A week ago yesterday was the International Day of Reflection on the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda, which began 11 years ago this month. In 100 days, one million Rwandans–primarily Tutsis–were brutally murdered. All while the rest of the world did nothing. Almost exactly a year ago, General Romeo Dallair told an audience, “It’s up to Rwanda not to let others forget they are criminally responsible for the genocide.” He’s right. The First World sat back, watched the genocide, and allowed it to happen–because Rwanda was of no strategic importance. Right now, it’s happening all over again, this time in Darfur, Sudan. I’m not known for supporting the United States government often, but here is one example where they did the awful, right thing, for the most horrific of reasons.

That’s a hard thing to support–and an even harder thing to say. It’s easy to accept intellectually that life needs death, that nothing can live without another dying, or that current damage has progressed so far that catastrophe is now inevitable. It’s easy to study Lotka-Volterra cycles and neo-Malthusian theory. It’s very difficult to consider the grim ramifications of those facts. Those ramifications have been painted vividly in Rwanda and Darfur.

Jared Diamond did not blench to consider Rwanda in his most recent volume, Collapse. All too often, we see these tragedies on their superficial level of racial hatred and intolerance. It’s an easy way to understand these things. We are more comfortable chalking up such horrific acts to such blatant evil as “hatred,” “bigotry” or “intolerance.” It’s cheap, it’s easy, and it’s a total cop-out. It’s a way to excuse ourselves, to comfort ourselves that we’re not responsible, because we’re not hateful bigots. We’re not like those murderous Hutus, cutting down so many innocent Tutsis. The millions of dead deserve better than such superficial excuses, and we must have the fortitude to look at the truth of the matter, no matter how uncomfortable it is.

The fact of the matter is, the road to Rwanda’s hell was paved with our good intentions. The plight of sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s was the usual ecological response to changing climate and a sedentary, agricultural population too large to support itself under changing conditions. But because we’re not inhuman monsters, the plight of their suffering pulled on our heartstrings, and there was an outpouring of foreign food aid to many of Africa’s impoverished, starving nations through the 1980s and 1990s. That aid began to fade in the 1990s as the novelty passed, and reached a low-point in Rwanda in 1994–just as the genocide began.

The existing population already could not be supported in that location; by sending food aid, we not only allowed that population to persist, we increased it. Our good intentions set up a Malthusian hell in Africa. In his review of Diamond’s book, Malcolm Gladwell synopsized Diamond’s argument on Rwanda:

What happened in Rwanda is commonly described as an ethnic struggle between the majority Hutu and the historically dominant, wealthier Tutsi, and it is understood in those terms because that is how we have come to explain much of modern conflict: Serb and Croat, Jew and Arab, Muslim and Christian. The world is a cauldron of cultural antagonism. It’s an explanation that clearly exasperates Diamond. The Hutu didn’t just kill the Tutsi, he points out. The Hutu also killed other Hutu. Why? Look at the land: steep hills farmed right up to the crests, without any protective terracing; rivers thick with mud from erosion; extreme deforestation leading to irregular rainfall and famine; staggeringly high population densities; the exhaustion of the topsoil; falling per-capita food production. This was a society on the brink of ecological disaster, and if there is anything that is clear from the study of such societies it is that they inevitably descend into genocidal chaos.

Should we have intervened? To sit back and do nothing while a million Rwandas are massacred is appalling–but what would have happened if we had stopped it? Rwanda was overpopulated; even now, it still is. Some kind of catastrophe had to occur. The ancient hatreds between the Hutus and Tutsis made a natural break point, like a perforated page. It was not the cause of the genocide; it was the excuse. Rwanda’s overpopulation–leading to overly intensive agriculture, deforestation, erosion, exhaustion of topsoil and the rest of the crises Rwanda then faced–made such an event inevitable. It was going to happen. Cultural tensions merely shaped how it would happen, and who the million dead would be.

This would not have changed simply because we stopped the 1994 genocide. Instead, it would have become the 1995 genocide–with even a greater population, and even more dead. I have no illusions that the First World’s intentions were in any way noble. They didn’t care about Rwanda because it held no strategic advantage for them. But they may have done the right thing, as terrible as it was, for all the most horrific reasons. Had we been able to watch people starving to death and done nothing to help them, fewer would have died, and in a less terrible manner. But our compassion would not allow that; we had to help them. Because we helped them, genocide erupted. How much worse could it have been, if we had stopped that, as well?

What will follow in Darfur in the years to come, if we intervene now?

These are not easy decisions, and just thinking on them makes me feel sick to my stomach. Humans developed pity and compassion, because they helped form strong communities and help us survive, giving us an evolutionary advantage in one another. But these concepts are alien to the natural world. The cruel workings of naturalistic fate are unconcerned with what is right, only with what works. Compassion and pity work well in our personal dealings with one another, but they have never been adapted to a global community of hierarchical corporate groups. On such a scale, it almost seems as if “morality” becomes maladaptive.

Most of us believe that we can tell right from wrong. Is this mere hubris? Everything is good for something, and bad for something else. Do we have the “big picture” to make such decisions? Or should we suspend our judgement, until we have the moral courage to countenance that unthinkable atrocities may be better than the alternative?

See Also

Gasana, James K. “Natural Resource Scarcity and Violence in Rwanda.” [PDF]

International Conflict and the Environment Case Study, Rwanda.