The world is marking 30 years since the Rwandan genocide. Inside Geneva talks to those who witnessed it.
“We came to one village where there were a few survivors and a man came to me with a list and said ‘look, the names have been crossed out one by one, entire families, they were killing everybody from those families,’” says Christopher Stokes, from Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders).
Charles Petrie, former United Nations (UN) humanitarian coordinator, recalls: “She thought there was a good chance that the Interahamwe [militia] would find the kids, the children, and she said, ‘pray that they don’t hack them to death, pray that they shoot them’”.
Why was it not prevented?
“The paralysis of the UN system, the paralysis of all the major players to respond to what was pretty clearly a massive genocidal operation,” says Gareth Evans, former Australian foreign minister.
Senior diplomats worked to make the UN stronger in the face of atrocities.
“Instead of talking about the right to intervene, we talked about the responsibility to protect. There are some kinds of behaviour which are just inconceivably beyond the pale, whatever country we live in, and just do demand this response,” says Evans.
Has “responsibility to protect”, or R2P, worked?
“I don’t think there’s been significant progress. I would say actually that we went from perhaps a hope, an illusion that something would be done to actually not expecting anything at all now,” says Stokes.
Join host Imogen Foulkes on the Inside Geneva podcast.
Please listen and subscribe to our science podcast -- the Swiss Connection.
Get in touch!
Thank you for listening! If you like what we do, please leave a review or subscribe to our newsletter.
The world is marking 30 years since the Rwandan genocide. Inside Geneva talks to those who witnessed it.
“We came to one village where there were a few survivors and a man came to me with a list and said ‘look, the names have been crossed out one by one, entire families, they were killing everybody from those families,’” says Christopher Stokes, from Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders).
Charles Petrie, former United Nations (UN) humanitarian coordinator, recalls: “She thought there was a good chance that the Interahamwe [militia] would find the kids, the children, and she said, ‘pray that they don’t hack them to death, pray that they shoot them’”.
Why was it not prevented?
“The paralysis of the UN system, the paralysis of all the major players to respond to what was pretty clearly a massive genocidal operation,” says Gareth Evans, former Australian foreign minister.
Senior diplomats worked to make the UN stronger in the face of atrocities.
“Instead of talking about the right to intervene, we talked about the responsibility to protect. There are some kinds of behaviour which are just inconceivably beyond the pale, whatever country we live in, and just do demand this response,” says Evans.
Has “responsibility to protect”, or R2P, worked?
“I don’t think there’s been significant progress. I would say actually that we went from perhaps a hope, an illusion that something would be done to actually not expecting anything at all now,” says Stokes.
Join host Imogen Foulkes on the Inside Geneva podcast.
Please listen and subscribe to our science podcast -- the Swiss Connection.
Get in touch!
Thank you for listening! If you like what we do, please leave a review or subscribe to our newsletter.
This is Inside Geneva. I'm your host, Imogen Foulkes, and this is a production from Swissinfo, the international public media company of Switzerland. In today's program….
Speaker 2:The Rwanda situation in 1994 really was a wake-up call to the world. The paralysis of the UN system, the paralysis of all the major players.
Speaker 3:They were killing everybody from those families and that's when there were just three of us at that moment. We were saying that this resembles a genocide. They're going through lists. It's systematic.
Speaker 4:She thought there was a good chance that the Inter-Hammway would find the kids, the children, and she said pray that they don't hack them to death, that they shoot them.
Speaker 2:The absolute necessity to recognize that there are some kinds of behavior which are just inconceivably beyond the pale, whatever country we live in, and just do demand this response.
Speaker 3:Even in the darkest of moments, you have to try and save some lives and not have what we call in French la paix des cimetières, the peace of the cemetery.
Speaker 4:Will I lose my sense of sadness? That's something you will never lose. You can't lose of sadness. That's something you will never lose. You can't lose your sadness, and so, yeah, so it stays with you. No, you don't. You don't deal with it. But the only thing you deal with is you're able to deal with the mental pain.
