canada played a leading role. At different times, two Canadians would serve as the Commander of the UN mission, Major-General Roméo Dallaire and Major-General Guy Tousignant. Even with the UN mission in place, the situation in the country turned into horror in April 1994. The Hutus began to execute over hundreds of thousands of Tutsis. The UN soldiers did what they could during the widespread of killing and chaos, but they were too few in number. And they could not prevent the horrific violence. The Canadian and many other UN forces remained in the country for a time to try to help the country with some humanitarian efforts before leaving the devastated country in

When the world’s quickest genocide slaughtering occurred, 500,000-100,000,000 people died in 100 days.The Rwandan Genocide was the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda. During that time captain Mbaye Diagne, a man from Senegal was sent to Rwanda by United Nations peacekeeping force as a military observer. Captain Mbaye Diagne was just supposed to observe and never interact with the problem going on, but he ignored the U.N.'s orders that prohibit observers from going out to save civilians. He started missions that focus on saving many lives by using his military state's natural charisma and ability to diffuse a delicate situation by making jokes and bribing the checkpoint militaries and others that wanted the Tutsis dead. A number of people Captain

The UN created a division called UNAMIR, which stands for United Nation’s Assistance Mission for Rwanda. UNAMIR was created in 1993 with the task to help implement the Arusha Accords and to assist in ensuring the peace and security in Rwanda. This organization succeeded in its mission until the genocide began. Since the beginning of the genocide, more than six men, woman and children were murdered every minute. UNAMIR’s strategy worked until the moment in which the Rwandan’s implemented weapons. Many people believed that the Arusha Accords weren’t the solution for ensuring definite peace in Rwanda. Ambassador Swinnen of Belgium said “ Radio Rwanda described the Arusha Accords in monotonous and insipid tones. I pleaded with the government to use more attractive, persuasive language to convince the political forces that were becoming radicalized to support the Arusha Accords. Unfortunately, the international community failed in this effort.” [Swinnen,

The massacre of Rwandans during 1993 were described by Ndiaye in a statement to the Commission on Human Rights as deemed so severe that it could merit the label of a genocide. Ndiaye report offered such extensive material based on the proceeding occurring in Rwanda that the United Nations should have into account his findings when establishing a peacekeeping force called The United Nations Assistant Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR). Ndiaye’s (1993) statement goes on to emphasize the key elements that had “facilitated the violation of the rights to life”, which included: the absence of nomocracy, the lack of protection granted towards different ethnic groups, and the use of propaganda. The absence of nomocracy meant that know official legal

The RPF may have found that their invasion of Rwanda in 1990 to be the prime opportunity because in 1989, “the international coffee price plunged by over 50 per cent,” leaving the Rwandan economy in a vulnerable position and any national army would be weaker if the economy was suffering (Pottier 21). It was, however, found that “towards the end of 1990, just after the RPF invasion, extremist elements of the Hutu government began planning mass murder of Tutsi,” and the international community was aware of these dangers (Clark 24). Johan Pottier was blunt when he states that “preparations for genocide, invariably dressed up as self-defense against the Rwandese Patriotic Front, an organization ethnicised as ‘the Tutsi invader’, had started some two years before the actual slaughter” (30-31). There had been known killings of human rights activists and journalists, as well as orders from prominent officials for the Hutu majority to prepare for the killings and even organizing death squads to thoroughly eradicate the Tutsi (Pottier 22, 30). All of these conditions, once mixed together with encouragement from the RPF and the Rwandan government, spelt disaster for civilians and hundreds of thousands of people would lose their lives over something that could have been prevented had the international

Militia members the Rwandan Army began attacks all across Rwanda with efficiency, first starting in Kigali and the northwestern city of Gisenyi. “By Monday, April 11, an estimated 20,000 Rwandans had been slain, the vast majority of them Tutsi. But… many Hutu also feared for their lives…” (Liebhafsky, D. F., Longman, T. P., & Rone, J., 1999). Nowhere was safe. “At first assailants generally operated in small bands and killed their victims where they found them, in their homes, on the streets, at the barriers. But, as early as the evening of April 7, larger groups seized the opportunity for more intensive slaughter as frightened Tutsi—and some Hutu—fled to churches, schools, hospitals, and government offices that had offered refuge in the past” (1999). There the killers found thousands of Tutsi men, women, and children, and killed, raped, and tortured them. “From April 11 to the first of May, killers carried out the most devastating massacres of the genocide, in some cases slaying hundreds or even thousands of people in one or two days” (1999). Liebhafsky, D. F., Longman, T. P., & Rone, J. go

