Meditations (Politics): I Am the Rwandan Child

I am the Rwandan child hacked to death with a machete ten years ago as the world turned its back. I was murdered not on the 'dark continent,' but in the darkest recesses of human consciousness.

Can you hear, above the din of this insane world, my last sobs in my mother's arms? Though I was denied existence, and had no voice while alive, you will not dismiss me as a mere memory. My voice will become a roar. I am every child that has died and is dying at the hands of the evil that lurks in the minds and hearts of adults too self-centered and weak to confront their own darkness.

General Dallaire, the Canadian in charge of the UN peacekeepers in Rwanda who was abandoned by the United Nations and the so-called international community, says that what haunts him the most is the look of pure bewilderment on the faces of thousands of people left to their fate. "Why is this happening to us?" is what that look, now etched into his anguished brow, conveyed.

The Hutu man who murdered me has said: "It was as if we were taken over by Satan. When Satan is using you, you lose your mind."

But the devil, though real, is a man-made thing, and it can only use those who have so weakened themselves through hatred, selfishness, and by following authority that they are unable to hear the whisper of God in the voice of a child. It is every person's unexamined darkness that makes evil, and allows it to reign on earth.

The devil did not make that man kill me, anymore than he made Clinton and Albright look the other way, and pressure the UN to pull its peacekeepers out of Rwanda after ten Belgian soldiers were murdered. Why were their ten white lives worth more than nearly a million black one's? And who wielded the greater evil-the madman who hacked into my skull, or the so-called leaders in America and Europe who willfully ignored me as genocidal debris?

"It's not that I didn't care," says President Clinton's advisor Anthony Lake, "it's that any caring wasn't translated into any focus, any attention really." Caring without attention and focus amounts to nothing but post-mortem sentimentality.

Very few people actually cared, inside or outside the governments in your comfortable countries. Even fewer do now.

Evil is winning its game. Now Bush is its puppet. They do not want dead bodies; bodies are merely a means to their real ends. Evil really wants dead hearts and souls. And more people join the ranks of the walking dead every day. Life has no death wish, but unexamined and unconfronted darkness generates numbness beyond reach.

How is it that two unarmed UN soldiers faced down hundreds of machete-wielding men storming a church filled with hundreds of terrified Tutsis?

The slaves of darkness are cowards, and can only do their dark and bloody business under the cover of secrecy. They scurry away like cockroaches when the light of day is shined on them.

The heroic head of the Red Cross in Rwanda, Philippe Gaillard, said: "General Dallaire was abandoned by his own organization (the UN). This is terrible." Kofi Annan, an African, was in charge of all UN peacekeepers at that time. Rather than resigning or being fired in disgrace, he became Secretary General. This is why the UN has been moribund for the last ten years, why it has lost all respect, and why its best hope was crushed under the rubble of human civilization collapsing in Bush's "war of choice" in Iraq.

General Dallaire said, when he made a desperate attempt to negotiate with the killers, "Suddenly I was not talking with humans. I literally was talking with evil."

Where does evil come from?

Evil is nurtured in the hidden recesses of the consciousness of every person who is not self-knowing. It is often said that it is a good thing that the evil that lurks within people remains hidden and suppressed. But that is the greatest lie. Darkness must be confronted, within the individual, as well as when it collectively rears its filthy head.

My small voice, joining with the other voices of innumerable murdered children, will echo in your ears until you ignite the inward revolution and build the outward mechanisms that end genocide.

- Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net. The author welcomes comments.

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