CONSCIENCES SHOULD ACHE FROM RWANDA.

Byline: Bridget Johnson

WE have every reason to believe that acts of genocide have occurred,'' State Department spokeswoman Christine Shelly said on June 10, 1994.

``How many acts of genocide does it take to make genocide?'' asked Reuters correspondent Alan Elsner.

``Alan, that's just not a question that I'm in a position to answer,'' she replied.

At the time, questions about what was really going on in the African nation of Rwanda were just beginning. And 10 years later, they continue to haunt us.

About two months before Shelly's comments, the ethnic majority Hutu extremists had begun to slaughter Tutsis in Rwanda. In 100 days, 800,000 were dead. Bodies of men, women and children littered roadsides and flowed down rivers past borders, carrying their morbid tales and ghastly machete wounds.

The United Nations had a peacekeeping force there from Day One. Rwanda's U.N. commander pleaded for troops. His forces were slashed to a mere 270 - a U.S.-backed reduction.

America's response to the crisis? Evacuate Americans.

After the Holocaust, the civilized world swore ``never again.'' The U.N. convention on genocide promised signatories would ``undertake to prevent and to punish'' future genocide.

Hutu extremists made no secret of their genocidal intentions. They hit the airwaves to urge Hutus to participate in exterminating Tutsis, even providing lists of names and addresses. ``Slowly, slowly, slowly,'' one message cooed, ``we will kill them like rats.''

Samantha Power wrote in ``Bystanders to Genocide'' (The Atlantic Monthly, September 2001) that America refused to intercede and jam these radio broadcasts. ``Staying out of Rwanda was an explicit U.S. policy objective,'' Power wrote.

One way to avoid being bound to action under the U.N. convention was by refusing to call the massacre ``genocide.''

The United States wasn't the only country that stood by and did nothing. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in the ``Frontline'' documentary ``Ghosts of Rwanda'' that more than 80 governments refused requests to contribute peacekeepers.

And ``never again'' turned into ``again.''

Richard Clarke, the recent toast of the 9-11 commission and then overseeing peacekeeping on the National Security Council, was quoted by Power in response to U.S.-Rwanda policy as saying, ``I don't think we should be embarrassed. I think everyone else should be embarrassed by what they did, or did not do.'' A far cry from his recent apology to 9-11 victims.

Eight hundred thousand dead. Our hands weren't clean.

Flash forward to today, and an oft-heard isolationist statement: ``But (insert country or tyrant) didn't do anything to us!'' We're basically saying, why should we risk our lives for strangers, foreigners, nobodies?

The time comes when we must choose anti-war or anti-genocide. In Rwanda, we chose the wrong path.

Annan - then head of U.N. peacekeeping - said he only needed 5,000 troops. Modern weaponry vs. machetes.

He got more than 80 ``no's.''

Why?

The Hutus methodically swayed public opinion at the start of their campaign, killing 10 Belgian peacekeepers while freeing ones from Ghana; predictably, the Belgian public was outraged, the government caved, the Belgians were out of there. Many were timid because of 1993's Somalia fiasco. But how many said ``no'' because it was ``just'' Africa?

If not a degree of diplomatic racism, it seems much of society also suffers from moral apathy. It's not happening to us, so a) it's not happening, b) it's not affecting us, c) it's not of key importance. And thus we chip away at our own humanity through disregard for others' lives.

It doesn't matter if Kim Jong Il starves his people to death or lets them rot in gulags; it only matters if he points nukes at us. It doesn't matter if Saddam Hussein gases the Kurds; it only matters if he has enough gas left over to choke us.

It does matter to us, though, if our troop commitments last longer than three months, if a devastating tragedy overseas has at least one American victim, if tragedy happens on American soil.

Power writes that ``the American system can remain predicated on the noblest of values while allowing the vilest of crimes.''

``If we were to be confronted with a new Rwanda, is the world ready to do it?'' Annan asked in 1998. ``Will the world move in to stop it? And my answer is, I really don't know. I wish I can say yes, but I am not convinced.''

I'm far from convinced, as I look at a world order that deems some lives less important and quibbles over how many ``acts of genocide'' it takes to equal genocide.