Rwanda’s military transformed itself several times since its formation as the Rwanda Patriotic Army (RPA) during the Rwandan Civil War (1990-1994). The military force established itself as a rebel group with the goal of establishing a ‘one Rwanda’ policy, which encompasses a nation without ethnic classifications and the return of nearly one million Rwandan diaspora Tutsi community. However, the genocide greatly shifted these goals but both the scale of the massacres as

Rwandans experienced periods of exile, internal displacement and refugee status since the closing years of Rwanda’s colonial rule under Belgium. Starting in 1959 and up until what could still be argued as on-going is a section of the Rwandan population not being able to living in their ancestral homeland. There are two significant period of Rwandan exile in terms of Rwanda’s current government and foreign policy. The first was the period of 1959 to 1962 when an estimated one million, mostly Tutsi, Rwandans were forced to become refugees throughout the Great Lakes region. Starting from 1959 and continued until 1994, Rwandans living abroad experienced the stigmatism that the international community was not going to solve their exiled status. Some of the children of these exiles in Uganda would later form in 1987, the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF). It was this rebel group which initiated the Civil War, ended the 1994 genocide and afterward rule over Rwanda. Founder of the RPF and current Rwandan Senator Tito Rutaremara commented on how the international community seemed to accept and ignore the human right’s abuse of the forced exiled of himself and his fellow Rwandans. By 1967, many in the Ugandan refugee camps for Rwandans had given up on the United Nations or other international institution to help resettle them in Rwanda. The United Nations even became a pun in a joke for when you expect someone to perform a job for you, but you realize that they were not seriously going

In 1998, four years after the Rwandan genocide, Bill Clinton stood in front of Rwandan genocide survivors and officials and solemnly apologised that he and his government “did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror”. Continuing with a regretful tone, Clinton proclaimed that “We must have global vigilance. And never again must we be shy in the face of the evidence”. In the 23 years since the Rwandan Genocide, academics and politicians alike have echoed Clinton’s pledge, and as questions and criticisms are lobbied against the concept of humanitarian intervention, the memory of the up to one million Tutsi and sympathetic Hutu massacred in 1994 is brought into the forefront as a cautionary tale of the dangers of international inaction. This essay addresses the Genocide, its consequences and the significance it holds for the international community and their pursuit of international peace and security. This essay is divided into three parts - the first focuses on the Genocide itself and its context, while the second part examines the consequences, looking at the political challenge of a post-genocide society, the difficulty of the justice process and the substantial regional flow on effects. The final part evaluates how the alternative courses of action that were not taken inform greater

After the first period of research finished, I travelled to London in order to collect and review the current literature on Rwandan foreign policy. This in-between field work period focused on

This thesis illustrated a new way to better examine Rwandan foreign policy by exploring and discussing how Rwandan leaders view the international community. The traditional standard narrative on Rwandan foreign relations focused heavily on how Rwanda acted with other states, institutions and actors. What was continually missing within the existing literature was a deep understanding of why Rwandan leaders interacted in a certain way with the international community. The genocide guilt card is most notable in this fault as it heavily focused on the explaining the mechanism of guilting to which the Rwandan government used to gain state interests. While the guilt card is perhaps the most known narrative of Rwandan foreign policy, it is not the only one. And such as with the guilting, these other literature sources on foreign aid, shifting diplomatic alliances and development, do not discuss the mentality of the Rwandan government with the world. Literature on Rwanda’s military, the Rwanda Defence Force, is the closest to uncovering how the country views the world. However, the analysis is rather limited as the focus is not on international relations, but on military-related subjects. The research presented here states that Rwandan foreign policy contains complexities of three major themes and groups. These were identified through interviews and data collected during three main periods of fieldwork within Rwanda, Washington D.C. and New York by the Rwandan officials responsible