Very often when people are talking about mass murders, they recognize chronicles of the Second World War. Our world shuddered after it had got to know about the quantity of the concentration camp's casualties and the usual soldiers who passed away on fields of battles. Many people think that this war was the most blood-thirsty page of our history, but only a few know that it is not entirely true.
According to the UN data in Rwanda, the country in the Central Africa, during the horrible genocide from April to July 1994 more than a million people were killed. It was the most headily wave of killings during all the history of the human civilization. Its rates exceed at nearly five times the casualties of the Second World War.
Two peoples, who have since olden days been living in a Central Africa — tutsi and hutu, generally live in piece seldom. But Belgium brought the biggest imbalance in their relations. This country owned large African colonies among which was Rwanda. Tutsi were given a power as an aristocratic minority, while hutu, who largely exceed them on a quantity, were given a destiny of a shepherds with little education. After the process of disintegration of colonial empires, civil war, in 1962 Rwanda finally got an independence. However, the fragile piece between peoples cracked - three years prior of an independence, the largest ethnic group of Rwanda - hutu overturned the tutsi king who was governing that time. In the flow of a next few years, thousands of tutsi were killed and approximately 150 000 were forced to hurry in nearby countries.
Almost forgotten story hides in itself a great number of useful lessons.
Rwanda is a typical agrarian country, where approximately 90 percents of its population provide itself living by farming. Suddenly, an anxious information shook, it seemed, the peaceful life of hutu — according to information, which had been translated through the famous radio, and later - from the pages of a favorite newspaper and even, according to a government's statements, - it was reported that tutsi were going to take power, and for this purpose would exterminate the multimillion population of hutu. Some time people were looking around stunned, suspecting friends, neighbors and members of own families, while the radio station diffused gossips. «Radio Rwanda» which everyone liked for its musical repertoire, orderly sowed a strife. Tutsi were laid to all problems of the country - it was established that an impudent minority had taken the workings posts, high appointments and university benches. Teachers in schools and propagandists asserted, while were comparing two peoples, that they are similarly different as a man and a woman, as a butterfly and a cockroach. Decades ago tutsi indeed had destroyed and banished the great number of hutu. «A cockroach cannot give birth to a butterfly» - stated teachers and the press. «The history of Rwanda shows us clearly that a Tutsi stays always exactly the same, that he has never changed. The malice, the evil are just as we knew them in the history of our country. They are all linked...their evilness is the same...recall those of their elders: killing, pillaging, raping girls and women, etc.». The teachers of higher educational establishments, professors, except for only two, feared to lose their work and supported propagandists, echoing their words to the simple civilians who trusted them sincerely. When the radio began to translate false news about the first killed hutu, it was already impossible to stop that wave of hatred.
So, the lesson, which Rwanda presented us - it that any society can be organizely impelled to the action and achieved of any purpose with the help of any facilities.
In order to hide an event from a world public, propagandists put to death a few persons from the peacekeeping mission of the UN, which had been based in a country, under a pretence of "non-interference in internal affairs". In order to avoid the new victims, the UN displaced a campaign.
So, how is the problem of Rwanda actual now, in an informative century for modern civilized societies? Let us turn the looks on the eastern Europe. A peaceful mass protest, happening in the last months of 2004 in Ukraine, adopted as an "Orange revolution", can give us a necessary answer.
I suggest you to look at the events occurring in Ukraine from the problem point of view. "Orange revolution" clearly allow to understand about the actual problems of the Ukrainian society - a language problem, which is exaggerated by the kaleidoscopically changing governments in order to distract the people from the problems which are more essential and expensive, a problem of national identity: division on western and eastern, Pro-ukrainian and Pro-russian, orange and dark blue. More often, party leaders are playing exactly with these points, in order to come to power. On a background, made of their multi-colored sequence, but absolutely monotonous, inefficient actions, people have already tired of all «new» and half-heartedly perceive an integration of Ukraine into EU and cautiously, adjoining with horror before threat of new war — an integration into the NATO.
During its history the country have been developed relations with the nearest neighbors. Russia, as the greatest and mighty power state or took Ukraine under guardianship of the wing, or held it down as a raw appendage. That’s why Ukrainians have a double relation to it.
Politicians are skillfully play with these points, against the general uniting factor of an unemployment, a rise of prices and reduction of wages, a low standard of living and corruption.
Warming up or cooling an international bone, politicians, as a matter of fact, play with fire. In our information century when speed of transfer of information is measured not by kilometers per hour which the postman goes on, but shares of seconds in the Internet space, where there is nothing more simple and fast, than to inspire this or that information to the naive population. Having carried out the analysis of the Ukrainian mass-media, it is possible to come to a conclusion that the information which moves in the Ukrainian press, is more often taken from only one source. Access to an alternative mass-media (foreign articles, or articles, not popular to be published in a press, but published on the Internet) many people don't have at all, or, what is more often — don't have skills of using and searching or knowledge of other language. Add to it a fact that in the east of the country the quantity of the Internet users is in times more than in the west.
Whether it is necessary for us to forget the history of far Rwanda?
What does this country represent itself from now? What has been reached by such enormous victims? The genocide 1994 has destroyed fragile economic base of Rwanda, has brought the population to poverty (especially women) and has deprived the country of appeal to private and foreign investors. Rwanda has hardly restored economy to the levels preceding 1994, though poor now became more. High expenses of Kigali on the country defense cause frictions between the government on the one hand, and the international donors and the credit organizations on the other. The armed gangs and various governmental forces continue struggle around the High African lakes, overstepping the limits of Burundi, Congo, Rwanda and Uganda in order to establish their control over settlements and natural resources. Heads of the government promise to put conflicts to the end, but local flashes are still happen, despite the peace-making efforts of the United Nations.
Ukraine now is actively going to receive Euro 2012, continuing a course of integration into the European Union. Now, as never before, is required for the national unity and collective efforts in order to lift the country to worthy European level. The government needs to solve, at last, deep state problems, and, the most important - is to stop stirring up an international hatred, and to unite the people by means of the general, real national idea.
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Есе підготовлено за матеріалом: Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda. PROPAGANDA AND PRACTICE . Думки, викладені в позиційному документі, належать його автору, і не представляють позицію Центру політологічних досліджень.
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