Final Curtain in Indochina?
The swift and total collapse of South Vietnam's military forces, the consequent political upheaval in Saigon and the departure of Lon Nol as head of government in neighboring Cambodia are brutal reminders, if any are needed, that an era in U. S. foreign relations has ended. It is ending with a massive defeat for the policy pursued in Indochina over 15 years, under four Administrations and several styles of political rhetoric, from the brave summons to a New Frontier with which John F. Kennedy sent his Green Berets to fight a new kind of war to Richard M. Nixon's doctrine of Vietnamization that claimed to have accomplished a "peace with honor." Peace, of course, never really came for the people of Indochina, and there was little honor in the rout of the South Vietnamese military. In Washington, even Administration spokesmen found it hard to continue their criticism of Congressional refusal to fund increased military aid to Saigon when South Vietnamese soldiers were reported to be abandoning weapons and other expensive hardware in their headlong flight from the enemy.
By the second April 10, as the African Synod opened in Rome--the official title for this meeting is 'The Special Assembly for Africa of the Synod of Bishops"--details had just reached the outside world of the slaughter in Rwanda. Among those killed in the wave of "ethnic cleansing" were 19 Africans gathered at the Jesuits' Christus Centre in the Rwandan capital, Kigali: nine young Rwandan sis¬ters of the congregation "Vita et Pax"; the Rwandan cook; a Rwandan social worker who had apparently sought refuge there; five Rwandan diocesan priests meeting at the center, and three Rwandan Jesuit priests.
At Jesuit headquarters in Rome, African bishops who had arrived for the synod joined the Jesuits' superior general and young African Jesuits studying in Rome to pray for all the victims of ethnic violence in central Africa and for the restoration of justice and peace. The Jesuits who died were remembered precisely for their work at the Christus Centre, which was dedicated to ethnic reconciliation and the protection of the vulnerable.
The term "ethnic cleansing," as we know all too well from former Yugoslavia, is a European coinage. There is nothing specially African about either the euphemism or the reality. As in the Balkans, so in Rwanda, efforts to understand what is happening fall back on terms like "ancient hatreds" and "historic grievances," but there is nothing predestined or inevitable about it. As in the Balkans, so too in Rwanda, unscrupulous and weak-minded politicians--in this case, not hard-line Serbs but hard-line Hutus--have seized upon an unsettled moment to grab more power for themselves and their party by killing off political opponents, mostly Tutsis, but also Hutus working for political reconciliation. Waving the ethnic banner, as in the Balkans, the hard-liners have unleashed ignorant men to massacre the "others," and by
For America's centennial celebration in 2009 James T. Keane, S.J., and Jim McDermott, S.J., authored a series of articles on pivotal episodes in the magazine's history.
"A Man of Independent Character: John J. Wynne and the founding of America Magazine,"