Speaker 1:Hello and welcome again to Inside Geneva. I'm Imogen Fowkes. This month we're marking 30 years since the Rwandan genocide and in today's podcast we're going to talk to people who were there at the time and ask why the world and the United Nations wasn't able to prevent it.
Speaker 5:The iron curtain between East Germany and West Berlin has come tumbling down.
Speaker 2:East Germany announced today it is opening its borders, allowing its citizens to go anywhere they wish. They've been pouring through the world non-stop, delirious with joy.
Speaker 1:The East German Trabant sedans coughing. When we wind the clock back three decades to the early 1990s, it's easy to forget that at that point the world was still flushed with optimism. By the end of the Cold War, many believed global peace, harmony, even equality, were within reach, that the conflict and violence of most of the 20th century could be consigned to history. Gareth Evans was Australia's foreign minister at the time.
Speaker 2:The 20th century, when we look back on it, when something like 80 million men, women and children died, were killed in mass atrocity, genocidal type crimes, starting with the Armenians, perhaps those who suffered under Soviet Union and Chinese repression politically, the catastrophe of the Holocaust with Jews in Europe, the catastrophe of the Cambodian politicide, if you like to call it that in the 70s, just over and over again, people were being killed, with the world not regarding any of this stuff as very much its own business, and I think, with the hope that arose in the 90s with the end of the Cold War, we could do something about it.
Speaker 1:You're talking 94, 95, you said people began to think we've really got to do better than this. Was that a moment, just five or six years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, when it was felt we can actually overcome disagreements within the UN, within the Security Council? This is a moment we can actually do something.
Speaker 2:Well, the early post-Cold War years, the 90s, were a time of extreme optimism, looking back as to the art of the possible internationally and in all sorts of ways, and building, you know, peace, dialogue, architecture and just the sense of confidence that big issues were able to be tackled really was there.
Speaker 3:Astonishingly, on the Croatian side, civilians are still up there with the soldiers either unable to leave their homes or trying to get back to them.
Speaker 5:Leaders of several West African countries say they are organising a Liberian peacekeeping force, even as conflicts erupted in former Yugoslavia and in parts of Africa.
Speaker 1:many shared that optimism. Among them a young United Nations humanitarian worker.
Speaker 4:My name is Charles Petrie. On the 7th of April 1994, I was actually in Mogadishu in Somalia and was instructed to join the mission in Rwanda.
Speaker 1:In 1992, Petrie had asked specifically to join the UN's mission in Somalia, but it wasn't what he hoped.
Speaker 4:The UN has been prevented from deploying its initial commitment of troops. Food convoys have been hijacked, aid workers assaulted.
Speaker 1:The UN's operation to alleviate famine degenerated into bloody skirmishes between Somali armed groups, un peacekeepers and, eventually, us troops.
Speaker 3:I have seen with my own eyes dead American soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu.
Speaker 4:There were at least two US helicopters confirmed shot down.
Speaker 1:Who, in the infamous Black Hawk Down incident, lost 18 men.
Speaker 2:If this operation was a success, then the US can't stand much more success in Somalia success and the US can't stand much more success in Somalia.
Speaker 4:I'd spent almost two years in Somalia. I arrived in August 92. I asked to be transferred to Somalia because it was the first post-Cold War international intervention and it was. There was a sense of a new world order, that Somalia was going to be the first international intervention that would have as part of its core the easing of suffering, sort of basically the elements of the Charter. I was there, participated in its failure.
Speaker 4:I was in Mogadishu on the 3rd of October, that whole Black Walk Down incident, and it was very clear at that moment that not only had the mission failed but there was no more appetite on the part of the international community to intervene in situations that were not directly relevant to the interests of individual nations like the US. So it was very, very clear for me and others who were in Somalia that ultimately somebody else would pay the price for the failure in Somalia, and that was Rwanda. And that's why, when I was instructed to go, I resisted and said that I did not want to be forced to witness the failure of Somalia. Rwanda, for me, was paying the price of the failure of Somalia, as in the lack of willingness of the international community to engage again in a situation that was not of direct relevance or interest to individual nations. And so, when the plane was shot down, when the killing started and there was almost immediately a request that I go to Rwanda, I fought it.
