IN 1994, Immaculee Ilibagiza was a young, college-educated woman. Her life would soon change forever. She glanced into the distance near her home in a rural area of Rwanda and instead of seeing a pristine and undisturbed landscape, she saw a man being killed with a machete. Genocide had begun in Rwanda and Immaculee, a Tutsi, was a prime target.
On the advice of her father, she fled the area and embarked on a three mile trek to the home of a minister who was close with her family. The minister, a Hutu, the majority ethnic group, agreed to hide Immaculee and she spent the next 91 days in a tiny bathroom with six other women. She had little to eat, could not shower and militias frequently stormed the house searching for more victims.
After three months, Immaculee survived. Her family was not as lucky. Neither were 800,000 other Tutsis, three-fourths of the Rwandan Tutsi population.
The international community did nothing to stop the genocide. The United Nations pulled the vast majority of its forces out of Rwanda after violence began. According to Ted Dagne, a researcher at the Congressional Research Service, the United States was completely aware of the genocide, but chose not to respond. After a recent botched intervention in Somalia, the United States was reluctant to intervene in conflicts in which it had no stake.
Rwanda should be taken as an example of what happens when the international community stands by idly in the face of atrocity. Instead of stopping the killings before they spiraled out of control, no one did anything; an entire ethnic group was nearly wiped out. Such blatant apathy was unacceptable then and in the ensuing age of international institutions promising multilateral cooperation, it still is today.
Rwanda was a tragedy, but if anything positive were to come out of the experience, it certainly would have been a promise that the international community would never ignore human atrocities again. Unfortunately, nothing positive has come out of Rwanda.
Admittedly, the international community should be applauded for intervening in Libya, a humanitarian crisis that had the potential to spiral into a humanitarian disaster. Yet even though the international community intervened in Libya, human atrocities and crises in other nations still are ignored. Consistency in humanitarian intervention is certainly a high ideal, but if organizations like the United Nations followed their own protocol, it would be an attainable one.
The "Responsibility to Protect" report, delivered by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty to the United Nations in 2001, says explicitly that the state has a responsibility to protect the lives of its people and, when it fails to do so, the international community is responsible. This is not about overstepping state sovereignty, it is about protecting the most valuable resource we have - human lives.
It is for this fundamental goal of preserving human life, made even more applicable by devastating precedents like Rwanda, that the international community must intervene swiftly in humanitarian situations. Ivory Coast is the most current example. The surge of violence in the country stems from an election last November, in which the incumbent, Laurent Gbagbo, lost to Alassane Ouattara. Gbagbo refused to step down and the nation rapidly descended into a bloody civil war, with atrocities committed by both sides.
It is one thing for a country to engage in civil war, but it is an entirely different situation when a civil war indiscriminately targets civilians. This has been the case in Ivory Coast. For example, last week Ouattara's forces battled Gbagbo's for control of the town Duekoue. One thousand civilians were killed in a town of only 50,000, according to the Red Cross. Many of them had been killed brutally with machetes, but it is unclear which side was responsible.
Gbagbo has used brutal tactics to cling to power. Aside from engaging in civil war, mass graves of his political opponents are being reported around the country. In the major city of Abidjan, 80 bodies are rumored to lie within a barricaded building to which U.N. peacekeepers are denied access. Especially concerning is the fact that Gbagbo's forces have been targeting Ivorian Muslims, who they view as incompatible with the country as a whole.
Just this past Tuesday, after a string of victories by Ouattara's forces and a limited intervention by U.N. and French forces, Gbagbo indicated that he might be ready to negotiate a cease-fire. On the other hand, it should not have taken five months for the international community to act. Every day that went by without intervention in Ivory Coast was a day of more bloodshed and civilian deaths.\nIt is inexcusable that Ivorians, whose stories are alarmingly similar to Immaculee's, had to wait so long for help. The United Nations has a mandate to act and it must do so to preserve human life. As President Obama said in his 2008 election night speech, "To those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of the world - our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared..."
The Ivorians unfortunately were forgotten, and when they finally were remembered they already had been wronged. Let us not keep the oppressed in Syria, Yemen, Bahrain and numerous other places waiting any longer.
Jamie Dailey's column appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at j.dailey@cavalierdaily.com.
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