http://www.chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=23836

Gun Control: First Remove the Log From Your Own Eye

Written by Howard Nemerov
Thursday, September 21, 2006

The Human Rights Committee has regularly addressed the due diligence responsibilities of States parties to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In general comment No. 6 (1982) on the right to life, for instance, the Committee interpreted broadly the State obligation to protect the right to life under article 6, noting that “[t]he Committee considers that States parties should take measures not only to prevent and punish deprivation of life by criminal acts, but also to prevent arbitrary killing by their own security forces”.[1]

     Employing high-sounding verbiage, a new United Nations report seeks to explain why “States” (i.e.: whomever controls a country’s government) are obliged to protect civilians’ right to life by eliminating firearms violence by both “private actors” (i.e.: regular people not part of the government) and the “State.” Reducing violence is a wonderful concept, but wouldn’t it be wise to first determine how well the U.N. holds itself and its member states to this standard before entrusting our lives and safety to them?

     By Their Own Standard

     Beginning in 1991, revolution in U.N. member Sierra Leone resulted in slaughter of unarmed civilians:

Sweeping into villages, the rebels round up alleged government sympathizers, including women and children, and summarily execute them or lop off arms, legs and other body parts.

On the other side is the democratically-elected government, which is supported by a large Nigerian military force known as ECOMOG. Unfortunately, ECOMOG was criticized just last week by United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan for conducting its own barbarisms against those it deemed sympathetic to the rebels.

And caught in the middle is the civilian population.[2]

     The international community “either has been unable or unwilling to broker an accord, and relief agencies, including the Red Cross, have largely left the area because of threats from both sides.” The United Nations was accused of “ignoring the brutal killing” in this West African nation “while focusing on the massacres in Yugoslavia's Kosovo province.” The Security Council’s response was to issue a statement expressing “grave concern” about the situation in Sierra Leone but “made no attempts to intervene in the conflict.”[3] (Note: Nigeria is another U.N. member.)

     The Rwanda Massacre

     Rwanda was a U.N. member during their genocide of 1994. As Professor Rudolph J. Rummel, Professor Emeritus of the University of Hawaii, explains:

The Western media have greatly misunderstood the 1994 genocide as a tribal meltdown, as ethnic hatred and intolerance run amok. The mental picture is of a Hutu running widely down a street swinging a machete at any Tutsi he can catch. This is a myth. Rather, the genocide was a well-calculated mass murder planned by Hutu government leaders.

This was not an act of massacre by the uneducated, undisciplined masses, ordinary folk easily misled and aroused. As with the Holocaust, when Nazi killing squads were often led and composed of PhDs and other professionals, the claims of the powerful and authoritative easily swayed the well educated to murder. In the Great Genocide, Hutu lawyers, teachers, professors, medical doctors, journalists, and other professionals, made their contribution to the methodical annihilation of the Tutsi or defiant Hutu.[4]

     Human Rights Watch summarized the entire episode in their report Leave None to Tell the Story: “In the thirteen weeks after April 6, 1994, at least half a million people perished in the Rwandan genocide, perhaps as many as three quarters of the Tutsi population.” Corroborating Rummel, Leave None notes: “This genocide resulted from the deliberate choice of a modern elite to foster hatred and fear to keep itself in power.” Leave None also confirms the international community failed to take preventative action: “Policymakers in France, Belgium, and the United States and at the United Nations all knew of the preparations for massive slaughter and failed to take the steps needed to prevent it.”[5]

     Leave None tells of how President Juvenal Habyarimana, losing popularity after two decades in power, embarked on a massive propaganda campaign to retain power:

For three and a half years, this elite worked to redefine the population of Rwanda into “Rwandans,” meaning those who backed the president, and the “ibyitso” or “accomplices of the enemy,” meaning the Tutsi minority and Hutu opposed to him.[6]

     By 1993, the U.N. believed that Rwanda would give the U.N. “a successful peacekeeping operation to offset the failure in [U.N. member] Somalia,” where U.N. peacekeepers failed to:

monitor the cease-fire in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, and to provide protection and security for United Nations personnel, equipment and supplies at the seaports and airports in Mogadishu and escort deliveries of humanitarian supplies from there to distribution centers in the city and its immediate environs.[7]

     Concerns about the cost of Rwanda’s peacekeeping mission not only caused delays in implementation but also reduced the eventual size of the peacekeeping force.