Speaker 5:UN peacekeepers reported that Rwanda's government was stockpiling weapons and Hutu Tutsi. Violence was rising.
Speaker 1:Rwanda had been tense for some time, with a civil conflict between ethnic Hutus and Tutsis frozen into an uneasy peace. In April 1994, the Rwandan president, a Hutu, was assassinated when his plane was shot down. Violence erupted again as Hutus, who formed death squads known as the Interahamwe, turned on the Tutsis.
Speaker 5:The Tutsis were blamed and a murderous attack on that entire people group. The definition of genocide began in Rwanda's capital.
Speaker 1:At first the world paid little attention. Gareth Evans again.
Speaker 2:I first became aware of the horror that was unfolding in Rwanda in April 1994 when our New Zealand colleagues in the Security Council alerted my Australian diplomats to what was going on and I was very perturbed about it and made a statement in the Australian Parliament saying that we were concerned about the unfolding tragedy that was occurring and if we were asked by the United Nations, we would seriously consider making a contribution to a peacekeeping or peace enforcement operation.
Speaker 2:I said that knowing pretty well that I was going to be in real trouble with my defence colleagues who were not at all enthusiastic about this kind of adventure, putting blood and treasure at risk for people in faraway countries about whom we knew little and, frankly, didn't care very much. I knew also that there'd be real problems in getting the necessary UN endorsement that would give us the mandate, give the world the mandate externally to act. But none of that happened. Of course we did eventually send a small contingent, but far too late to make a difference, and I think the Rwanda situation in 1994 really was a bit of a wake-up call to the world the paralysis of the UN system, the paralysis of all the major players to respond to what was pretty clearly a massive genocidal operation.
Speaker 3:You do not just see death here, you feel it and smell it.
Speaker 4:It is as if all the good and life in the atmosphere had been sucked out and replaced with the stench of evil.
Speaker 1:But while world leaders dithered and the UN remained paralysed, some small aid agencies tried to help.
Speaker 3:So my name is Christopher Stokes. I'm working for Médecins Sans Frontières, usually as a head of mission, a negotiator, and in 1994, I was a young aid worker. I got a phone call one afternoon and I was asked if I could go to Rwanda in April 1994.
Speaker 1:Christopher Stokes, then 28 years old, was part of a team of just three people hoping to set up an MSF surgical unit.
Speaker 3:We entered into northern Rwanda, which is a beautiful countryside, lush green Northern Rwanda, which is a beautiful countryside, lush green tea plantations, but there was no one there. We couldn't see anybody. We were driving for hours and hours and we didn't see a single living human being and we didn't understand where the population was. Rwanda is a pretty dense country and it's only, I'd say, after two days that we started seeing not people, but actually bodies, as we crossed villages, and in front of each hut, basically in this village, you had people who'd been executed men, women and children.
Speaker 3:And we continued driving because we had a target. We were going to look for a town where we could establish a surgical intervention. And when we were on these roads, we came to one village where there were a few survivors and a man came to us and showed me a list with names and he said in French so he was telling me look, the names have been crossed out one by one, and he said entire families, and they were killing everybody from those families. And that's when there were just three of us. At that moment we were saying that this resembles a genocide. They're going through lists. It's systematic. These are innocent civilians but killed in a very systematic way, and that impression on those first couple of days just got stronger and stronger as we reached our destination.
Speaker 1:On a very personal level. There were just three of you. You saw hundreds, thousands of examples of appalling violence. Did you not want to turn around and go back?
Speaker 3:Well, I think we were in a state of shock, we were astonished by what we were seeing.
Speaker 3:I remember when we were driving down a road and I could see on the side of the road something that looked familiar but didn't look like anything I'd seen before, so we didn't recognize it immediately.
