Five speakers at a lunch-time forum on Rwanda yesterday said political upheaval in the East African country is often ignored by the Western media as a reason for the slaughter of nearly one million people.
More than 50 Dartmouth community members attended the forum on the terrace of the Collis Center.
Government Professor Gene Lyons, who also directs the Dickey Center's United Nations Institute, mediated the forum.
He began the forum by listing the three things that would be discussed: the Rwandan land and people, the obligation of the interHe said there are two elements of the tragedy: the genocide of the Tutsi people and the two million refuges fearfully remaining in Zaire while an indeterminate number still exist inside the country.
"We need to arrange conditions in some sense so that people who are outside will feel safe in coming home," he said, "at the same time emphasizing that as an African problem, it's the Africans who are going to solve it."
Kasfir said the crisis was not caused by an on-going ethnic quarrel between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes. He said the ethnicity of the warring peoples served political and economic motives.
Gerald Gahima, an envoy from the new Tutsi government &emdash; the Rwandan Patriotic Front &emdash; that overthrew the old Hutu government to end the massacre of its people, agreed with Kasfir.
"This was not an ethnic issue," he said.
Gahima and Kasfir both said the new government was very different from the old because it seeks retribution for the Tutsi civilian massacres, it wants a democracy and will not return to the old system of ruthless monarchy.
Kasfir and Gahima, together with Frank Smyth, a freelance journalist who was asked to investigate arms trafficking in Rwanda last year, spoke about of responsibility and accountability for the death toll.
He developed a picture of the Western fuel that fired the destruction throughout Rwanda.
The speakers tried to summarize the political causes and effects that cased the present crisis. The Tutsi were monarchs until the late 1950s, when they were overthrown by Hutu rebels in a rebellion which killed between 20 and 100 thousand people.
The Hutus ruled oppressively over the Tutsis and a small group of Tutsis fled to Uganda and formed a guerrilla army intent on regaining control of the Rwandan government.
According to Smyth, in exchange for the Tutsis' military aid to Uganda, Uganda aided their subversive return to Rwanda this past year, a fact which Uganda denies.
Each Tutsi attack on Hutu government sparked a Hutu counterattack &emdash; an open slaughter of Tutsi civilians.
The French, concerned with preserving their culturally-aligned bloc of countries in the African continent, aided the Hutus, providing them with some of the arms that resulted in genocide.
The Hutu president signed a peace agreement in Russia last year under international pressure to end the fighting and share government control with Tutsi rebels, but Hutu extremists thwarted the treaty's effect by assassinating their president.
These extremists proceeded to work their way through Rwanda, slaughtering all people who could not produce identity cards showing their Hutu origins.
Today, after the Tutsi retaliation which has put the RPF in power and ended the genocide Gahima said most of the Tutsi have been killed.
"If more than ten percent of the one million are alive, we should be very lucky," he said.
The final speaker, Jack Shepard, addressed the Rwandan crisis in terms of a larger global context. Shepard is the former director of the Dickey Center's War/Peace Studies Program and current director of the Global Security Fellows Initiative at Cambridge University.
He emphasized the latent capabilities of the U.S. military and the need to create new institutions as well to relieve the humanitarian dilemmas.
"How can we use institutions that exist to simply perform tasks they've been mandated to do?" he asked.
Audience opinion on the talk generally was varied. One student said there were too many experts involved and another said angrily, "Americans are stupid."
