Yet all the minorities in the Middle East, whose very existence is under direct and immediate threat, have received from western governments is a woolly undertaking that they will collect evidence. I visited the genocide sites in Rwanda—a salutary and chilling experience. I am always struck that President Clinton and British Ministers of the day say that their failure to identify and take action to prevent that genocide, which led to the loss of 1 million Tutsi lives, was their worst foreign affairs mistake. In the past two years, two serving British Foreign Secretaries have similarly lamented the failure of the international community to decry the genocides in both Rwanda and Bosnia quickly enough, despite the overwhelming and compelling evidence that existed. William ( Lord) Hague, speaking as Foreign Secretary on the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, said: “The truth is that our ability to prevent conflict is still hampered by a gap between the commitments states have made and the reality of their actions”. His successor, Mr Philip Hammond, said last year that the horror of Srebrenica, “demands that we all try to understand why those who placed their hope in the international community on the eve of genocide found that those hopes were dashed”. The reality has been that once it is recognised that genocide is being committed, serious legal obligations follow, and states have proved reluctant to engage with their responsibilities. There are really only two options here. If there is no genocide, our obligations under the genocide convention have not been triggered, but if there is, how could we sleep at night having disregarded the chilling lessons of past
beatings are routine, and where prisoners were so hungry they were reduced to eating rats, snakes, or even searching for grains in cow dung. She said that in such places “the dignity of human life counted for nothing. The guards told us that we are not human beings, we are just prisoners, so we don’t have any right to love. We were just animals. Even if people died there, they didn’t let the family members outside know” Voices like Hae Woo’s are a radical counter point to a regime which, when it speaks, does so with a mixture of braggadocio and blackmail – alternating between threats to blow us to kingdom come and demands that we stay quiet about gulags which executes and incarcerates and e vast numbers of its own people. We can see these killings either as a display of strength or the actions of a weak regime, paranoically trying to cling to power at all costs. Of course, the creation of mass fear is a time-honoured technique of dictators from Nero and Caligula to Ceausescu and Stalin. And it brings to mind my first visits to Poland, Russia, Romania Albania and the Ukraine. In Lviv I met with Bishop Pavlo Vasylk who had spent 18 years in prison, in Prem, and the Ivan Gel, the chairman of the committee of the defence of the Greek Catholic church who had spent 17 years in jail I met a young priest who had been sent to Chernobyl to clear radio-active waste as a punishment for being caught celebrating the liturgies in the open. It helped to remind me how precious the freedoms are which we enjoy in our own country and the liberties that we prize, but how fragile those things can be. Stalin, of course, once mockingly asked "How many battalions does the Pope have?" The election of a Polish Pope in 1978 and the crucial role which he and the churches played in eastern Europe in challenging Marxist totalitarian regimes more than provides the answer.