Speaker 3:It was actually a small lake, but you couldn't see the water because the whole surface of the lake was covered with bodies that were bloated and had risen to the surface, people who'd been killed and had been dumped in the lake, and so there were moments like that when we thought, okay, there's, what is the point that there is something absurd about humanitarian action in such a context. Nevertheless, we we knew there was a surgical team coming through. We were told there were survivors, there were wounded people and we needed to open up services to try and help them, which we did finally, in a small town called Byumba in the north of Rwanda and I think it's only afterwards, coming back, leaving Rwanda after April, after May of 1994, that kind of dawned on us the scale of what we had witnessed, because we're talking about 15,000 people killed a day on average for close to three months.
Speaker 1:When you see that, apart from your commitment to trying to get your surgical team in and set up so they can work, is there also a feeling I have to tell people. I mean, like lots of people, about this surely if people knew, if the world knew, we could stop it.
Speaker 3:When we were shown the list yes, definitely, that was something that really stuck in my mind and the desperation and outrage of that man who was showing he was a survivor, a Tutsi survivor, showing me the list and saying, look, they've killed the families one by one. Then, yes, definitely, I thought when I go back I was young and junior I wasn't like going to tell the world what was going on. This isn't just well, just, it's the wrong word. But this isn't some disorganized, chaotic killing or massacre of civilians. It's very systematic. Really, they produce death on an industrial scale without using industry. Actually, it was done with very simple but effective means machetes without using industry. Actually, it was done with very simple but effective means machetes, kalashnikovs. And totally yes, I was determined to tell that story when I got back because it was early days and that side of what was happening in Rwanda wasn't being broadcast and wasn't being shown at that moment.
Speaker 5:Between April 7 and July 15, 1994, up to a million people were killed in Rwanda in a mass slaughter unprecedented in modern history.
Speaker 1:While Stokes, weeks into the genocide, tried to tell people what was happening, Charles Petrie, still in Somalia, was having long conversations with colleagues already in Rwanda who relayed the urgency of the situation.
Speaker 4:You have to come here because what we're seeing is nothing like anything we've ever seen before. And so after three days I relented and I agreed told New York that I agreed to be transferred.
Speaker 1:So you got there in May. What struck you when you arrived? What stood out? What struck you when you arrived? What stood out?
Speaker 4:Basically the silence of the people, the general population, the absolute fear of the Tutsis. I met their sense of inevitability in terms of their death. I mean, I remember having a discussion with a sister who was in charge of an orphanage. She had been intimidated by the Inter Hamwe. They had come into the orphanage and they had threatened to execute her unless she handed over the family of a minister of the former regime or the minister that they had already killed. And she refused and they said, well, if she continued to refuse, she was. She didn't refuse, she just said they're not here. And the interhamway said well, they knew that they were here and if she didn't hand them over they would kill the children. And she had about 150 orphans and she was shaken. And so I asked her you know what's what's happening? And and she admitted that she was hiding the family and she was scared that they would be found.
Speaker 4:And so we spent all afternoon trying to find a way to get the family out. But it was difficult because you had all of these barriers, these inter-Hamway barriers, so I couldn't take them in my car because they would be checked, couldn't send an APc to pick them up, but so we had to. You know, after, uh, you know, a long deliberation, you know, I had to admit to her that I didn't find a way, I couldn't think of a way, and she said, well, there is one thing you can do for me. And so I said okay. And she said pray. And so I was about to respond and she said no, no, let me finish.
Speaker 4:And she said pray. She said because she thought there was a good chance that the Interhamway would find the kids, the children. And she said pray that they don't hack them to death, that they shoot them. And she said I'm willing to die. You know it's my calling and I'm willing to die. You know I'm, it's my calling and I'm willing to die for my, for the orphans I'm protecting, but I can't bear the thought of seeing them being hacked to death. So she said pray that they be shot when the inter ham way find the family. So I felt tears starting to well my eyes and then the thought struck me that I had absolutely no right to cry in front of her, in front of that courage. I just had to tell her that I would pray that they be shot. And then it turns out that the Inter-Hamway did come and they killed a good number of the children, but the children were shot the children but the children were shot.
