Ten years ago in Rwanda, 800,000 people were murdered in 100 days and the world
didn’t stop it:
Rwanda?s extremist Hutu government and military led a campaign to exterminate
the minority Tutsis. One much practiced strategy was to drive Tutsis into
centers such as churches and schools and kill them en mass. Stories abound
by Tutsis
being disabled by having a leg chopped off and left on the ground to await
the return of their killers. Tutsis pleading to be put out of their misery
quickly, children being slaughtered in front of their parents, women being
gang raped and subjected to unspeakable acts before being killed. United Nations
peacekeeping force stationed in the country stood by helplessly and watched
the massacre unfold.
After all was said and dead the U.S. and other countries said they had no idea
this was all happening and that they couldn’t have done anything except:
- The CIA’s National Intelligence Daily, featured the slaughter in Rwanda
on a daily or near-daily basis in April and May 1994. - The State Department’s intelligence briefing saw in Rwanda “genocide and
partition” as early as April 26, reporting declarations of “a ‘final solution’
to eliminate all Tutsis”. - The U.S. did not officially declare the killing genocide until May 25.
Rwandan officilas and some researchers argue:
We consider this more
of a totalitarian purge, a politicide, rather than ethnic cleansing or
genocide. The evidence suggests the killers didn’t try to figure out who everybody
was. They erred on the side of comprehensiveness.
Oh whew, thank God! A totalitarian purge. Sort of like Cambodia? Comprehensivness meaning they
slaughtered everybody.
I have not immersed myself in A Problem From Hell yet – a thick tome
annotating the U.S. reaction to the genocidal events of the past century – usually
amounting to ‘those crazy tribal people’ don’t need us interferin’.
Human Rights Watch’s
report Ten Years Later is a huge account of what happened then and
the efforts of the international war crimes tribunals.
I wonder where genocide is occuring right now – being masked and branded as
just crazy colored people getting their war on.
Leave a Reply to Andu Cancel reply