Africa is not Europe, and Rwanda is not Kosovo. But to understand the current war in the Balkans it helps to go back to the appalling events in a small central African state only five years ago, and the world's utter failure to prevent the slaughter that occurred.
"Never again!" it was said after the second World War, and once more after Rwanda and Bosnia. "Never forget!" we urged ourselves after the Rwandan genocide - and yet the memory is already receding into the mists of time, confused with subsequent atrocities and misdoings.
And yet the genocide stands as a unique crime in human history. We can be mesmerised by figures - was it 500,000 or 800,000, even a million killings? - without properly comprehending the awfulness of it all. But, as the 800-page report published by Human Rights Watch this week makes clear, this crime wasn't just mass murder, it was mass participation in murder.
Hundreds of thousands in the majority Hutu population took part in the butchery, mowing down their neighbours and even members of their families in a killing rage incited by an elite of intellectual extremists. In a country where Tutsis formed a 15 per cent minority but controlled most of the power, Hutu extremists developed the urge, and the plans, to exterminate their rivals.
The atrocities drip off the pages of this 800-page report. An elderly Tutsi woman has her legs cut off and is left to bleed to death. A baby is thrown into a latrine to die of suffocation or hunger. Women are repeatedly raped and mutilated before being killed. The prime minister is shot dead, and a beer bottle is shoved up her vagina. People are killed by the churchload, even the football stadiumload, and the rivers are used to flush their bodies away.
But beyond the pornography of violence, there is a challenging message for today. Did the outside world have any knowledge of the impending catastrophe? And, once it started, what did the world do to stem the killing?
The answers to these questions are now clear. As the report states: "The warnings of catastrophe were many and convincing; although international decision-makers did not know everything, they knew enough to have understood that disaster lay ahead." Instead of intervening, the foreign powers pulled their troops out of Rwanda - having first evacuated the white population. Loath for so long to use the term "genocide", they portrayed the conflict as a spontaneous tribal bloodletting, ignoring their knowledge of the careful planning that went into the genocide.
The report, Leave None to Tell the Tale, catalogues the repeated warnings of a bloodbath collected by intelligence agents, diplomats and informants. The pathetic, heroic figure at the centre of the tragedy, Gen Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian commander of the tiny UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda, told his superiors in New York of extremist plans to kill 1,000 Tutsis every 20 minutes.
YET his warnings were ignored, made light of, distrusted. And who was the UN head of peacekeeping at the time? None other than Kofi Annan, now UN secretary general. Meanwhile, Ms Madeleine Albright, now the US Secretary of State, was her country's ambassador to the UN five years ago.
The same arguments about deploying ground troops raged then as now in Kosovo. But as Gen Dallaire made clear, just 5,000 soldiers would have sufficed to stop the genocide.
Instead, though, UN forces stood by as the slaughter commenced. Thousands were killed in a house-to-house search on April 6th and 7th, 1994, but Gen Dallaire's soldiers were forbidden to intervene, as this would breach their "monitoring" mandate.
Two weeks later, their numbers were actually cut from 2,500 to 500 after 10 Belgian soldiers were killed.
Not until mid-May did the UN security council vote to send troops to Rwanda, but even then their deployment was delayed by rows over who would foot the bill and provide their equipment. Finally, French soldiers intervened, and created a safe area in the south-west which saved some lives but also allowed many of the killers to escape.
Only the advance of the invading Rwandan Patriotic Front, a Tutsi-led rebel force attacking from bases in Uganda, stopped the killing. But by then, 100 days later, up to one million people had been murdered.
It would be pleasing to report that the lessons of the genocide have been learned, and that Rwanda is recovering. But this would not be accurate. An international court was set up to try the perpetrators of the genocide, but it has made slow progress. "Drained by the search for paper clips, pens and paper, the tribunal had little energy left for dealing with the complexities of the genocide," the report notes.
After four years, on an annual budget of $30 million, the court has secured two convictions.
The Rwandan authorities have moved marginally quicker, having delivered over 1,000 verdicts. But that still leaves 135,000 genocide suspects still languishing in jail in the most depraved conditions.
Fearing reprisals, two million Hutus fled the country, creating the world's biggest refugee camps along the borders in Zaire and Tanzania. The extremists re-emerged, running their own private armies under the noses of the UN, which again stood idly by.
The RPF forced many refugees to return in 1996, but this has seriously destabilised Rwanda, and violence is endemic in many parts. Meanwhile, the conflict has spread to Zaire, now the Congo, where a civil war has drawn in at least eight African states. But is anyone watching?
Once again, central Africa is not the Balkans. But if anyone wants to witness the effects of non-intervention, they need look no further than Rwanda.
