As a Catholic, I am very distressed by the suggestion that UN sanctions can justify war.
Morality doesn't depend on the will of the majority. If something is morally wrong, it doesn't matter how many people favor it, and if something is morally right, it doesn't matter how few favor it.
"They should act when they are right to act because the Security Council can be wrong. It was wrong in Rwanda," said Rwandan President Paul Kagame, a tall, lanky man whose straightforward, mild manner belies his status as a powerful national leader who spent years as a guerrilla fighter.
"The Security Council was wrong in Rwanda, about the genocide, and we lost one million people," he said at a downtown San Francisco hotel.
"I do not know whether you have to wait until Kuwait is taken over by Iraq or Saudi Arabia is overrun by Iraq in order to act," he added.
The United States, Britain and Spain have proposed a new U.N. resolution that sets a March 17 ultimatum for Iraq to comply fully with disarmament demands or face a possible war. But France and other veto-wielding Security Council members oppose the measure.
Kagame, who lived most of his life in Uganda, founded the Rwandan Patriotic Front and entered Rwanda in 1990 to fight the Hutu government. He became vice president in 1994 after a genocide in which extremist Hutus killed some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
"Even if there was a resolution telling me not to fight to save my people, I would have simply ignored them, yes, because they were wrong and did not know what was happening," he said. "For me, saving my people outweighs simple obedience to a wrong Security Council."
*** Note - The Vatican did not intervene and never apologised for its inaction in Rwanda, neither did the French. The Clinton administration and the UK at least felt bad enough afterwords to issue apologies |