Speaker 1:People were saying that the end of the Tutsis had come. The killings continued, sometimes 15,000 people a day, for a hundred days. The intervention that was finally approved was far too little and far too late, but there was a consensus that the world had to do better. Gareth Evans found himself chairing a commission tasked with developing a UN strategy of intervention. The goal to stop future atrocities like Rwanda.
Speaker 2:We met in an environment where we just felt we had to come up with something that really would concentrate the world's mind on the absolute necessity to respond to these atrocities and not allow the world to go on saying this is nobody's business but that of the sovereign countries that are involved. I think we made that international commission made four big contributions which did turn out to be circuit breakers. One was to change the language of the debate, and instead of talking about the right to intervene, we talked about the responsibility to protect. So right became responsibility, intervention became protection of those vulnerable.
Speaker 1:Very clever wording.
Speaker 2:And wording matters. I mean, language was important, and language was the first thing we successfully did. Second thing we did was to broaden the range of actors that we said should be involved. It's not just the big guys with military capability, it's everyone. After the world witnessed genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia, the UN adopted measures to hold governments accountable for the protection of their own citizens.
Speaker 1:The negotiations benefited from that post-Cold War optimism. The United States, Russia and China all worked together to draft the UN's Responsibility to Protect principle. It was finally approved in 2005 and imposed three key duties on UN member states.
Speaker 2:Responsibility protected with its three pillars. The three pillars one the responsibility of every state to protect its own people from mass atrocity crimes, ethnic cleansing, genocide, other crimes against humanity, major war crimes. Secondly, the responsibility of every state to assist those in need of assistance, and the third pillar was the responsibility of the state to assist those in need of assistance. And the third pillar was the responsibility of the wider global community to react effectively if a state was manifestly failing to exercise its responsibility to protect its own people, with the ultimate sanction but not the only sanction being a military response if that was endorsed by the Security Council. So that formulation was indeed embraced in 2005, but not without an awful lot of diplomatic agony. So that was a huge achievement and a quite remarkably swift achievement, but one that was driven by a global sense of very bad conscience after the catastrophes of Rwanda, particularly in 94, and the Balkans that followed it.
Speaker 1:The R2P standard, as it's known, is pretty basic. It says that when a country is unwilling or unable to protect its citizens from mass atrocities, it is now the responsibility of the world community to intervene. A bad conscience. Is it human nature always to become wise after the fact and not before horrific events? Today, Gareth Evans believes R2P, as it came to be known, has had mixed success.
Speaker 2:I think it's worked pretty well preventively, in the sense that there are a number of situations you can identify stopping the recurrence of violence in Kenya, the West African cases of Sierra Leone, liberia, guinea, cote d'Ivoire, the Gambia all a few years ago, but all successful preventive operations calling in aid that are to be responsible to protect concept. But I mean prevention is something that very few people notice, because when it succeeds, absolutely nothing happens. Nobody gets the credit, and so prevention is always a hard sell. The real problem is when we come to the issue of reaction, when prevention has failed, when terrible things are actually happening, what's been our capacity to respond? Well, of course there have been failures, and it's the failures of effective reaction when really horrible situations have exploded that has led to a lot of cynicism Failures in Sri Lanka, failures in Sudan, failures in Myanmar, failures in Yemen, above all, failures in Syria and, of course, a catastrophic failure now in Israel.
Speaker 1:It is so decided. The Security Council will now begin its consideration of Thirty years on. Charles Petrie's anger at what happened in Rwanda is still vivid. But he doesn't think the UN itself failed. He thinks the big powers in the UN, the permanent members of the Security Council, were at fault then and now.
Speaker 4:No, it's the Security Council that failed, but they willfully failed. I think the failure of the Security Council is linked to two key elements. The first is that Rwanda was on the Security Council, and so they were able to craft the narrative for the Security Council, so they were able to push the conflict narrative. You know, this is just civil war, civil conflict. The legitimate government is resisting the aggression of a rebel force, you know, and they were, you know, obfuscate the genocide. But more importantly was the US and the Black Hawk Down incident and the failure in Somalia.
