Isaacs, Tracy (2011). Moral Responsibility in Collective Contexts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
1. Collective Wrongdoing, Collective Harm, Collective Solutions: Four Cases
I started to think about writing this book very shortly after the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Over a three week period in the spring of 1994, over eight hundred thousand members of the Tutsi group and their sympathizers were hacked to death by over one hundred thousand members of the rival Hutu group. The animosity between these two groups owed directly from a history of Belgian colonialism in Rwanda throughout the twentieth century. Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian general who led the o cial UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda during the genocide, writes that “the Belgians viewed the minority Tutsis as closer in kind to Europeans and elevated them to positions of power over the majority Hutu, which exacerbated the feudal state of peasant Hutus and overlord Tutsis.” The collective atrocity that escalated into full-scale genocide in the spring of 1994 involved moral failures at the individual and the collective levels. At the collective level, more than the collective agent who perpetrated the act shouldered its share of the collective guilt. When all was said and done, not only were there over one 1 p. 4 hundred thousand suspected perpetrators, including over sixty-ve who have been tried at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, there was also alarming and convincing evidence that the actions of the international community, particularly the United Nations, contributed in great measure to the extent of the slaughter. Despite early reports indicating a coordinated and systematic e ort to kill any man, woman, or child who was Tutsi, “as de facto custodians of the term ‘genocide’ the UN was slow to designate the events in Rwanda accordingly."