The United Nations, birthed in 1945 after the atrocity of WWII’s Holocaust, pledged through its 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Genocide Convention to protect the right to life and security for all. Yet, in 1994, it betrayed this mandate by abandoning Rwanda during the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda. The UN wields the privilege of turning a blind eye to African bloodshed—a luxury we in Rwanda cannot. This affords the question: since Europe’s human rights are universal, who do they define as human? The human rights legacy of the West is a facade built on exclusion. During the Enlightenment of Europe, thinkers like Locke and Rousseau championed natural rights—life, liberty, property—codified in France’s 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man. Yet these rights were reserved for those deemed fully “human” by a legal definition that meant even Europe’s “awakening” was only the awakening of a debate that questioned whether women were fully rational and capable of autonomy. This limited definition framed women as “lesser” humans to justify denying them political and legal rights, a logic mirrored in the exclusion of Africans. Women, bound by coverture laws, were denied property or contracts, pitied as men’s dependents. Africans faced harsher dehumanization: France’s Code Noir and Britain’s Slave Codes reduced them to chattel. The 1787 Zong massacre, where 133 Africans were drowned for insurance money, exposed a legal system that saw Africans as profit and not as human lives. This legacy of selective humanity carved Rwanda’s colonial scars. Belgium’s rule imposed ethnic divisions, issuing ID cards and measuring noses to mark Rwandans as “lesser” creatures whose stories and identities ought to be dictated by European imaginations. The dehumanization of Tutsis that later enabled their killers to kill also enabled the West to stall. By 1994, Western lenses, trained to see no full humanity in Africans or their pain, turned from Tutsi cries. Whose rights shine in Europe’s light? The lessons of WWII taught that genocide is humanity’s greatest destruction. Yet, 49 years after the Holocaust, Belgium’s colonial rule in the Great Lakes region had already sown the seeds of ethnic division and violence within the borders Europeans carved for African rule. The 1959 assassination of King Rudahigwa, who defied Belgium’s divisive policies by lowering their flag at the DRC’s independence, deepened these colonial scars. By 1994, this legacy of selective humanity culminated in Rwanda’s betrayal. The United Nations, founded on Enlightenment ideals, decided Rwandan lives did not fully matter, as their Belgian-led “peacekeeping” force abandoned 4,000 Tutsis at ETO Kicukiro, begging for the peace the blue hats promised, only to leave them to machetes. This abandonment was no accident. It is insanity to believe the same people who planned and imported the cancer of divide and genocide into a population that knew unity prior—training and practicing genocide in Rwamagana before independence in 1959—would respond any differently than the blue hats who left Tutsis to machetes at ETO Kicukiro. The West’s history of defining “human” to exclude Africans enabled this callous neglect, turning a blind eye to Tutsi lives at their time of greatest need. Today, the UN conveniently turns a blind eye to the 100-day killers of Rwanda that France, the so-called father of human rights, safely relocated to the DRC. The UN ignores the orchestrators and implementers of over one million victims of genocide in 1994, who have continued their death count from across our border for 31 years now. It has never been that they do not know. It has always been that they are far and disconnected enough to the language the blood spilled in our region cries—a language they do not wish to comprehend. Rwanda’s story demands a reckoning. The UN’s failure in 1994, and its ongoing silence, reveals a world where universal rights are a privilege, not a promise, for those deemed less human. Until the West confronts its legacy of exclusion, the question burns: who counts as human enough for human rights?
