Did the systematic ethnic cleansing of Rwandan Batutsi and Bahutu in 1994 constitute genocide? Incredible as this question sounds, it was a serious point of debate in President Bill Clinton's White House and State Department even as the rivers of Rwandan blood were flowing all over Rwanda.
Not that America's leaders could not tell a genocide when they saw one. After all the definition of genocide had been established fifty years earlier by an American following the horrors of systematic mass extermination of Jews in Nazi Germany and its conquered territories.
Recognizing that the unprecedented deliberate mass extermination of Jews and other people could not be accurately described by any existing words, Raphael Lemkin, an American military advisor argued in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, that such a new concept required new terminology.
Lemkin coined the word genocide [from Greek genos -race - and Latin cide - to kill] to signify a coordinated plan aimed at the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group for the simple reason that the victims belonged to that group.
On December 9, 1948 of the UN Convention for the Prevention and the Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted. Article 2 of the Convention defined genocide in terms that essentially amplified Lemkin's basic concept.
Article 8 authorized signatories to the convention to "call upon the competent organs of the United Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide."
The United States, among other Western Democracies, was a signatory to this charter. Thus the problem was not that the Americans did not know that what was happening in Rwanda fit Lemkin's and the UN's definition of genocide.
The real problem was that official recognition of the Rwandan genocide would have automatically obliged the US government to push the UN to intervene in Rwanda in order to stop the killings.
A lot has been said and written over the last decade to explain the refusal by the Clinton administration, and the other "civilized" democracies to intervene in Rwanda.
Some of the reasons include the absence of American strategic interests in Rwanda; the bad experience of US troops in Somalia a couple of years earlier; the logistical difficulties that Rwanda presented to rapid deployment of US/UN troops; and the failure to realize the gravity and extent of the situation.
What has never been stated in clear terms is what I believe to have been the real reason for American, and therefore UN, inaction in the face of the Rwandan genocide.
The reason was racism, pure and simple. The victims of Rwanda were native Africans, inferior beings, not worth saving. At least they were not worth risking Americans lives.
It is probably hard for Africans to accept that the Clinton administration could have put a discount on African lives. After all Clinton was a president who, on the surface, seemed to be emotionally connected to African-Americans and their cousins across the Atlantic.
Yet not only was his government stubbornly committed to the non-action policy on Rwanda, Clinton gave voice to this attitude in a public address at the US Naval Academy on May 25, 1994, seven weeks into the genocide.
Clinton told the new graduates: "We cannot turn away from ethnic trouble spots, but our interests are not sufficiently at stake in so many of them to justify commitment of our folks." It was clear which ethnic trouble spot he had in mind that morning, one which did not warrant American help.
Of course he would have his chance to re-write America's role, couched in a clever "apology", during a brief trip to Kigali in March 1998.
Looking straight into the eyes of Rwandans assembled at Kanombe airport, Clinton said: "We come here today partly in recognition of the fact that we in the United States and the world community did not do as much as we could have and should have done to try to limit what occurred in Rwanda."
Then summoning his trademark I-feel-your-pain pose, Clinton continued: "It may seem strange to you here, especially those of you who lost members of your family, but all over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror."
The Clinton Apology, as it came to be known, was of course another falsehood. It sought to democratize his guilt by declaring that it was not just him alone who had failed to appreciate the situation in Rwanda.
It sought to create the impression that America had done something, though not enough. The fact is that everything that America did during the critical weeks when machetes were felling Batutsi and moderate Bahutu made it possible for the genocidaires to perpetrate their heinous crimes.
The Americans forced the UN to drastically reduce the UNAMIR peacekeepers within days of the bloodletting, effectively neutering them enough to make them ineffective. America refused to jam or destroy Radio Hate [RTLM] in Kigali, the voice of the genocide masterminds.
America's leaders, both democrats and republicans, were united in their abandonment of Rwanda, complete with their refusal to acknowledge the genocide.
While America had had no problems accepting that the systemic massacres of Armenians in 1915, the Jews in Nazi Germany and the Europeans in Yugoslavia was genocide, similar massacres in Rwanda did not constitute genocide.
To his credit, President George W. Bush, did not pretend to care about Africans the way his predecessor did. During his 2000 presidential campaign, Bush stated that he would never commit US troops to a future Rwanda.
So far he has lived up to his promise. The United States has not, and probably will not, send an intervention force to Darfur province of Sudan where Arab militias, the Janjaweed, are systematically and deliberately killing Negroid Africans.
Likewise no American lives will be risked by sending US troops to help stop the massacres of Africans by Africans in Eastern Congo Free State.
Interestingly, Bush has shown no hesitation in asking other countries, including African ones, to contribute troops to help him dig himself out of his increasingly messy War of Mass Deception [WMD] in Iraq.
As I reflect on lessons learnt from the Rwandan genocide, the most powerful one remains the reality that African lives do not matter to the leaders, and the majority of the citizens, of the world's most powerful nation and its European allies.
Their non-interventionist attitude is couched in references to lack of strategic interest. But the underlying reason is an entrenched racism that prevents them from reacting with the urgency and emotional commitment that has propelled them to intervene in less extensive acts of mass murder among their kinsmen in Europe.
Recognition of this fact may save Africans from the anger and frustration that are inevitable when the powerful nations of the world, the very ones which sell us the lethal weapons we use to destroy our own, refuse to save us from ourselves.
African lives threatened by genocide or other acts of mass violence will be saved by African forces that have been assembled and equipped for that purpose.
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