A Lesson in Forgiveness
by Jorge Vargas
The moral values of the Christian West teach people, from early childhood and onward, to forgive, for no matter what the crime, the reward for forgiveness will be great. We are taught that this forgiveness will allow us to enter the kingdom of Heaven, or, to those who happen to be less religious, it is at least likely that forgiving someone will make us feel more mature. There is no doubt that forgiveness is a virtue in other lands, be they Muslim or Hindu or anything else, but, due to a lack of familiarity, this writer will speak only of the West.
Jesus taught us to, if slapped, turn the other cheek, and one would indeed be hard-pressed to deny this most sound piece of advice, since most of us aspire to that righteous standard. However, what if the crime is so great that the average human mind can’t even begin to imagine it? What if the crime is so extreme, its repercussions so long-lasting, that not even Hollywood can grasp the reality of it? What if the crime was the murder of your father, your mother, your brother, your sister, your doctor, or your teacher? What if this most extreme action was genocide?
On June 27, 1993, Lt. General Roméo Dallaire, of Canada, was told that he would be deployed overseas on a UN peacekeeping mission to Rwanda, a tiny yet heavily populated nation in East Africa which was, at the time, in the process of negotiating a peace agreement to end a two and a half year civil war between the rebel Tutsis (FPF) and the Hutu government. In his book entitled “Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda,” Lt. Gen. Dallaire confesses that, at the time, he didn’t even know where Rwanda was located or ‘exactly what kind of trouble the country was in.’ As his first-person narrative of the Rwandan genocide progresses, the reader learns perfectly well where Rwanda is, and what sort of trouble was brewing within that tiny African nation, which was, as Lt. Gen. Dallaire points out in his book, devoid of natural resources.
The pages within the hard covers of this edition tell the harrowing and heart-wrenching tale of complete disaster, chaos, ignorance, and, most of all, false hopes. Throughout the tale, Dallaire explains how the United Nations, so afraid of disasters like those experienced by U.S. forces in Somalia, managed to make the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) completely feeble in comparison to the forces of the RPF – Rwandan Patriotic Front – and the RGF – the Hutu Rwandese Government Forces. Dallaire tells both sides of the tale, explaining the crimes of the genocidal RGF and Hutu ‘civilians and Interhamwe, along with the RPF’s refusal to respond quickly to the genocide, forsaking the lives of countless Tutsis, in order to gain a better tactical advantage on the field. Dallaire doesn’t leave out, of course, the crimes committed by the other parties involved in the genocide: the United States government, the French government, the Belgian government, the media, and other nations that took advantage of Lt. Gen. Dallaire and his UNAMIR troops in order to make a profit – Dallaire reports that some Western governments, such as the United States and Great Britain, had the audacity to sell military equipment to him knowing full well that the equipment was completely useless, although he didn’t find out about this until the equipment had been delivered to him.
Along with blaming the U.S. for failing to send supplies to Dallaire and threatening to veto motions to allow UNAMIR to take direct military action against those guilty of genocide, the French for sending troops into Rwanda only to provide protection for the Hutu Power groups – which were, of course, guilty for the genocide –, the Belgians for leaving Dallaire’s Mission completely unaided and without supplies after they lost 15 soldiers, the media for being too busy reporting the O.J. Simpson trial to bother with the genocide that cost over 800,000 lives, and the various other nations that stood by idly and did nothing, Dallaire blames himself. For his actions on the first day of the genocide, during which fifteen of his men were killed, Lt. Gen. Dallaire is compassionate enough to blame himself, when one could make the case for saying that if anyone acted heroically during those months in Rwanda in 1994, it was, of course, Lt. Gen. Dallaire.
They killings were systematic. They were brutal. They were gruesome. They were genocidal, not just ‘acts of genocide’ as one Western official infamously declared on international television, and the book certainly sets the record straight on that one issue. However, this is not a piece solely about Rwanda. In it we can hear the voices and the stories that have been told on every continent. We see the natives of the Americas being pushed off their lands, forced to live on reservations or in poverty – and often in both –, we see the genocides of Africa that have occurred much too frequently in the past years, be they in Rwanda or in Sudan, or in so many other nations, we hear the cries of fear from those who have faced oppression in Asia, and we remember the stories of the most widely known genocide of all: the Nazi extermination of the Jews, which, consequently led to a war in which the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, and Russia all took part, along with so many others. Consequently, we remember the one genocide that led to the involvement of the great powers of our world.
What is perhaps most useful about this text isn’t his description of the war, although his descriptions are, without a doubt, extremely powerful and precise. The politics that went on during the genocide are perhaps the point of greatest interest. Those who go on about the great capacity for love that the West has, and the West’s generosity, need only read the clarification that Lt. Gen. Dallaire gives of Clinton’s claim during the genocide that the U.S. had committed $9 million in relief and had agreed to equip a UN Ghanaian battalion – the author points out to us that the US never equipped the Ghanaians because the bill was too high, whereas he can offer no explanation of what became of those $9 million, or recollection of ever having seen them anywhere near Rwanda. To those who would tout the great respect that the West has for Human Rights, one need only read the passage in which the author tells us that a U.S. staff-person, during the last few weeks of the genocide – when the UN, and the US as well, had full knowledge of what was going on thanks to Dallaire’s frequent and detailed reports – informed Dallaire that, according to the former’s calculations, the deaths of 85,000 Rwandans would justify risking the death of one US soldier.
The reader can’t help but curse the human race as the pages turn, not for the genocide, but for the hypocrisy. We who in 1945 said ‘never again’ were able to turn our backs and continue onward with our lives. Europe was rebuilt and it was business as usual for most of us. We were blind to the deaths of 800,000 Rwandans in 1994, along with the loss of life in the most recent genocide in Sudan, along with countless other genocides. It is unfortunate, to say the least, that we live in a world where there are superpowers which exploit nations with resources, ignore those without them, and arm different warring factions for the most trivial of reasons – France originally supported the genocidal Hutu RGF because they were francophone. The blame doesn’t only go one way. Those members of the Third World who idolize the values and icons of the West must take heed, for this is the treatment that they will get for their idolization. Neither side has yet achieved the maturity necessary to live in this era of instantaneous nuclear annihilation.
This all began with one simple question: we are taught to forgive, but what is one to do if the crime is too great? How do we expect a Tutsi to forgive a West which not only allowed this to occur but then sent aid to those guilty of crimes against humanity because the media failed to correctly ‘cover the story?’ How do we expect the Tutsi to be able to forgive his Hutu neighbor? How do we expect the children of this human atrocity to ever believe in that message Jesus taught, the message that is heeded by so many of us in the West? How can we not expect that child to hate us?
Alas, no answers will be offered here, simply an observation: the fact that those children haven’t all grown up to hate West, that they haven’t gone out of their homes to kill Westerners is a testament to the fact that there is still hope for love and that forgiveness does exist in the human world. Ironically, forgiveness is found in those who aren’t as obsessed with God’s forgiveness and with weekly Confessions as we are.
What can one learn from Dallaire’s story? Never give up seems trite but applicable. Perhaps one can aspire for a deeper lesson. Perhaps we can learn to stop thinking of the helpless African child who needs our help and consider, as alien as it may seem, the African adult who wants our respect. Maybe we should stop obsessing with the preciousness of our lives, and consider the bizarre fact that their lives are just as magnificent.
Or maybe we can all pray the following words, for they appear to be more accurate than the ones that we’ve been praying for so long: “Forgive our trespasses, as they forgave us, who trespassed against them…”
Peux ce que veux. Allons-y.
