Grappling with the century's most heinous crimes

"National interests come first before human rights violations," says Alexandre Kimenyi, an ethnic studies professor at California State University in Sacramento. "That's why in Rwanda nobody was in a hurry to intervene."

Last week marked Rwanda's fifth anniversary of the beginning of the killing of between 800,000 and 1 million Tutsis and others by extremist Hutus, their ethnic rivals. The US and other countries apparently declined to get involved in the three-month slaughter because Rwanda was not perceived as having any strategic interest. Some critics charge that racism might have been a reason.

Others note the situation in Rwanda came just a few months after 18 American servicemen were killed in a single, particularly shocking firefight in Mogadishu, Somalia. This may have tempered any enthusiasm for trying to intervene in what amounted to genocide elsewhere in Africa.

University of Delaware political scientist Kenneth Campbell calls this "strategic indifference."

" 'Never again' got trumped by 'Never use ground troops,' " Dr. Campbell says. "It's an attempt to avoid casualties among ground troops because there's a higher value being placed by Western decisionmakers on the lives of their own well-trained, well-armed ground troops over the many thousands more lives of the defenseless victims of these perpetrators. And to me that's a strategic indifference."

Harder to overlook

A year ago, President Clinton traveled to Rwanda to declare: "We did not act quickly enough after the killing began. We did not immediately call these crimes by their right name: genocide." Having failed to respond there, and having been slow to respond in Bosnia, US leaders no doubt felt pressure to act in the face of "ethnic cleansing" in Kosovo.

These days, it's becoming far less easy to overlook episodes that may point toward genocide. Spy satellites, small pilotless aircraft, and other intelligence-gathering means can document atrocities and the large-scale movement of refugees. The media have become more aware of the problem, and more willing to report the issue than they have been in, say, East Timor.

Nations now are more willing to track down and prosecute the perpetrators of genocide. The UN Security Council has established International Criminal Tribunals for war crimes and crimes against humanity (including genocide) committed in Bosnia and Rwanda.

These are the first such international war-crimes bodies since the Nuremberg Trials after World War II and the first international action under the Genocide Convention.

Tribunal officials have begun investigating possible war crimes in Kosovo, including reports over the weekend that Albanian Kosovar women are being raped and murdered.

Officials also are less hesitant to use the term "genocide" to describe what is behind the masses of ethnic Albanians streaming for safer territory or, more ominously in the case of many men and boys, missing from the scene.

"Of all gross violations, genocide knows no parallel in human history," UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in a speech to the annual session of the 53-nation UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva April 7. "Though we have no independent observers on the ground, the signs are that it may be happening, once more, in Kosovo."

A day before, US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said, "It is right to stop the ethnic cleansing, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the other indicators of genocide that we see."

Some observers - particularly in Israel - caution against using the term "genocide" to describe a situation that is far less costly in terms of human lives lost than the calculated killing of civilians based on religion and ethnicity was during World War II.

"I have problems with its application to Kosovo," says Holocaust survivor and documentarian Elie Wiesel.

But in a column in Newsweek magazine, Mr. Wiesel wrote: "Faced with Milosevic's stubborn policy of ethnic cleansing, no self-respecting government or nation could knowingly violate the biblical injunction 'Thou shall not stand idly by.' "

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