McCartney W.E.H. Lecky

Historian and Politician, 1838-1903
1. Auflage 1993
ISBN: 978-1-84351-505-0
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 268 Seiten

This is the long-awaited biography of the great humanist historian of eighteenth-century Ireland. Carlow landlord, writer and political commentator, Lecky achieved fame in his lifetime as the author of monumental works of Irish, English and European history, and saw himself as heir to the great tradition of colonial nationalism vested in Swift, Burke and Grattan. A classic Victorian intellectual, he championed rationalism, loathed bigotry and was an admirer of Daniel O'Connell. In later life he became a 'revisionist' of his own earlier work, opposing Parnell and adopting a position of liberal unionism. He represented his alma mater Trinity College, Dublin, from 1895 to his death, campaigning vigorously against Home Rule. This critical account of Lecky's life, writings and ideals opens up a neglected area of nineteenth-century Irish and continental historiography, and documents the parts he played in the unfolding drama of Anglo-Irish relations and the emergence of Irish nationalism. It makes an invaluable contribution to the history of ideas, and deepens our understanding of the nature of culture and politics in modern Ireland.

DONAL MCCARTNEY is emeritus professor of modern Irish history at UCD and editor of The World of Daniel O'Connell (Dublin 1980).

Autoren/Hrsg.

McCartney, Donal

Leseproben

Prologue

Throughout April and May 1994 I was in South Africa, completely absorbed in that country’s affairs, and I scarcely registered Rwanda’s genocide while it was happening. Then, my knowledge of Rwanda could have been written on a postcard. I knew only that it had the highest population density in mainland Africa (some 7.15 million occupying a territory about the size of Wales), that it was very beautiful, mainly dependent on agriculture and terrifyingly prone to lethal conflicts between the fifteen per cent Tutsi minority – for centuries the ruling élite – and the Hutu majority. I remembered too that in 1961, after the massacring of many Tutsi, the Hutu gained power as the Belgian rulers prepared to leave their grossly mistreated colony to its own sanguinary devices. Also, during a 1992 cycle ride from Kenya to Zimbabwe, I met a few of the Tutsi who had settled in Uganda as refugees in 1959 and subsequent years. From then I learned that between ’62 and ’67 certain Tutsi factions had tried to fight their way back to Rwanda but were always defeated. These incursions provoked reprisals, usually government-organised, against Tutsi still living in Rwanda. During the ’60s some 20,000 were killed and hundreds of thousands fled to neighbouring countries: Burundi, Uganda, Zaire and Tanzania.

In April 1995, a year after the genocide began, I suddenly had a personal reason to focus on Rwanda. My daughter Rachel, then two months pregnant, and her partner Andrew, were moving to Kigali where Andrew was to spend six months attached to a UNHCR team. (They first met in Mozambique when working as UN volunteers with a unit established to disarm the opposing armies in preparation for the elections of November 1994. On their return from Kigali in October, they came to stay with me and I expected graphic accounts of life in post-genocide Rwanda; normally both enjoy describing their travels and analysing regional problems. But this time they had strangely little to say. Almost nothing, in fact; their faces closed if anyone asked about their impressions of and experiences in Rwanda. This silence was in itself disturbingly eloquent and when they lent me two books I fully understood it.

Death, Despair and Defiance, published by African Rights, needs 1200 pages to report exactly what happened in each of Rwanda’s 143 communes during the genocide. It is by far the most shattering book I have ever read, all the more so for being a straightforward record of facts and figures, dates and times, personal names and place names, unadorned by literary graces. As for Gérard Prunier’s The Rwanda Crisis, that made me aware for the first time of the French government’s unforgivable complicity in the genocide and of the shameful passivity-cum-duplicity of the UN before, during and after the tragedy. In February 1998 I was unsurprised to read that General Roméo Dallaire had been forbidden to give evidence to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda about communications between himself and the UN during his time as Commander of the UN ‘peace-keeping’ force in Rwanda. The reasons for this embargo, which inevitably lessened the value of the General’s evidence, are given in Chapter Four.

On 4 August 1993 the Hutu government and the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) signed the Arusha Accords, designed to end the conflict that began in October 1990 when the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) invaded from Uganda, determined to overthrow the extremist Hutu regime and make it possible for the millions of Tutsi refugee and their born-in-exile children to return to Rwanda. The Accords provided (in theory) for the integration of opposing armies and the presence of a UN peace-keeping force until the setting up of a transitional government, including members of the RPF, to run the country while elections were being organized. On 5 October ’93 the UN Security Council’s Resolution 872 at last authorized the peace-keeping force (UNAMIR) but its troops were not deployed until December. Meanwhile the Hutu extremists were blocking the formation of the transitional government and training and arming thousands of militia, ostensibly for ‘popular self-defence’ and the ‘neutralization of infiltrators’. Because of a shortage of firearms, army officers instructed civilians in methods of killing with machetes, spears, swords and bows and arrows.

