When Evil Triumphed, Tragically, in Rwanda

“Never again,” everyone vowed after learning of the millions who died in Nazi death camps during World War II, these bold pledges of vigilance resonating across decades.

“We are here to consecrate this memorial and to contemplate its meaning for us,” President Clinton said in 1993 when dedicating the Holocaust Museum in Washington. “The evil represented in this museum is incontestable, but as we are its witness, so must we remain its adversary in the world in which we live.”

Powerful words.

How meaningful are they, however, when measured against bodies--hundreds, even thousands, of them strewn everywhere, skulls crushed and limbs askew, forming a carpet of rotting flesh?

It is one thing to make noble pronouncements after the fact, using the distance of time as a shield. When there is no other option, however, will nations ever act militarily on behalf of genocide victims? Will the U.S.? And would it make any difference whether the victims of this systematic extermination were white or black?

These are questions to ponder as Serbian security forces presently stand accused of slaughtering children, old men and other innocent ethnic Albanians in Kosovo--which they deny--while NATO strokes its chin and mulls what to do about it.

And as PBS on Tuesday airs a devastating “Frontline” documentary titled “The Triumph of Evil,” recalling philosopher Edmund Burke’s observation about evil being able to prevail only when good men do nothing.

Never again, it seems, except now and then.

The killing arena this time was not Auschwitz or Yugoslavia. It was Rwanda, a former Belgian colony in East Central Africa with a history of ethnic strife that culminated five years ago in the murder of an estimated 800,000 minority Tutsis by the dominant Hutus.

They were shot, clubbed, knifed, axed and hacked to death with machetes in 100 days of carnage whose record of concentrated murder was unmatched even by Hitler and his booted thugs.

Could it have been prevented?

This jolting film from Mike Robinson and Ben Loeterman argues methodically--through interviews with key participants and intimate observers--that the West ignored warnings from a top Hutu political informant about the coming butchery that he himself had been ordered to help instigate, and that both the Clinton administration and United Nations Security Council turned their backs on the victims, allowing Tutsis to be brutalized and exterminated en masse.

A U.N. peacekeeping force of more than 2,500 was on the ground. But mitigating against an intervention, we learn from this film, were bad memories in the form of ugly TV pictures memorializing the deaths of 18 American rangers in an earlier botched U.N. raid in Somalia. Never again?

“We said, ‘Not Somalia again,’ ” recalls a U.N. official.

Nor would the U.N. and the State Department acknowledge that Tutsis were being targeted solely because of their ethnic origin, because to call the murders genocide, it’s claimed here, might have prompted a more forceful campaign for butting in.

“People didn’t want to really grasp and admit that they knew and understood what was happening because they didn’t want to bear the consequences then of dealing with it,” says James Woods, former deputy assistant secretary of defense under Clinton.

Nervous Reply About Use of Word ‘Genocide’

When a reporter at a briefing on Rwanda asks State Department spokeswoman Christine Shelly if she had been ordered by her superiors “not to use the word ‘genocide’ in isolation,” her nervous reply on tape here is textbook obfuscation: “I have guidance which I try to use as best I can. I’m not, I have, there are formulations that we are using that we are trying to be consistent in our use of. I don’t have an absolute categorical prescription.” Meanwhile, Tutsi lives were sand in an hourglass, reports Karel Kovanda, then the Czech ambassador to the U.N., “disappearing through our hands, day after day.”

Voiced by Will Lyman, TV’s finest narrator, “The Triumph of Evil” is more evidence of the 16-year-old “Frontline” being unquestionably the medium’s best source for investigative documentaries, this film following its earlier studies of U.S. foreign policy in this region.

Never an easy sell, the documentary form on commercial networks is now limited almost entirely to nature films, quickie biographies and 15-minute segments on newsmagazines that cater to short attention spans and, while frequently tasty, are thin and rarely nourish deep understanding. No one will ever confuse brain-building “Frontline” with the junk food of NBC’s “Dateline.”

“The Triumph of Evil” is a sober, systematic report that, while mesmerizing, penetrates to the bone without deploying false sentiment to juice emotion and manipulate viewers. On a human level, though, its overlapping of words and pictures has a heart-aching impact.

On the screen are scores of Tutsis, the worry on their faces speaking for itself as a Belgian TV reporter recalls how they went to their knees while begging her to help them escape.

“Almost all of these people were murdered,” Lyman says over another set of news pictures showing a crowd with boys in the foreground, their arms raised as if pleading.

And a camera pans human wreckage on the ground as a girl who survived this massacre recalls the horror she witnessed:

“We were pretending to be dead. They took stones and smashed the heads of the bodies. They took little children and smashed their heads together. When they found someone breathing, they pulled them out and finished them off. They killed my family. I saw them kill my papa and my brother, but I didn’t see what happened to my mother.”

Flash-forward now to 1998, four years after Tutsi forces have defeated the Hutus and installed a moderate president in office. In a tour of Africa, Clinton touches down in the Rwandan capital to make a speech of contrition at the airport almost like a candidate on the stump.

He admits: “We did not act quickly enough after the killing began.”

He admits: “We did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name: genocide.”

And he admits: “All over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror.”

Lyman says that Clinton presented the Rwandan president with a plaque honoring the victims after having a private audience with survivors of the massacres, during which he listened silently to their horrifying tales.

Then, less than four hours after arriving, Air Force One departed with Bill Clinton on board presumably biting his lower lip while feeling their pain.

Too late.

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“The Triumph of Evil” airs at 9 p.m. Tuesday on KCET.