Prayer for Marie: Creating an Effective African Standby Force

摘要

On 16 April 1994 in Cyahinda, Rwanda, 3,500 unarmed Tutsi men, women, and children packed into a small Catholic church, and 4,000 more crowded into surrounding church buildings, to escape from the Rwandan army and its death squads. Discovering their whereabouts, the death squads came with guns, machetes, and clubs, surrounded the parish buildings, and attacked the helpless families within. In a methodical and almost leisurely manner, they systematically murdered one day's quota, only to return the following three days to complete the killing. At the end of four days, 5,500 unarmed men, women, and children lay dead. Among them was Marie, a six-year-old girl who had been tortured and raped. She had bled to death after having her legs cut through above the knees with a machete.1 There were nearly 100,000 'Maries' in 1994 Rwanda children who faced an unimaginable death. This horror was repeated time and time again over the course of 13 weeks, when approximately 800,000 people were massacred in Rwanda's genocide. By August 1994, three million Rwandans had been internally displaced, and more than two million had fled to neighboring countries out of a total pre-war population of approximately seven million. Women and children suffered most from the aftermath of the genocide, with an estimated 47,000 children orphaned, and up to 500,000 women raped.2 Unimaginably, this occurred as the international community watched with a fixed, if not disinterested eye. After the Rwanda genocide, the United Nations released a report which concluded that a small outside force perhaps as few as 5,000 soldiers could have intervened and stopped the slaughter in its early stages. The failure of the United States and the international community to act is one of the most shocking instances of indifference in history.