A PEOPLE BETRAYED: The Role of the West in Rwanda's Genocide.

• Author: Confessore, Nicholas
• Position: Review

A PEOPLE BETRAYED: The Role of the West in Rwanda's Genocide by Linda Melvern Zed Books, $19.95

"SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND PEOPLE died in Rwanda in 1994," moderator Jim Lehrer reminded Al Gore and George W. Bush during the second presidential debate this past October. "There was no U.S. intervention, no intervention from the outside world. Was that a mistake?"

It was at that moment, I think, when the exchange between Gore and Bush went from insipid to obscene.

"I think in retrospect we were too late getting in there," the vice president replied, as if the Clinton administration had merely overslept. And, in any case, the U.S. should only intervene when "we tried everything else," explained the man whose administration had tried nothing. Only "if we can really make the difference with military forces," Gore said, even though the U.N. commander in Rwanda had informed the Security Council early on that he could quickly halt the genocide with a mere 2,500 well-equipped troops. The U.S. must "have allies," Gore said, "willing and able to go and carry a big part of the burden." This from the vice president whose Pentagon chiefs proposed--after Ghana volunteered soldiers for a Rwandan intervention force--to lease the U.N. four dozen near-obsolete armored personnel carriers for $4 million plus $6 million shipping and handling.

The massacre of thousands of Tutsis at the hands of Rwanda's Hutu majority in April 1994 is a topic that has already provoked countless articles hundreds of reports and studies, and some 50 books; it is one of the most meticulously documented genocides in history. That Al Gore can nevertheless stand before a national television audience and mouth such platitudes may explain why Linda Melvern has written A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda's Genocide. Melvern, a British investigative journalist with a talent for legwork, has devoted herself to the genocide's considerable international dimension. And the result--a wide-ranging account of the actions and inactions of shady arms dealers, inept bureaucrats, and cowardly politicians--still shocks six years after the fact.

Certain French and Egyptian officials, for instance, might legitimately be considered accomplices to the killing. The French, absurdly obsessed with anglophone plots in central Africa, have always been close to the Hutu leadership; the son of then-president Francois Mitterand, who ran African policy out of his father's office, was friends with the Hutu...