1994, during the height of the extermination campaign in Rwanda, as Paris airlifted arms to Mobutu’s intermediaries in eastern Zaire for direct transfer across the border to the génocidaires, France’s President François Mitterrand said—as the newspaper Le Figaro later reported it—“In such countries, genocide is not too important.” By their actions and inactions, at the time and in the years that followed, the rest of the major powers indicated that they agreed. Evidently, it did not occur to them that such a country as Rwanda can refuse to accept the insignificance of its annihilation; nor had
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