All the women were rounded up together, grouped in a huddled mass. Their pursuit had been systematic, the soldiers instructions perfectly clear that no female was to be left untouched.
The army was not simply rampaging out of bounds on some spur-of-the-moment scheme to wreak havoc. Government ministers, including a very influential female official, handed down the order from above.
Once gathered, the army then began mass rape. The process took awhile; each man had to get his turn. When they were done, the men set about destroying their victims. Mass death replaced mass violation. Not all the women died, however. One out of 20 received life, not out of sake of grace, but so that they could tell their horrifying story to all they would meet. These women lived because the army wanted its actions to be remembered. The desired intimidating effect required that survivors spread their story.
The above story occurred in Rwanda during the outbreak of ethnic violence that killed over one million people during the mid-nineties. Scarily, it could have occurred in many African nations, countries in which warlords rule, corruption reigns and death, famine, pestilence and war surround everyone.
Don't be lulled into thinking that the four horsemen of the apocalypse operate only on one continent. Europe is hardly immune. The Yugoslav civil war a mere decade ago likewise killed over a million people. I don't think one can even calculate how many others escaped death, much less the devastation reaped upon their lives. The multiplier must be too high.
I could rattle off the terror and cruelty perpetuated in the prison camps of the early nineties, but what would it matter? Even if I wrote for days, for months even, I couldn't complete the grim picture.
And now I come to the Middle East, which being a staple of our morning papers, hopefully needs little introduction.
The United States is on the verge of challenging the military autocrat that is Saddam Hussein.
Those against the war speak of the death awaiting so many involved, whether they be American soldiers or Iraqi children. They are right, of course. War will bring death to those who fight it as well as those whom it surrounds.
But the simpleton "No war for oil" chants mask the destruction that has already occurred. Hussein has been fighting his own war for decades. He fought Iran, killing a million Iraqis. He tried to fight Kuwait, before the U.S. and Britain stopped him. But most importantly, he has been fighting his own people. The currently patrolled no-fly zones over Iraq protect the Kurds in the north and a minority population of Iraqis in the south, peoples whom Saddam has been killing in the thousands ever since he took power. Sometimes he kills slowly, through military police and executions. Sometimes he kills quickly, through the use of chemical weapons.
I'm going to stop here before articulating a complete sentiment either in favor or against military action in Iraq because I think there is a larger point to be made regarding all three of the above examples of global strife: Genocide and ethnic cleansing are not dead institutions. We in America grow up learning about the Holocaust, and our history books encourage us to look at such cruelty as having been wiped out with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
That is not the case. People continue to die by the millions. More importantly, people continue to be exterminated.
We Americans love to talk about rights, God-given rights. The right to vote, the right for free speech, the right not to be oppressed... We hold these truths to be self-evident, right? Well, they are not.
There is a rule to this world, however, one that holds true no matter what the circumstance: The powerful will prey on the weak constantly and without remorse until another powerful entity stops them.
We in the Western world keep hoping that we can stop having to go to war. At the end of the 19th century, Europe thought itself to be moving away from armed conflict. Then came World War I, the "war to end all wars," because surely nothing surpass it. The Second World War did, to which the corpses of 30-60 million people attested.
The question I pose to my fellow students, and indeed, to my country, is whether or not we will choose to sit back and let the world kill each other, and only act when a few thousand Americans die in the cross-fire? Our predecessors chose to do just that. We sat back and watched Japan exterminate Chinese, Hitler occupy most of Europe and Africa throw off its chains to Europe only to engulf itself in near continuous civil war ever since.
Too much of the world's population lives at the mercy of warlords, men whose own hardship as youths removed any sense of sympathy for those they kill at will. Diplomacy will not work with such men. That is a fact, and no amount of preying, or anti-war marches, or any other wishful thinking will change that.
It is also a fact that the only force capable of stopping such cruelty is the U.S. military. Europe is weak. Even faced with mass genocide within its own boarders, it chose to do nothing, preferring to watch millions of people face death, rape and torture. And those victims were white. Think Europe will flex its ever-atrophying military muscle to help out when the next million Africans start being cleansed from this Earth by a rival ethnic group? It will not.
I pause here to add a little personal perspective. As most people who've read my columns probably recognize, my politics are extremely liberal. Yet, while I possess very leftist views on religion, on homosexuality, on women, on race and many other topics, I think our military is essential to this world.
I spent much of my weekend dropping a bomb on my parents that I'm very seriously considering joining the army within a year after I graduate. Needless to say, my family was none too happy.
I end with this cautionary note: I carry no illusions about the disastrous things U.S. foreign policy has done. We've supported dictators in Latin America who raped and killed with abandon. We've encouraged democratic uprisings in Middle Eastern countries, most notably Iraq, only to renege and watch as a warlord slaughters the few brave enough to challenge him.
When the U.S. enters wars, we are so convoluted in our objectives that we often do more harm than good (see Vietnam), and so thousands die, and die for nothing.
All this scares me, it truly does.
My feelings waver. On some days I truly am idealistic enough to risk losing my life, or my legs, to prevent another million people from being murdered and to protect 100,000 women from rape. Other days I think the world's f----- up beyond repair, that there are too few people willing to risk their life for another's for my sacrifice to make a palpable difference.
And yet, as we in this country talk about rights, I can' t help but shake the fury inside of me that believes that above all else, a people deserves to live free from rape and torture at every turn. The killing will continue until we try to stop it. Nobody else will. Are we, am I, not obligated to try?
Nick Christie is a Trinity senior and an associate sports editor for The Chronicle.
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