On Rwanda
Man, you want to get disgusted, go to the article and read.It opens with a story of murder that I want to think exaggerated, but I can't.
Remember the Blood Frenzy of Rwanda
Genocide prevention must become a foreign policy priority to avoid a repetition of those hideous crimes.
By Samantha Power
Samantha Power is the author of "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide," which won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, and a lecturer in human rights policy at Harvard University
April 4, 2004
…The Clinton administration's response was best captured by a State Department press conference two days into the slaughter. Prudence Bushnell, the midlevel official who had been put in charge of managing the evacuation of Americans — and only Americans — from Rwanda, spoke with journalists about the Rwandan horrors. After she left the podium, State Department spokesman Michael McCurry took her place and seamlessly turned to the next item on the day's agenda: U.S. criticism of foreign governments that were preventing the screening of the Steven Spielberg film "Schindler's List."
"This film movingly portrays the 20th century's most horrible catastrophe," McCurry said. "And it shows that even in the midst of genocide, one individual can make a difference." McCurry urged that the film be shown worldwide.
"The most effective way to avoid the recurrence of genocidal tragedy," he declared, "is to ensure that past acts of genocide are never forgotten."
No one made any connection between Bushnell's remarks and McCurry's, between Rwanda and the Holocaust. Neither journalists nor officials in the United States were focused then — or in the ensuing three months — on the fate of Rwanda's Tutsis.
By July 1994, when Tutsi rebels took control of the country, the killers had accomplished much of what they set out to achieve. At least 800,000 people — half of the Tutsis who had lived in Rwanda three months earlier — had been eliminated.
The Rwandan genocide revealed, more than any other event in the 20th century, the shallowness of the pledge of "never again." Again, a dozen key plotters managed to organize a society around mass murder. Again, an inconvenient minority found itself targeted for extermination. And again, the world watched.
Indeed, the U.S. and its allies on the U.N. Security Council didn't simply watch. They voted to withdraw the U.N. peacekeepers who were in Rwanda, abandoning Rwandans who had relied upon the blue helmets for their protection.
