[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: Saying No to Killers

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The article below from NYTimes.com 
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Saying No to Killers

July 21, 2004
 By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF 



 

PORTLAND, Oregon 

So what would you do if, like Carl Wilkens, you were caught
in the middle of a genocide? 

Mr. Wilkens, a Seventh-day Adventist missionary, was living
with his wife and three small children in Kigali, Rwanda,
in 1994. Then a Hutu militia began to slaughter the Tutsi,
beginning with prominent figures like his banker neighbors,
who threw their two youngest children to safety over a back
fence before they were executed. Mr. Wilkens and his wife,
Teresa, tried to distract their children from the carnage
by playing a variation of musical chairs in which you could
move only when there was no gunfire nearby. 

U.S. officials and church leaders ordered Mr. Wilkens to
join an emergency evacuation of foreigners from Rwanda, and
relatives and friends implored him to go. 

He refused. 

Ms. Wilkens and the children left, but Mr. Wilkens insisted
on staying in Kigali to try to protect Tutsi friends. His
father warned him that even if he survived, his
insubordination might end his career in the church. In the
end, every other American left Kigali, but Mr. Wilkens
remained through the entire genocide. 

"It just seemed the right thing to do," he recalled in an
interview here in Oregon, where he is now an Adventist
pastor in the small town of Days Creek. "I could take my
blue passport and go, and moments later my housegirl and
night watchman, both identifiable Tutsis, were going to be
butchered." 

One evening the militia came to kill Mr. Wilkens and his
Tutsi servants, but Hutu neighbors praised his humanitarian
work and the militia went away. Death threats piled up, but
Mr. Wilkens spent his days talking his way through
roadblocks of snarling, drunken soldiers so he could take
water and food to orphanages around town. The Raoul
Wallenberg of Rwanda, he negotiated, pleaded and bullied
his way through the bloodshed, saving lives everywhere he
went. 

This continued for three months as 800,000 people were
slaughtered. During all this time, President Bill Clinton
and other Americans dithered, and there was an utter moral
failure around the world. 

But Mr. Wilkens plodded on each day, saving lives on a
retail scale. Survivors describe him as extraordinarily
courageous, not only for staying in Rwanda but also for
venturing out each day into streets crackling with mortars
and gunfire and pushing his way through roadblocks of
angry, bloodstained soldiers armed with machetes and
assault rifles. 

Of course, Mr. Wilkens managed to save only a tiny number
of Tutsi in Kigali, and Americans sometimes ask if his work
wasn't like spitting into the ocean. That's true, he
acknowledged, adding, "But for the people you help, it's
pretty significant." 

Ten years later, it's a useful exercise to wonder how many
of us would have the courage Mr. Wilkens showed. Yet we
don't have to wonder idly how we would respond to such an
African genocide - one is unfolding, right now, in the
Darfur region of Sudan, and once again we're doing next to
nothing. The World Health Organization estimates that
10,000 people are dying there each month, and again the
response around the world has been abject moral failure. 

Colin Powell's visit to Sudan was an excellent first step,
but President Bush has remained passive. As for John Kerry,
he averted his eyes from Darfur for months, but last week
he finally demanded action against what he termed genocide.


The U.S. needs to send massive aid shipments and take much
tougher steps, like issuing an ultimatum that will lead to
a no-flight zone over most of Darfur until the Sudanese
government disarms the genocidal Janjaweed militia. That
would get Khartoum's attention. 

To respond to this genocide, we don't need to stand up to
drunken killers with machetes and AK-47's, as Mr. Wilkens
did. Yet we, as individuals or as a nation, still can't
muster the will to take minimal steps to save lives, like
providing adequate food, water and medicine, and
browbeating Sudan into halting the killing. 

If readers want to help, I've listed some actions they can
take on www.nytimes.com/kristofresponds, Posting 520 (but
please don't send money to me). Moral choices lie not only
with those who, like Carl Wilkens, risk death to help
others, but also with the millions of ordinary people who
are spared the risks but still face a basic decision: Do we
try to save lives, or do we simply turn away? 

E-mail: nicholas at nytimes.com


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/21/opinion/21kris.html?ex=1091431382&ei=1&en=adc0901cd1deb7f9


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