The first is about foreign policy and relates to genocide. And the second is the story about a man named Sergio. Again, the most important man that most of us had never heard of.

The first story begins on April 21^st 1994.  Which is not going to be -- probably anytime soon -- in any history book. It’s not an important day in our country’s history. It is a day on which the New York Times reported that 200,000 people had been killed, already, in what would be called the Genocide of Rwanda. 200,000. The Washington Post, I think reported 250,000 dead in that morning’s newspaper.

Patricia Schroeder was at that time an American Congresswoman from Colorado, Some of you remember her. She had a press exchange that afternoon with a group of journalists about Rwanda. Now, the press exchange was wonderful because she both talked about the events in Rwanda and the tragedy in Rwanda but she also went “Meta” – the journalists really forced her to go ‘meta’ in a way that rarely happens in politician-media exchanges these days  But one journalist asked her, “Congresswoman Schroeder – I just don’t understand it. The NY Times today reported 200,000 dead. This is 2 and a half weeks into the downing of the Rwandan President’s plane and the start of this killing spree; and yet there are no press conferences being held in Washington, there are no press releases being issued, there are no Congressional hearings being held.“

Now granted Rwanda is not in our ‘national interest” as it’s traditionally defined. But, whoa. 250,000, 200,000 people, that’s a lot of people. And it just seems like the killing is getting more and more pronounced; and it definitely seems like it’s ethnic killing. We’re hearing about people not getting killed for anything that they’ve done but just because of their membership in a group.  This is terrible. And yet there’s only silence coming from Washington. 

And Patricia Schroeder on this otherwise nondescript day in our country’s history did something wonderful, which was that she was honest in her response. And I think her response gives us great insight into American foreign policy and how and whether we might inject regard for human consequences into its formulation. She answered the journalist, she said, “You know, you have a great point. I don’t know. You’re completely right. We’re not up in arms the way that you would expect given the scale of the human carnage .The only thing I can tell you that I can think of and it’s my experience that my office in Colorado and my office in Washington are getting all of these telephone calls. The phone is ringing off the hook about the endangered ape and gorilla population in Rwanda. But nobody’s calling about the people. The phone just isn’t ringing about the people.”

And this is, again, just such a wonderfully insightful moment. Because what you see, of course, is that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. That in a world -- and this is ever more true today -- of so many competing priorities, the mere fact that virtually everyone in the Congress would have said if polled in advance of the Rwanda genocide, “If a genocide happened, how would you think that you would respond?” They would say “I’d be up in arms. I’d do something.” Yet, when it actually happened, when history was progressing in real time rather than being looked at retrospectively, other things were commanding attention. Other very important things. There was a withdrawal from Somalia that was going on at that time, there were negotiations with North Korea about disarmament or nonproliferation, trying to ensure they didn’t acquire a nuclear weapon. Plenty was going on. But the one thing that was not generating domestic political noise was the systematic extermination of a people in Africa.

And I want to stress that it is wonderful that we had come to a stage in our history in 1994 where the endangered ape and gorilla population were getting phone calls and that animal and endangered specific groups were kicking into gear. But the main insight that one can take away is that at that time in our history for all the talk of ‘never again,’ all the commemoration of the Holocaust, there was no endangered people’s movement. Other species? Not enough and not powerful enough, I’m sure. But no endangered people’s movement.

So many of us would have read the newspaper at that time and sort of sighed and said ‘that should be stopped.’  But we didn’t see that we, as citizens had a role in convincing our government to take measures to stop it. And the response as some of you know by the Clinton Administration at that time was weak. Our response was not only not to send troops -- that was sort of obvious 6 months after Black Hawk down and Somalia and so forth. It was quite obvious that the United States was not going to get involved on the ground. But we actually went to the United Nations and insisted, using our power in the UN Security Council, that the UN peacekeepers in Rwanda be withdrawn as the genocide was unfolding. So you actually had scenes in Rwanda where civilians were gathered under the UN flag at UN bases and the peacekeepers being withdrawn would exit through one gate and the killers would enter through another. Where you had citizens, civilians, who were more vulnerable than they would have been had they not relied on the promise of ‘never again’ or the promise of international protection.

We, the United States, had the possibility of jamming ham radio in Rwanda which was being used -- some of you remember if you’ve seen “Hotel Rwanda” -- to propagate the hate and convince the Hutu that they should go and kill, exterminate, their Tutsi neighbors:  “Cockroaches. Exterminate the cockroaches.”  It was also being used to broadcast the names and addresses of Tutsi or the license plate numbers of Tutsi who’d managed to escape from their homes, so they could be hounded through the streets of Rwanda. And the Clinton Administration debated whether to jam the ham radio, but somewhat ridiculously decided,  one, that it was too expensive -- it would have cost $8500 an hour, which relative to the lives of  those it would have saved, in my opinion, is a small price to pay;  but second, and this was absurd -- and I wish my Constitutional Law expert husband had been in the Administration at the time -- but the argument was it would have been interference with the freedom of speech, the First Amendment, had we actually intervened. Well if you can’t shout ‘fire!’ in a crowded theater you certainly shouldn’t be able to say ‘exterminate the Tutsi.’ But nonetheless, there was no noise, there was no pressure system. In such moments, in such periods where there’s not much consensus, the country becomes more risk adverse, understandably.  And there’re good, sound reasons to be risk-adverse; but there was nothing offsetting on the other side, warning of the costs of inaction for the people of Rwanda and ultimately for America and other countries’ reputations and self image when it comes to responding to genocide. 

Now, I tell you this story because again of Portsmouth and the citizen involvement in the making, shaping of peace. But also because there is some good news here.


Continued.