On 21 October ’93 the first Hutu to be elected President of Burundi, where the Tutsi are also in a fifteen per cent minority, was assassinated by Tutsi army officers. More than 50,000 – both Hutu and Tutsi – died in the subsequent violence but the so-called ‘international community’ made no significant comment. Rwanda’s genocidal leaders exploited this situation to incite hatred and fear of Tutsi and pointed out that a world indifferent to massacres in Burundi would remain equally indifferent to the extermination of Rwanda’s Tutsi. They were soon to be proved right.

In January ’94 France promised President Habyarimana more than $5.5 million in military aid for the coming year. During February the Hutu militia murdered forty people in Kigali, the UN troops making no effort to deter them though UNAMIR’s mandate was ‘to contribute to the capital’s security’. When that mandate expired on 5 April no transitional government yet existed and the Security Council voted to extend it for another four months. UNAMIR then consisted of about 2,700 soldiers from twenty-three countries, the vast majority inadequately trained and ill-equipped – not at all the sort of troops the international community would send to an oil-rich battleground.

On the evening of 6 April ’94 President Habyarimana and President Ntaryamira of Burundi died – with all others aboard – when their plane was shot down as it approached Kigali airport, by a person or persons unknown. Within hours of that event the slaughtering of Tutsi and their moderate Hutu allies had begun. ‘Moderate’, in this context, means Hutu opposed to the extremist regime and willing to implement the Arusha Accords. Not all Hutu so describe had ‘Moderation’ as their middle name.

By 8 April blood was flowing in torrents; in just one attack on that date over 2,000 were killed on the campus of the Adventist University at Mudende. Next day 300 French paratroopers arrived to take control of Kigali airport. A thousand Belgian troops and an Italian contingent followed, while 300 US marines moved into Burundi. In collaboration with UNAMIR, these crack troops efficiently evacuated more than 2,000 ex-pats. Very few chose to remain in Rwanda where the massacres were being accompanied, day and night, by orgies of rape and looting. The foreign troops then withdrew and by 13 April some 20,000 Rwandans had been butchered – as the Security Council noted while debating the crisis without reaching any conclusion. Three days later, by which time many thousands more had been killed, it held another inconclusive debate. On 21 April General Dallaire stated that he could end the genocide if given a force of 5,000 to 8,000 well-equipped soldiers. On the same date the Security Council’s Resolution 912, prompted by the US government, directed the withdrawal of most UN troops, leaving only 270 with a mandate limited to helping to deliver humanitarian aid and acting as ‘intermediary’ – a fanciful notion since mediation was not on the agenda.

Three weeks later, after countless prolonged discussions, the Security Council was about to vote to send troops back to Rwanda when the US representative request a postponement of the vote because she had ‘no instructions’ from Washington. Not until 17 May did Resolution 918 authorize the sending of 5,500 troops to Rwanda with a mandate to protect civilians (of whom more than half a million had by then been killed) and the delivery of humanitarian aid. The US voted for this Resolution but delayed deployment by insisting that the situation needed to be ‘further assessed’. Six weeks later the Secretary General admitted that only 550 troops were deployed in Rwanda, more than two months after the Resolution authorizing ten times that number. It is surely not irrelevant that on 10 June US officials were instructed to avoid the word ‘genocide’ as its use might increase pressure on the US government to act.

On 1 June General Dallaire appealed to Washington for armoured personnel carriers without which he was unable to save civilian lives. President Clinton’s envoy to Rwanda promised him that his request would be ‘taken to the highest authority’. On 22 June 10,700 bodies were removed from Lake Victoria for burial; those bodies, flung into the Kagera river some time previously, had become a major threat to the lives of lakeside villagers. Next day the US delivered to Kampala the first of forty-seven armoured personnel carriers leased to the UN. On June 28 another four arrived but proved useless because lacking radios or machine-guns.

The RPA took Kigali on 4 July and on 15 July the US government withdrew recognition from the genocidal regime and ordered its Washington embassy to be closed. Members of this rump government and the FAR Chief-of-Staff then took refuge, with French assistance, in Zaire and the RPF announced the formation of a new Rwandan government.

The UNHCR estimated that by the end of July some 1.4 million Hutu refugees had fled to Zaire, 353,000 to Burundi and 241,000 to Tanzania. Many fled because their leaders told them the RPA would kill them if they remained in their communes, others because they were forced to leave by local officials. In Zaire FAR soldiers and militia...