ANTHONY LAKE: A Look Back at Rwanda

If he could turn back the clock, there is one thing Anthony Lake, President Clinton's national security adviser, would handle differently during his time in the Clinton White House - Rwanda.

During a talk last Thursday on Rwanda, the Darfur region of Sudan, and the H.I.V./AIDS crisis in Africa, Mr. Lake reflected on America's response, or lack of response, to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. The director Terry George, who lives in Noyac, opened the discussion, held at the Jewish Center of the Hamptons, by showing excerpts from his film, "Hotel Rwanda."

Mr. Lake, who was introduced as a new member of the community and a new member of the congregation, remembered visiting a church in Rwanda shortly after the spring 1994 genocide. The bodies of women and children had been left where they were slain and the courtyard was filled with still more bodies. "It was worse than anything I ever saw in Vietnam," Mr. Lake said.

More than 10 years later, he still asks himself, he said, "how anybody could have allowed this to happen. . . how I, because I loved Africa, could have allowed this to happen." At the time, he said, senior administration officials were absorbed with Bosnia and Haiti, and Rwanda was "even less than, horribly, a sideshow, it was a no-show."

There were no senior administration level meetings on the situation in Rwanda. "While I try to explain it, there can be no justification for what any of us did or did not do," Mr. Lake said. "I never asked him [Clinton] to make a meeting to intervene or not intervene, and that was wrong."

During that spring in Rwanda, nearly one million people were killed, mostly by machete-wielding Hutu extremists, as the United Nations and all the world's superpowers stood by.

"There was a national silence on this. . . . It all adds up to a horrible, horrible failure to act," Mr. Lake said, but added, "We earn the right to mourn our past mistakes by working to prevent future catastrophes like this."

Mr. Lake, who now chairs the United States fund for UNICEF, pointed to the ongoing violence in the Darfur region of Sudan, where some 400,000 people and counting have died in the past two years due to violence, hunger, or disease.

The international community is paying more attention to Darfur than it did to Rwanda, in part because of the lessons learned from Rwanda. "Nonetheless, this is a genocide that is going on," Mr. Lake said.

Citing figures from the Web site www.beawitness.org, Mr. Lake said that in the month of June only one of every 950 hours of television news was devoted to the genocide in Darfur. During the same period, there were 50 times as many news stories about Michael Jackson and 12 times as many stories about Tom Cruise.

One way to fight atrocities such as the one going on in Darfur now is "by bringing more attention to them and by providing money and support for the people out there working on them," Mr. Lake said.

As terrible as the genocide is, the greatest crisis of all in Africa is that of H.I.V./AIDS. Fifteen million of the 20 million people who have died worldwide from AIDS have been in Africa. "In Swaziland, you have an almost unimaginable situation, a Rwanda without machetes," Mr. Lake said. Half of the women in that country are infected with H.I.V./AIDS.

"When you see constant pictures of people starving in Ethiopia, people killing each other in Darfur, that becomes a caricature," he said. "That is not Africa. There are terrible things that are happening in Africa, but that is not Africa. Most Africans are not killing each other, not starving, not holding their hands out asking for help."

Still, there are many ways the international community can help in Africa, he said, because the Africans "want to help the situation as well."

There is a moral imperative to act, Mr. George said, but people should remember that their issues are our issues, too. Unrest, poverty, and disease in one area of the world always affects other areas of the world.

Mr. Lake spoke of the "banality of evil." It is sometimes hard to imagine, he said, that someone you can sit across the table from and get to know is capable of acting on the worst in their nature.

"Evil is a word I'm very frightened of, and not for the obvious reasons, because it's a two-edged sword," Mr. George said. "They're saying the same thing about us and what they do. . . most times more effectively, is demonize the opposition. You have to start from the premise that they don't start out as evil," so that you can get at the roots of violence and hatred. He pointed to last month's London bombers. "It's no use getting to the point where they get on the bus. . . you've got to stop them before they get on the bus."

"When people turn to evil, they must be opposed," Mr. Lake said. He says the United Nations needs to change its rules of engagement in Darfur to deal with the situation not as a civil war, but as a genocide, so it can protect the potential victims of violence before Darfur becomes another Rwanda.

With all the unrest and anger and poverty teeming in so many countries in Africa, it is an important region to watch, to be involved in, and to foster democracy in, Mr. George said. "Africa is up for grabs."