Tom Dunn's Personal Reflection

I think that the Rwandan Genocide clearly shows that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was not accepted by all people in the world. The Declaration was written some 60 years ago and still this happened only 13 years ago. After World War II, the world thought that something like the Holocaust was over with and could never happen again. Instead, this genocide went against everything mentioned in the Declaration. The tribes killed innocent children, men, and women, old and young. Over 800,000 people were killed in this giant massacre which directly violated the Declaration. In the Holocaust over 6 million Jews and other minorities were brutally massacred with no reguard for human rights. These two events were very similar. However, in the end, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights did not have the power to stop this horrible massacre from happening.

The Rwandan Genocide was very similar to the Holocaust. In both cases, the government decided that certain groups of people weren't worthy enough to live there so they initiated a system to get rid of those groups. They got rid of people based on their races, genders, religions, and history. Also, the killers used ways to kill mass amounts of people without taking a long time. The Interahamwe rounded up villages and then mowed them down with machettes while the Nazis put them in gas chambers. Both of these ways were effective in killing many people in a small amount of time. The only main difference is that in the Holocaust 6 million people were killed and in the Rwandan Genocide about 800,000 people were killed.

The idea of humanism was totally disregarded during the 100 days of the genocide. Obviously, the Interahamawe didn't care what happened to the people and just went on killing people without any thought about human life. The idea that all individuals matter didn't occur to any of the people. People were killed due to their race, gender, and beliefs. The government military just went on killing these people and didn't care about how many people they killed and the fact that they had no real reason for killing these people.

This event really changed the way I viewed the world and the people in it. Reading about the Holocaust effected me but I always really thought of it as something that happened a long time ago. This, however, was so recently. I mean, I was actually alive for this. I can't imagine how much pain and agony these families went through. They saw everything they cared about, their homes, families, and possesions, all torn apart. For those who committed the crimes, I felt extreme hatred towards them. I couldn't imagine what possessed a person the kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people. It was horrible, especially for the government. These people are citizens of your country. They have been there for decades and you just decide that because they have different beliefs and look different, that they aren't worthy to live there. That's just unimaginable.

I think that the efforts by the United Nations are acceptable. The U.N. was created to be able to solve conflicts and uphold the Declaration of Human Rights which is understood to be accepted world wide. So, when something like the Rwanda Genocide happens, the U.N. is supposed to have the power to step in and stop the violence with a few casualties as possible. If the United Nations was to step in to the United States, I wouldn't have a problem with it as long as we were doing something to break the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. If we were, then the United Nations would have the right to step in because that's why the world created it.