Confronting the horror.

Hundreds of thousands of people, most of them unarmed civilians and many of them women and children, have been killed in Rwanda since that East African state descended into chaos in early April. Unquestionably, the slaughter has been genocidal. It also appears to have been well-planned in advance. The killers, members of Rwanda's majority Hutu tribe, are determined to exterminate the minority Tutsi tribe as well as any Hutus sympathetic to the idea of peaceful coexistence between the two historic ethnic rivals. Hutu civilian "militias," led by the Rwandan army, have mercilessly hunted down their Tutsi neighbors. Hundreds of thousands of Rwandans have fled to neighboring Burundi, Tanzania, and Uganda.

Rwanda is in the midst of a civil war. As much as two-thirds of the country is now in the hands of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a guerrilla movement largely made up of Tutsis and which is not innocent of atrocities itself. This latest episode in tribal warfare began after the suspicious death of Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, who had been seeking some accommodation with the RPF. The UN, which had several thousand troops stationed in Rwanda to help monitor a tenuous cease-fire, had to pull them out when the fighting started up again in April. In the past few weeks several thousand French troops, under the auspices of the UN, have ventured into parts of western Rwanda in an effort to protect civilians. How effective the French will be is not clear. Historically, France has trained and supported the Hutu-led government, and is viewed with understandable skepticism by Tutsi leaders.

UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali has been trying to build a consensus for international intervention for months. The response of the international community has been to avert its gaze. President Bill Clinton, for one, has studiously avoided any suggestion that the United States has a role to play in bringing this moral catastrophe to an end. Meanwhile, the UN has authorized the creation of a 5,000-man "peackeeping" mission, but this effort has been criminally slow in taking shape.

President Clinton's timidity is not entirely baseless. The UN has been trying to negotiate a resolution to the Rwandan civil war for years. Intervention seems fraught with uncertainty, and organizing an international consensus takes time. Equally important, Rwanda's tragic plight, unlike Bosnia's or North Korea's, is not a threat to American or European security. In addition, the UN's handling of Somalia has made the United States leery of becoming entangled in a humanitarian effort that cannot be easily disentangled from longstanding tribal enmities. Finally, if there is good reason to intervene militarily in Rwanda, then what about the Sudan, Angola, Liberia, Bosnia, Georgia, East Timor, Afghanistan, etc., etc.?

As reasonable as these apprehensions are, it is equally clear that swift intervention could have saved tens of thousands of lives without posing any significant danger to a professionally deployed UN force. As the success of the U.S. famine-relief mission in Somalia demonstrated, the commitment of overwhelming military force to protect and feed civilians can work. The will to act, not the know-how, is the crucial missing ingredient in Rwanda.

What the post-cold war world needs, as former UN Undersecretary-General Brian Urquhart has argued (the New York Review of Books, June 10, 1993), is a standing UN military force--one not sporadically and grudgingly drawn from the armies of member nations. Such a force, under the authority of the Security Council, could be rushed into action to prevent the mass killings epidemic in an increasingly unstable world. Is there any other plausible alternative?