Hello everyone who reads this blog on Bonaire! For this week’s post, I am going to tell you a little bit about the Rwandan Genocide and how countries around the world reacted to it.
If you click on this link, the first paragraph that you will read is about former United States President Bill Clinton’s opinion about the United States’ impact on the Rwandan Genocide and how it could have possibly differed. As the article says, Clinton admitted to NBC that if the U.S. had tried to intervene in the genocide beginning in 1994, around 300,000 lives could have been saved in those first few years. Try to imagine that number: the average American college campus holds around 20,000 students. 300,000 people is fifteen college campuses combined! That is a lot of people that lost their lives. Right off the bat hearing that quote, I want to say that the United States should have intervened in the genocide as soon as they knew it was happening. Of course there are other factors: the opposing party (or the “killers”), other relevant countries and forces, and other parts of generic combat that could prove difficult for America to succeed. But, here’s the problem: Rwanda is a country that is 373 times smaller than the United States. 319 million more people live in the U.S. than Rwanda, and still we, alongside the entire UN and every other nation in the world, stood by while a 100-day-long killing spree took away the lives of 800,000 innocent people.
In the case of the Rwandan Genocide, “humanitarian law” was not, at all, acknowledged or respected. This is the exact same as what happened with the ethnocide that was Hitler’s Holocaust, the four year-genocide that killed 6 million Jews across Europe. Every country that could have acted, most primarily America, simply ignored the fact that thousands were dying every day.
Bonaire is a small, minimally powerful country in comparison to the superpowers of the world like the U.S., China, Russia, or even the U.K.. With minimal military, and dependence on a European nation, Bonaire barely has an impact on global humanitarian law. However, back when the Dutch first invaded, a familiar story of slavery and death followed in the major country’s footsteps.