On April 7th next, the great and the good will converge on the Rwandan capital of Kigali to mark the 10th anniversary of the country's genocide. George W. Bush has been invited, Tony Blair and Brian Cowen too, writes Joe Humphreys
The plan is to hold a minute's silence at noon at the Gisozi burial ground on the outskirts of the city where tens of thousands of corpses lie. Then the dignitaries will fly home and the survivors of the genocide - which left 800,000 to one million people dead in just 100 days - will get on with their lives, still bereft of justice.
Sure, a handful of perpetrators, notably three media executives who helped to stir up the violence, have been convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal (ICTR) based in neighbouring Tanzania. Progress has also being made in Rwanda on establishing a community-based courts system to clear the backlog of murder cases, numbering up to 120,000.
But those principally responsible for allowing the genocide to take place - those who had the means of stopping it but chose not to - have yet to be held accountable. World governments, members of the so-called international community, proclaimed to uphold the Genocide Convention, which contracts the UN Security Council to prevent and punish genocidal acts. But in January 1994, when Gen Romeo Dallaire, commander of the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda, warned his superiors that plans were afoot for a campaign of ethnic cleansing, nothing happened.
Within a fortnight of the violence erupting, the same commander appealed to his then superior, Mr Kofi Annan, for 5,000 troops which Dallaire said would be enough to stop the blood-frenzy. The claim was never challenged, yet the troops never arrived. Meanwhile, the US cynically debated whether or not the killings amounted to genocide or merely "acts of genocide", suggesting a lesser form of holocaust.
A French-led peacekeeping mission arrived in Rwanda only after the worst of the massacres were over, and then its role was highly dubious, effectively offering protection to killers fleeing to the refugee camps of Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
"Who the hell cared about Rwanda?" asked Gen Dallaire some years later. "There are hundreds of Rwandans I knew personally whom I found slaughtered with their families complete . . . and bodies up to here. . . villages totally wiped out. And we made all that information available daily, and the international community kept watching."
His verdict has effectively been accepted by those in charge at the time, among them the US president Bill Clinton, who, in a qualified apology in 1998, admitted "we did not act quickly enough". In her autobiography, former US Secretary of State Ms Madeline Albright described her government's failure to tackle the genocide as "the deepest regret from all my years in public service".
But are such expressions of retrospective sorrow enough? In April 2002, the entire Dutch cabinet resigned over its perceived failure to prevent the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, the worst single atrocity in the Bosnian war. Nobody resigned over Rwanda. Not Clinton. Not Kofi Annan. Why so?
Is it that a European life is truly worth more than an African one? Or is it that, deep down, the world doesn't really care about crimes of omission? The issue comes into sharper focus when one considers how such crimes are being committed today. No government can plead ignorance of the fact that up to 1.2 billion people in the world live in extreme poverty. Or that up to 800 million are undernourished. Yet what government is seriously trying to tackle these problems despite promising to do so four years ago when signing up to the UN's Millennium Development Goals? The goals set out targets, to be reached by 2015, on creating wealth, advancing education and health - including cutting rates of HIV - and reforming trade rules that discriminate against poor countries. Implementing such commitments is all the more urgent in places such as Rwanda where underdevelopment has played a key role in inter-ethnic violence; and where, conversely, improvements in basic living standards have helped to boost reconciliation - as I myself witnessed on a visit to the fragile African state last month.
In several villages near Gitarama, for example, women widowed by the genocide had come together with the wives of prisoners implicated in the slaughter to create local credit unions and small businesses. Elsewhere, thanks to foreign donors, people were being educated for the first time about universal human rights and, critically in the context of Rwanda, individual responsibilities.
But in Rwanda so much more needs to be done, and it's not just the world's powerbrokers who should be doing it. Recent history in Ireland has taught us that crimes of omission thrive only when good people stay silent.
For the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to force their way onto the international agenda, ordinary people need to make them an ongoing political concern. This has been acknowledged by Trócaire, which - as part of its Lenten campaign - is rallying public support behind the goals (see www.Trocaire.org).
People have a gilt-edged opportunity to express their views on the MDGs in the upcoming European Parliament elections, and the Government in its presidency of the EU. If opportunities like these are not seized, we will rightly stand accused, individually and collectively, of a monumental crime of omission. And, as with all such crimes, the defence, "I am just one of many who did nothing", holds no weight.
It just echoes the logic of the masterminds of Rwanda's genocide who proclaimed: "If everyone has blood on their hands, no one is guilty."