     In 1993, the Habyarimana government was forced to sign a peace accord with the well-armed Rwandan Patriotic Front. Nevertheless since the ruling elite had already succeeded in creating racial division between the Hutu and Tutsi using “attacks, virulent propaganda, and persistent political maneuvering,” they prepared an armed force to attack the minority Tutsi:

Soldiers and political leaders distributed firearms to militia and other supporters of Habyarimana in 1993 and early 1994, but Bagosora and others concluded that firearms were too costly to distribute to all participants in the “civilian self-defense” program. They advocated arming most of the young men with such weapons as machetes. Businessmen close to Habyarimana imported large numbers of machetes, enough to arm every third adult Hutu male.

     In this case, “militia” was the term for civilians recruited to assist in the planned genocide, who were often led by former military personnel. It is important to note that machetes were sufficient because the intended victims were already disarmed, just like the U.N. prefers all civilians to be. The Habyarimana assassination on April 6, 1994 provided the perfect excuse for a “planned extermination” by his followers, using ethnic cleansing as an excuse to consolidate power:

The Presidential Guard and other troops commanded by Colonel [Théoneste] Bagosora, backed by militia, murdered Hutu government officials and leaders of the political opposition, creating a vacuum in which Bagosora and his supporters could take control. Soldiers and militia also began systematically slaughtering Tutsi.[8]

     When the commander of the U.N. peacekeeping force in Rwanda notified his superiors of impending massacre, the gravity of these warnings were not passed along. As a result, “the Security Council made only small changes in the rate of troop deployment, measures too limited to affect the development of the situation.”[9]

     Next, rather than committing peacekeeping forces to stop the atrocities, the U.N. enabled genocide by making the safety of peacekeeping troops a priority:

But instead of using the peacekeeping troops to stop the genocide, the U.N. sought primarily to protect its soldiers from harm. [UN Commander] Dallaire was ordered to make avoiding risk to soldiers the priority, not saving the lives of Rwandans. To do so, he regrouped his troops, leaving exposed the Rwandans who had sought shelter in certain outposts under U.N. protection. In the most dramatic case—for which responsibility may belong to commanding officers in Belgium as much as to Dallaire—nearly one hundred Belgian peacekeepers abandoned some two thousand unarmed civilians, leaving them defenseless against attacks by militia and military. As the Belgians went out one gate, the assailants came in the other. More than a thousand Rwandans died there or in flight, trying to reach another U.N. post.[10]

     During the internal struggles to take command of the country’s military, U.N. peacekeepers might have been able to stop further depredations, but they were ordered not to intervene, which allowed Bagosora time consolidate power, resulting in a far more efficient implementation of the genocide:

By April 15, it was clear that the U.N. Security Council would not order the peacekeepers to try to stop the violence and might even withdraw them completely. By this date, the organizers of the genocide had also expanded their ranks considerably and were strong enough to remove opponents and impose compliance with the killing campaign.[11]

By appropriating the well-established hierarchies of the military, administrative and political systems, leaders of the genocide were able to exterminate Tutsi with astonishing speed and thoroughness.[12]

     Unprotected by any peacekeeping force, the disarmed victims were left to their own devices, either fleeing, hiding, or participating in an almost predestined tragedy of self-defense:

Many Tutsi and those Hutu associated with them fought to save their lives. We know of their heroic resistance, usually armed only with sticks and stones…but we have no way of knowing about the countless small encounters where targeted people struggled to defend themselves and their families in their homes, on dusty paths, and in the fields of sorghum.[13]

     Others found ways to accommodate their attackers, paying “repeatedly for their safety over a period of weeks, either with money or sexual services.” Their choices were limited to those of serfs or slaves: death resulting from attempted resistance or complete subservience in hopes of purchasing another day of physical survival.

