I dreaded machetes. The Interahamwe were known to be extremely cruel with the people they chopped apart; first cutting tendons so the victims could not run away, then removing limbs so that a person could see their body coming apart slowly. Family members were often forced to watch, knowing they were next. Their wives and their children were often raped in front of them while this was happening. Priests helped kill their congregations. In some cases, the congregations helped kill their priests. Tutsi wives went to sleep next to their Hutu husbands and awoke to find the blade of a machete sawing into their neck, and above them, the grimacing face of the man who had sworn to love and cherish them for life. And Tutsi wives also killed their husbands. Children threw their grandparents down pit toilets and heaved rocks on top of them until the cries stopped. Unborn babies were sliced from their mothers’ wombs and tossed about like soccer balls. Severed heads and genitals were on display. The dark lust unleashed in Rwanda went beyond friendships and beyond politics and beyond even hate itself-it had become killing for killing’s sake, killing for sport, killing for nothing. It raged on, all around the hotel, on the capital’s streets and in the communes and in the hills and in every little spidery valley.

There was a stash of money in the hotel safe. The money was for a last bribe, something to pay the militia to let me and my family be shot rather than face a machete.

Seven time zones away, in the United States, the diplomatic establishment was tying itself up in knots. Everybody wanted to avoid saying a certain word.

A Pentagon study paper dated May 1, 1994, sums up the prevailing attitude. The author was suggesting a way for the United States to take limited action in Rwanda without getting in too deep. “Genocide investigation: Language that calls for an international investigation of human rights abuses and possible violations of the genocide convention-Be Careful. Legal at State was worried about this yesterday-Genocide finding could commit [the U.S. government] to actually ‘do something.’” So the pressure was on. There had to be a way to call what was happening by something other than its rightful name.

It is not as though there was an information blackout. The U.S. government-and, in fact, most of its citizens who watched the news-knew what was taking place in Rwanda. Romeo Dallaire had made himself available to anyone who wanted to interview him by telephone, and had taken to calling the slaughter “ethnic cleansing.” The BBC’s courageous reporter Mark Doyle was granted access to the hopeless UN mission and filed a story every day about the ongoing slaughter. Journalists slowly realized this was more than just another African civil war. And by the end of May the broadcasts of the nightly television news and the newspapers in America were full of accounts of mass murders and bodies floating down Akagera River toward Lake Victoria. But even with this incontrovertible evidence the U.S. government would not let itself admit that what was happening was a genocide. This played right into the official lies of the génocidaires: The killings were a spontaneous uprising of grief among the villagers at the assassination of the president and not something that had been carefully planned.

The official U.S. State Department phrasing was nothing less than bizarre: “Acts of genocide may have occurred.”When spokeswoman Christine Shelley was asked how many acts of genocide it takes to equal a genocide she did a clumsy dance by saying that it could not be determined if the violence was directed toward a certain ethnic group-never mind that five minutes of listening to RTLM would have told them all they needed to know. “The intentions, the precise intentions, and whether or not these are just directed episodically or with the intention of actually eliminating groups in whole or in part, this is a more complicated issue to address, ” she said. “I’m not able to look at all of those criteria at this moment and say yes, no. It’s something that requires very careful study before we can make a final determination.”

All in all, I would call this a very good Rwandan no.

The peculiar avoidance of the word genocide was for a reason. The word is actually a relatively new one in the English language. It was coined by a Polish-born lawyer named Raphael Lemkin who then helped persuade the United Nations to pass a resolution, in 1948, expressly forbidding the destruction of a group of people because of their religion, nationality, or ethnicity. Lemkin had been horrified by the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians during World War I, but was even more appalled that it seemed to be no crime in the conventional sense. Nations could not be held accountable for murder in the same way people could. Furthermore, there was nothing legal or otherwise that separated the random killing of civilians from the attempt to eliminate an entire race.

Grappling for a way to express the magnitude of the Nazis’ plans for and actions against the Jews during World War II, Lemkin decided that we needed a new word to embody the concept. It had to be short and easy to pronounce and convey a certain horror. After some experimentation he chose genocide, blending the Greek word for “race” (genus) with the Latin word for “kill” (cide). The word caught on and was quickly added to Webster’s New International Dictionary. UN member states signed a treaty in 1948 threatening criminal penalties for the leaders of any regime found to have conducted an extermination campaign against a particular religious or racial group. But the United States dragged its feet, fearing the encroachment of a world government telling it how to act. It was not until 1986 that the U.S. Senate finally ratified the agreement. By then genocides had been carried out in Cambodia, in Nigeria, in Pakistan, in Burundi, and in many other places on the globe.

But this is characteristic. As Harvard University scholar Samantha Power has pointed out, the world’s foremost superpower, America, has almost never acted to stop a race of people from being exterminated, even when confronted with overwhelming evidence.

Lemkin’s idea was romantic and idealistic: That it is in the interests of the entire interconnected human family to see that no one part of it is wiped out. And yet ever since, the short-term interests of national sovereignty have always carried the day. So it was with Rwanda, where “acts of genocide may have occurred” but no actual genocide that anyone really cared to see. If U.S. officials actually spoke the word out loud they might have been morally and legally compelled to act under the terms of the 1948 treaty. Few officials in Washington wanted that with a midterm congressional election around the corner. Everyone in the Clinton administration was mindful of the disaster in Somalia that had occurred the previous October, when eighteen Army Rangers were killed in the Black Hawk Down incident that seemed to symbolize everything that could go wrong with peacekeeping missions. Even though our situation was radically different in origin and nature, anything that called for a commitment of American troops to Africa was anathema in the halls of the U.S. State Department. And, of course, there was no natural resource in Rwanda that anybody cared about either-only human beings in danger.

I still wonder how policy officials from that time can sit down at the table with their families and have any appetite for food, or go to sleep at night, knowing that they failed to act. Human beings were sacrificed for political convenience. This would be enough, I think, to turn any reasonable man into a prisoner of his own conscience for the rest of his life.

Even a proposal to jam the frequencies of RTLM was rejected, on the grounds that the Army National Guard airplane required for the overflights cost eighty-five hundred dollars an hour to fly. If that plane had been kept aloft for every second of the genocide it would have worked out to about twenty-four dollars for each life taken that might otherwise have been saved.