Western ideals aren't found in killing field - interpreting why 'indiscriminate' acts of barbarism are lacking in western societies when trying to understand the carnage in Rwanda - Column

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 23, 1994 | by Richard Grenier

In a tiny central African country that most Americans have never even heard of, people on the wrong side of a tribal divide are being slaughtered by the tens of thousands. The heartfelt cry going up in the United States about Rwanda is: Why are people doing such horrible things? But the wrong question is being asked.

Given the violence prevalent in most parts of the globe and the eruptions of mass slaughter in dozens of countries, the question should be: Why doesn't spontaneous outburst of indiscriminate slaughter, or anything similar, happen in the Western world?

Because if you think people are killing each other indiscriminately in Washington or even Bosnia (which I'm not certain is even part of "the West"), you've never seen Rwanda. Nor adjacent Burundi, another African microstate given to outbursts of mayhem. A country of only 5 million people, with the same Tutsi-Hutu mix as Rwanda, Burundi holds the record for central-African massacres, almost 200,000 people -- more than the population of Little Rock, Ark. -- racked up in a few days of uninhibited slaughter in the early 1970s.

This part of central Africa was once inhabited by the Twa, a Pygmy group, until the invasion of the Hutu, a Bantu people, who massacred the Twa. In the early 16th century, the Tutsi, a people thought to come from Ethiopia, massacred the Hutu -- but with moderation, keeping most of them as serfs. The overall population of the Rwanda-Burundi area remains roughly 10 percent Tutsi and 90 percent Hutu.

During the 19th century, German colonists preserved the overlordship) of the Tutsi as did Belgian colonists during the first half of the 20th. But since independence in the early 1960s, the Tutsi and the Hutu have been battling it out with more massacres -- most of them of a genocidal nature that easily would qualify for a Nuremberg trial if the perpetrators were white.

I single out central Africa only because Rwanda is in the news, but I'm not forgetting that in Bangladesh, Nigeria and Cambodia deaths of this general nature total more than a million; in East Timor (Indonesia) into the hundreds of thousands, and recently in Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Colombia, Sri Lanka and in several other places into the tens of thousands. Even in Liberia, a small west African country established for freed American slaves under the auspices of the United States, a three-way civil war has killed 150,000. That figure counts almost as many dead as in all Yugoslavia, which has 10 times the population. But we hear of no NATO air strikes against the bad people in Liberia.

Russia, a "white" nation, has failed to enter the Western world because of its people's lack of historical experience of the Renaissance, Reformation, 18th-century Enlightenment or any of the other formative developments that created the Western mind, economy and social institutions. There's nothing genetic about the fact that certain parts of the world have failed to develop the notions of tolerance, individual liberty, civil rights, equality before the law, democracy and the representative institutions that form the basis of Western society. These institutions were long in coming even in Europe, where the Thirty Years War and Wars of Religion of the 17th century were particularly harrowing. How could we expect such institutions to come into being overnight in Africa, which missed not only the Renaissance and the Enlightenment but everything else that went into that process as well?

My systematic adversaries on this question are professors of black studies, whose main purpose -- as far as I can make out -- is to teach American blacks they're descended from Cleopatra and whose accounts of the real Africa verge on comedy Indeed, our whole modish "multicultural" concept is simply outlandish, as if all Americans with Hungarian names should major in Hungarian Studies where they're taught that Hungary is the end-all, be-all, and all Americans with Norwegian names should major in Norwegian Studies where they're taught the same thing of Norway.

It is the very multicultural system, in fact, which now is reaching such a glorious culmination in Rwanda. The Hutu, in a manner of speaking, all major in Hutu Studies and learn how marvelous it is to be a Hutu. And the Tutsi all major in Tutsi Studies and learn how marvelous it is to be a Tutsi. Unfortunately, neither Rwanda's Hutu Department nor its Tutsi Department teaches anything about equality, tolerance or respect for the rights of a loyal opposition. Nor are they likely to discover any of these notions some time soon.