Like its cousin, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, Rwanda's stunning new genocide museum, perched on a quiet hillside overlooking Kigali, is at its most arresting when it honors the lost children.
One installation invites us to consider David, a cute, shy boy, with big round black eyes: David's favorite sport was soccer; he enjoyed making people laugh; his dream was to be a doctor; he was tortured to death; his last words were: "The UN will come to get us."
Next to David's biography is Ariane's, four, stabbed in the eyes and head; Fillette, also four, smashed against a wall; Yves and Yvonne, three and five, hacked to death at their grandmother's house; Aurone, two, burnt alive in a chapel; and 12-year-old Mami, whose last words were: "Mum, where can I run to?"
The children's installation is introduced by the words: "They should still be with us." A nearby display asks whether they could be. It honors the actions of ordinary people of courage.
People like Yahaya, a 60-year-old Muslim who saved Beatha, who narrates her story: "The killer was chasing me down an alley. I was going to die any second. I banged on the door of the yard. It opened almost immediately. He [Yahaya] took me by the hand and stood in his doorway and told the killer to leave. He said the Koran says if you save one life it is like saving the whole world. He did not know it is a Jewish text as well."
Next to these tributes is another installation -- a reproduction of the infamous fax by the UN Force Commander, General Romeo Dallaire, imploring the then head of UN peacekeeping, Kofi Annan, for authority to defend Rwandan civilians -- many of whom had taken refuge in UN compounds under implicit and sometimes explicit promises of protection.
Here, too, is Annan's faxed response -- ordering Dallaire to defend only the UN's image of impartiality, forbidding him to protect desperate civilians waiting to die. Next, it details the withdrawal of UN troops, even while blood flowed and the assassins reigned, leaving 800,000 Rwandans to their fate.
The museum's silent juxtaposition of personal courage versus Annan's passive capitulation to evil is an effective reminder of what is at stake in the debate over Annan's future: When the UN fails, innocent people die. Under Annan, the UN has failed and people have died.
His own legions have raped and pillaged. In two present scandals, over the oil-for-food program in Iraq, and sex-for-food in Congo, Annan was personally aware of malfeasance among his staff, but again responded with passivity.
Having worked as a UN human-rights observer in Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti and Liberia, there are two savage paradoxes for me here. The first is that, while the media and conservative politicians and pundits have suddenly discovered that the UN has been catastrophically incompetent, this is very old news to anyone with the mud -- ?or blood -- ? of a UN peacekeeping mission on his boots.
One very personal example: When I worked in Liberia in the mid-90s a new chief administrative officer (CAO) was dispatched to Monrovia by the UN to replace the previous CAO, who was removed (then reassigned elsewhere) for taking a 15 percent kickback on UN procurement contracts.
In the name of cleaning up the old corruption, the new CAO tapped our phones, paid locals to spy for him and threatened to send home anyone who opposed him, all to facilitate his own quest for a 15 percent kickback on everything we purchased.
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