Speaker 4:After the failure in Somalia, there was a presidential decree, and the presidential decree sort of stipulated that the US would only intervene in situations that were directly relevant to their national interests. And, as a result, for a good part of the period of the genocide, more than half the US representative on the Security Council tried to ensure that there would be no peacekeeping operation, because they did not want to be part of a peacekeeping operation and they didn't want to be seen not to be part of a UN peacekeeping operation. So they did, you know. So, basically, you know, madeleine Albright did as much as she could to ensure that there would be no intervention. I mean we were in the midst of trying to convince New York of the horror and the magnitude of what was going on and in a way, at least at the beginning, we were countering the narrative that was being given to the Security Council by members of the Security Council.
Speaker 1:That must be. I mean, I hear this on a regular basis still from the UN's humanitarian community the frustration of trying to tell the Security Council what's happening to ordinary innocent civilians and they're not listened to. I mean, do you think this is ever going to change?
Speaker 4:That's a pretty fundamental question. Let's put it this way when you look at the conflicts today, I don't see much of a change.
Speaker 5:No, the Security Council has authorized the use of force to protect civilians and civilian areas targeted by Colonel Qaddafi.
Speaker 1:And when, in 2011, on the one occasion when the UN chose to use R2P's last resort military intervention.
Speaker 4:The United States and the world faced a choice.
Speaker 5:Qaddafi declared he would show no mercy to his own people. He compared them to rats.
Speaker 1:Gareth Evans, too, believes the Security Council, or specifically three members of it the US, the UK and France, known as the P3, got carried away.
Speaker 2:Libya worked initially exactly as R2P was intended to work. Exactly as R2P was intended to work. When Colonel Gaddafi was exercising one-sided violence against his own people, the UN Security Council unanimously gave him an ultimatum stop or we will come back and further consider our options, which you are not going to like. Three weeks later, in the context of movement of Gaddafi's forces across northern Libya to Benghazi and with everybody anticipating a massacre population which could have cost maybe 10,000 lives, in that context, there was this agreed resolution in the Security Council to enable a civilian protection military operation to take place, and that succeeded. That succeeded in stopping the march on Benghazi, stopping Gaddafi in his tracks. If there'd been anything like that response in Rwanda in 1994, 800,000 people in Rwanda would be alive today.
Speaker 2:What went wrong is the P3 got carried away would be alive today. What went wrong is the P3 got carried away. They said we are going to take this mandate and use it to enforce regime change. We're not going to take any notice of any of you, the South Africans and others, who are arguing for an attempt at diplomatic negotiation. Not going to take any notice of you the Russians, the Chinese, the Indians, all of whom were on the Security Council at the time. That was catastrophic in terms of its implications for the emerging, catastrophic situation in Syria. There was no condemnation, there was no threat of sanctions, no application of sanctions, no threat of criminal prosecution through international mechanisms. There was nothing, because the Security Council members had completely resisted what they saw as the overreach of the P3 and believed that you know, give these guys an inch and they'll take a mile. We're not going to give them an inch.
Speaker 1:Some people might say and I hear this a lot at the United Nations in Geneva that these mechanisms, as they're sometimes called, r2p or some of the stuff, the launching of inquiries, you and human rights council that they work quite well against the little guys. But the big guys are. The big powerful countries are immune, even if pretty bad things are happening.
Speaker 2:I think all you can do is hang your hat on, in the context of atrocity crimes, the absolute necessity to recognise that there are some kinds of behaviour which are just inconceivably beyond the pale, whatever country we live in, and just do demand this response.
Speaker 2:And I think there is a sense in which you know we have succeeded in creating a new norm in which at least countries are embarrassed to be seen to be perpetrating atrocities.
