13/02/03 YORK VISION
NEWSPAPER OF THE YEAR
POLITICS 9
The forgotten war In 1994, 1m Rwandan people were slaughtered in just three months. Now, 9 years later, the perpetrators of the genocide are finally being brought to justice. Greg Harris asks why we have been so willing to forget about the Rwandan tragedy, and criticises the UN for their costly inaction. LAST MONTH, people around the world marked Holocaust Memorial Day, declaring that we must never allow such an event to happen again. However almost 50 years after Hitler's barbaric regime fell, a genocide almost as intense as WWII took place in Rwanda, accounting for over a million deaths in just 100 days. Unlike with the Nazi persecution however, the events occurring in Rwanda were known about only days after they began, and they could have easily been stopped. They weren't however, and it seems odd that the bloodiest genocide of our generation receives such little remem-
brance. If you scoured through newspapers for long enough last month, it was eventually possible to find that father and son, Elizaphan and Gerard Ntakirutima, a pastor and doctor respectively, became the ninth and tenth people to be found guilty of genocide by the UN tribunal into the 1994 massacres. Ntakirutima Snr, it is alleged, was sent a message by Tutsi's villagers begging for the Church's help in hiding them from Hutu death squads. Instead, the pastor and his son led the militiamen straight to their hiding place and watched as they were brutally
murdered. Next month another Churchman, Father Atlanase Seromula, will stand trial for his part in the killings. According to the prosecution he, with the help of Hutu militia, imprisoned 2000 Tutsis in his Church before bulldozing it down around them. He then allegedly proceeded to watch, as the survivors were shot or bludgeoned to death. There are many lessons to be learnt from Rwanda, however, one point should stand out above all for those who plead for holocausts to never happen again - the failure of the UN. In 1999 an independent report criticised UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and other officials for their actions during the Rwandan genocides, and it is not hard to see why. At the beginning of the conflict the UN had over 2500 troops stationed in the country. When the massacres began, they were forced to sit and watch, the result of ill-conceived "monitoring" orders. Within a week, the troops were ordered by the Security Council to leave Rwanda. It was not until two months later, after the Red Cross reported that at least 500,000 Rwandans had died, that French forces returned to end the genocide. Even then the American government, one of the key obstructions to redeploying troops, was unhelpful over the loan of 50 APCs to the UN force. The role of the UN has been a hotly
debated issue in recent weeks, as Bush's hawks label them weak and futile against Iraq. However Rwanda was no Iraq. There was a clear moral justification for military intervention that could have protected thousands of Rwandans. The Hutu and Tutsi militiamen, many of them armed only with machetes, would not have been difficult to defeat. Rwanda is now beginning to see justice, as the worst of the genocide perpetrators are tried for their crimes.
Electoral reforms boost Indonesian democracy
BY TOM ROUND
JUST AS the 1997 election saw 'Blair's Babes' become a new phenomenon in British politics, the next election in Indonesia will see an unprecedented number of women entering the country's parliament. The female president of Indonesia, Megawati Sukaroputri, has passed a bill which means that at least 30% of candidates for next year's elections will be women. At present only 45 of the 462 Indonesian MPs are women, however that figure that could now treble next year. The bill has been widely heralded as a great victory for women in a country which, until recently, has been controlled by a small minority of politicians and the military. Indonesia has a large Muslim majority, and a history of Islamic terrorism, which cost the lives of over 200 people in Bali last year. By giving women and other sectors of society a greater political role,
there is hope that those instabilities will be greatly reduced. Azyumardi Azra, Chancellor of the State Institute of Islam, stated: "Without such requirements, women will be sidelined in our political life. This is not discrimination against men or favouritism; it should be understood as a necessity." The law comes as part of a package of desperately needed electoral reform in Indonesia. Last summer 3,000 students took part in angry protests on the streets of Jakarta. Their chant, "we must have reforms or die" shows how strongly the Indonesian youth feel about the political climate of their country. Prior to the new bill, the president was appointed by the Indonesian Parliament, and 38 seats were reserved for the security services. However, following the students' campaign, both of these iniquities have now been abolished. Presidential elections will be held next year, and the military's influence on Indonesian politics has been
reduced dramatically. The reforms also prohibit political parties that gain 2% or less of the vote from standing in the following election. Whilst this might impinge upon certain minorities, the ban will lower the number of parties in parliament, thus helping to reduce deadlock and uneasy coalitions. It will be an indicator of the maturity of Indonesian democracy that minority issues will still be dealt with, despite the absence of the minor parties. As one of the world's largest democracies, countries around the globe will monitor Indonesia's positive discrimination policies closely. If it succeeds, many others may attempt similar initiatives, including the UK. The use of positive discrimination to redress political imbalance is a hotly debated issue. In some instances it is clearly beneficial. Here in the UK, the civil service and the police have successfully oper-
ated positive discrimination for several decades, helping to overcome gender-based employment inequalities. However, enforced discrimination can be damaging, and is not universally supported. Only 1.8% of MPs come from ethnic minorities, compared to a national non-White population of 6.7% and women make up less than 35% of MPs. However, a move to redress this imbalance through positive discrimination would be met with opposition by those who regard any form of discrimination as wrong. Here in the UK; a country that prides itself on its tolerance and opportunity for all, encouragement rather than discrimination must be used to increase the representativeness of Parliament. Indonesia, as an emerging democratic state, should be applauded for taking such progressive measures. However this does not mean that they should necessarily be adopted elsewhere.
However ten arrests in nine years cannot make up for failure of the UN to provide justice and basic human rights for the one million people that died in 1994. This, more than anything that happens in Iraq, shows the need to reform the UN into a body that is capable of enforcing international law in a just way.