     Lack of international response was a major contributing factor in the duration and size of the Rwandan massacre. Dating back to 1990, “influential donors of international aid” concerned themselves more with the Habyarimana government’s stability than political and economic reforms. When the massacres began, despite them being “solidly documented by local and international human rights groups and by a special reporter for the U.N. Commission on Human Rights,” nobody “openly challenged Rwandan explanations that the killings were spontaneous and uncontrollable and none used its influence to see that the guilty were brought to justice.”[14]

     As the result of the U.N. and its member nations denying, delaying, and prioritizing troop safety over their mission, Human Rights Watch estimated “at least one half million” Tutsis died between April and July 1994, about 75% of their population. Another 25,000-60,000 were killed by the Rwanda Patriotic Front.[15] Even when motivated by an opportunity for positive publicity, the U.N. and its member countries failed to “protect the right to life” of the Rwandan people.

     Flying Down to Rio

     The Brazilian people recently rejected a proposal to ban civilian firearms in their country:

But the referendum backfired for proponents. Earlier this year, support for the ban was running as high as 80 percent. But in the weeks before the referendum, both sides were granted free time to present their cases on prime-time TV, and the pro-gun lobby began to grow.

Analysts said the pro-gun lobby benefited from equal time on television in the final weeks of the campaign and that they cannily cashed in on Brazilian skepticism of the police.

“They ask the question: ‘Do you feel protected and do you think the government is protecting you?’ and the answer is a violent no,” said political scientist David Fleischer of the University of Brasilia.[16]

      Curiously, only after (U.N. member) Brazil’s vote on the referendum did reports get published supporting this “Brazilian skepticism of the police.” One article noted that Brazilian police committed numerous “cold-blooded executions” of those considered to be drug-gang members. At times, the police were documented to commit mass murder in a manner more in keeping with the gangsters they reputedly hunted:

The authorities say it is mainly criminals caught in military-style raids on drug gangs but according to a former senior official, new evidence suggests that many of the shootings are cold-blooded executions conducted by the police.

But in the spring of this year events took a sinister turn when, on 31 March, two men entered a bar and started shooting, not once or twice, but again and again. Most of the victims were shot at close range - in the chest and in the head.

In all, 29 people were shot dead, apparently not by members of a criminal drug gang - but by off-duty police officers.

“Around 60% of the bodies of people that were killed by the police had more than six shots,” explains Professor Lemgruber.

“Most of them [were shot] in the head and in the back - mostly executions.”[17]

     Another article reported that in recent years, a significant percentage of Brazil’s annual firearms-related killings have been committed by just one city’s police force:

According to human rights organizations and government statistics, police in Rio and its suburbs — home to a population of 11 million — have taken the lives of more than 4,000 people in the past five years. In the first 10 months of this year, more than 900 died at the hands of police.[18]

     Disarming law-abiding citizens would have stopped neither the gangs nor the police: one group armed despite laws banning possession; the other armed with military-grade light weapons permitted under U.N. protocols. The Brazilian people knew this, and their vote acknowledged the reality of their situation.

     Conclusion

     The United Nations and its member states consistently fail to “protect the right to life” of people in any country. Unfortunately, the people in these countries will not be voting on upcoming international firearms regulations: the only votes in the U.N. belong to representatives of the “States.” In the U.N. you matter as much as a half million Rwandans.

     Endnotes

About the Writer: Howard Nemerov began doing his own research into gun control when he recognized that the media was full of distortions and half truths. He publishes with ChronWatch and other sites, and is a frequent guest on NRA News. He is currently working on his first book, "Gun Control: Fear or Fact," which deconstructs and explains the gun control agenda and its arguments, debunking each one with a statistic-rich analysis. This is the handbook for when you want to talk to others about gun control . Howard receives e-mail at HNemerov [at symbol] netvista.net.