Speaker 2:I mean, there is this sense that there are some things we just can't get away with. I think it's inconceivable today that someone like Henry Kissinger could say as he did in 1975, six months after the Khmer Rouge had begun their genocidal atrocity campaign with the deaths of already hundreds of thousands of Cambodians on their hands, when he was reported as saying to his Thai counterpart you can tell those Cambodians on their hands. When he was reported as saying to his Thai counterpart, you can tell those Cambodians we'll be their friends, they're a murderous bunch of thugs, but we won't let that stand in our way. That degree of cynicism, I think, is just inconceivable today. People are not going to change their behavior easily, but at least you can embarrass them, you can shame them. So it's a long haul, and we've got a long way to go before recapturing any capacity for serious consensus where it really matters in the Security Council and elsewhere. But I don't think it's been a waste of time.
Speaker 1:And what about Chris Stokes and Charles Petrie, 30 years on? Both have stayed in humanitarian work, both have memories of Rwanda that will never leave them, and both sometimes feel deep pessimism and grief.
Speaker 3:I don't think there's been significant progress. Perhaps there was an impression in the 90s that R2P, or Responsibility to Protect, and international intervention could come to the rescue of civilians and populations in need, but we've seen that largely fail in any number of settings. I mean, we can look today at Darfur, sudan. No one expects it, no one's even talking about any form of international intervention, and the level of suffering in Sudan is horrendous today. So I would say actually that we went from perhaps a hope and illusion that something would be done to actually not expecting anything at all now.
Speaker 1:It is 30 years since Rwanda. You were a very young man when you were there. You stayed with MSF and you spent a lot of time in conflict zones, but still people will ask violence on that scale? How do you process it? How do you carry on?
Speaker 3:Well, interestingly, we've had conversations with colleagues today about what we're doing in Gaza. So I don't want to draw an artificial parallel between Rwanda and Gaza, but there is a sense from some of our colleagues in Gaza today. What's the point? Humanitarian action is insignificant. Look at the scale of the suffering that Wanda taught me actually was, although it did seem absurd given the scale and the number of people who were killed. Ultimately we did start a surgical intervention in Byumba and we did save lives and for those people who were there, those survivors, that action was important. So, even in the darkest of moments, you have to try and save some lives and not have what we call in French la paix des cimetières, the peace of the cemetery, where no one survives the conflict. And that's what we're trying to do in Ukraine, what we're trying to do in Gaza, and it's a lesson I learned the magnitudes of suffering, and those of us who are observers are nowhere close to have suffered or felt.
Speaker 4:But when you get older, much older, and you come to sort of the third phase of your life, yeah, then it really hits you hard, and I've had a few friends who've committed suicide as a result, which I totally understand. So it does weigh on you being a spectator of horror, being asked to pray that the kids be shot rather than hacked to death. All that you know, you think you can deal with it, but it comes to haunt you much, much, much later.
Speaker 1:Does it still?
Speaker 4:Yeah, of course I've used. I've tried different things, but I've used hypnosis, which I thought was really interesting. And I have a friend, a very good friend, who's going through a really really hard time, and so I told him try hypnosis. You know, it's sort of like a valve that eases some of the pressure. And his response to me was will I lose my sense of sadness? And I told him look, my friend, that's something you will never lose. You can't lose your sadness. And so, yeah, so it stays with you. No, you don't deal with it, but the only thing you deal with is you're able to deal with the mental pain.
Speaker 1:And that brings us to the end of this edition of Inside Geneva. My thanks to Gareth Evans, Charles Petrie and Chris Stokes for sharing their thoughts, analysis and memories with us.
Speaker 1:If you have comments on Inside Geneva, don't hesitate to contact us at insidegeneva, at swissinfoch. In our next episode we'll be looking at artificial intelligence, warfare and autonomous weapons. Are the weapons being used in Gaza, Ukraine or Russia a sign of how future wars will be fought? Who controls them? Do the Geneva Conventions apply? Join us on April 30th for that, and as the UN investigates its embattled agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, check out our episode taking a deep dive into what the agency does and why Israel says there's a problem with it. You can find Inside Geneva and subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts. A reminder you've been listening to Inside Geneva from Swissinfo, the international public media company of Switzerland, Available in many languages as well as English. Check out our other content at wwwswissinfoch. I'm Imogen Folks. Thanks again for listening and do join us next time on Inside Geneva.