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09 September 2005
Rwanda Genocide Sorry. I have been reading a book by Romeo Dallaire. It makes NOLA seem fucking tiny. Really. Blame "Bush"? No: blame Bill Clinton for letting a half million Rwandans die.
what the hell is that supposed to mean, that until people in NO start hacking each other's limbs off with machete, it's not that bad?
and frankly, you should read up a bit about Somalia. after Mogadishu, and the polite bipartisan climate it did generate in Washington, I'm not surprised Clinton acted like he did and stayed away from Rwanda. it made a lot of sense for him, politically. he had very little political capital yet, and in '94 he looked like political dead meat already, and Rwandans don't elect US Presidents, after all (just like the people ruled by US-friendly Central American or Southern American dictators don't elect US Presidents, either -- wouldn't that be interesting)
politicians seldom look forward to go back to private life. Clinton certainly didn't -- hell, he's the guy who killed a brain-damaged man in the '92 campaign just because he didn't want to look like Dukakis. (for our younger readers: just google up "Rickey Ray Rector")
having said that, it would be so cool to have politicians who do the right thing and then take the heat and promptly lose elections for that. they're a very rare breed indeed. and they don't last very long, they usually go back to teaching in college or building houses for the poor or stuff like that
(and by the way Dallaire's not bad at all, but Gourevitch's and Samantha Powers' are more important reading on Rwanda, imo. Jim Nachtwey's pictures, too)
umm.. were you? Tone down the rhetoric chief. Calling people assholes and "aweful people" is making your reading recommendations seem a lot less appealing (as is your comparison of apples and oranges).
There's no article to read, since all of you've done is link to google search results.
But then again, perhaps your goal is just to be antagonistic and act morally superior (remind me where you were again when this was happening?).
And anyone that thinks Clinton actually had the power to do anything significant about Rwanda is insane. It speaks less of Clinton than it does of the American people, who are in general a myopic and isolationistic lot.
You might be surprised to learn, as I was, that Rwanda is not part of the United States of America. NOLA, which seems so tiny with its thousands of dead and displaced, is. This might help to explain why people are "blaming" Bush.
I've never seen Anchorman. Being as we live in Seattle, it'll be difficult to keep her away from bridges. How about I just keep her away from Will Ferrell instead?
Did Bush mess up by failing to step in to protect the citizens of New Orleans? Yes.
Did Clinton mess up by failing to step in to protect the citizens of Rwanda? Yes. Of course, I say that because I believe that there was a moral duty to intervene, not because he had a mandate to do so... (like protecting Americans at home) Didn't Clinton appoint the last head of FEMA that actually had disaster relief training? Actually, I can't imagine Clinton not trouncing Bush in either domestic or foreign policy. This argument, aside from being a red herring and slightly offensive, is itself bunk.
Incidentally, if you're a Dallaire fan, you may or may not know that he's been appointed to the Senate.
Probably the best single article on the Western side of what went wrong in Rwanda.
Even if you accept that the US was obliged to act (and that only the US is culpable in failing to do so, because of the UN's structural reliance on US logistics for peacekeeping), you have to ask what the mission was and how likely it was to succeed, and then whether we had the resources to do so. The genocide, after all, had been planned well in advance and took almost everyone outside Rwanda by surprise -- and then the majority of the killing was over within a matter of days or a couple of weeks. Over $100 million (stolen from development funds) was spent on weapons and death squads were prepositioned everywhere.
As it was the UN moved with surprising alacrity, given that it isn't really used to responding to emergencies. Almost all of its peacekeeping missions up to this point had been ex post facto "referee" roles to observe peace agreement compliance; the UN had only recently attempted a more robust nation-building and violence-prevention role, in Somalia, and we all know how well that went. The US, of course, suffered its own humiliation there and the public mood was not one for missions that didn't fit our essential security needs, and Clinton had had a bad first year and really wasn't gonna go back to Congress proposing what went wrong last year.
Sure, Clinton could've shown more courage. The US could've been less isolationist. The other Security Council members could've been less dependent on the US solving their problem for them. The future African Union could've been more mature and stepped up to the plate earlier. And so on. But I don't consider Clinton personally, morally culpable for the entirety of the genocide -- certainly not to the point of apoplexy. That's unfair to the man, and unfair to the office. Dallaire may vent his frustration solely on Clinton, but Dallaire was in a very difficult position and I don't blame him for his anger.
It was a horrible mistake, and the world -- collectively -- shares a certain responsibility given the resources at our disposal. I think we've done our duty which is to learn from that experience. The UN is more robust and capable of peacekeeping today without the US being the keystone that can topple everything by its absence. Africa is more self-assured and self-managing. We're trying a tiny bit harder to get out in front of things like Darfur.
Cryptical, WTF? Your post is angry and emotional but largely without content. Matteo posts a perfectly reasonable response, and you verbally abuse him for holding an opinion and your only justification is "read the fucking book?" If this was MetaFilter, your ass would be flagged and in MetaTalk so fast it would still be spinning.
But you know what? This isn't MetaFilter. There is no MetaChatTalk (thank god). Your behavior in this thread is inappropriate -- for this site or any other, with the exception perhaps of your own. I understand that you're upset, but taking it out on someone else for the sole reason that you don't like what they said is bullshit.
I'm not even going to get started on your dismissal of the tragedy on the Gulf Coast. Would you have said the same had you read that book just after the tsunami? After all, not as many people died then as in Rwanda, either.
The banhammer was a joke, an attempt to tell you what a fuckhead you are to bring the Mefi-mentality here and to demonstrate the next level of the assholatry you've embarked on.
The second point was acknowledging that I'm doing the same thing by making the joke.
And the twizzlers point has a guy with twillzers on his face. Perhaps the frog is more accurate depiction of my feelings.
I stand by my words. I have just finished reading the book for a second time. Have you read it even once? Do you know what actually happened that lead up to the hyper civil war and the genocide? And how fast it happened? Fuck realpolitik. There is no excuse for that kind of colossal and unneccary bloodshed, though the Security Council sure made a go of it.
Read the book and weep, and then defend your (western) country and the UN. And Clinton and god damned Madeline Albright. And Kofi Annan. He was on the front line of this fight but he backed off. A hundred times! As for Bill Clinton, well, he got gun-shy because of Somalia, or so it seems. I met him one day on a speaking tour, no kidding, and I asked him what his greatest faliure was as a president. Maybe he saw Africa in my eyes. His answer was, "Rwanda." He still came across as a politician, but he had the right answer.
Read this book and then re-evaluate.
If I could hack myself to death 800,000 times I would. How many machete hacks is that? Several millions, I imagine. No one seems to get the scale of this. So read the fucking book!
Thank god for death by gun. Death by bullet was a form of grace and an easy out in Rwanda in the spring of 1994. Think about that for a second (as that is all you have to spare right now): you are better of dead than many of these Africans. Potential leaders were assasinated on or about April 7. In their HOMES!
I am tired of Americans being sorry for themselves. I am tired of the United States, period. And I hold a passport. If America is going to do something impressive it had better do it soon. If not, then fuck off with your horror stories and pleas for understanding: we are all misunderstood but not all of us are in control.
CE, I'd be really, really surprised if anybody here, deep down, felt much differently about Rwanda than you do.
Was it a fuck-up? Yeah. Could it have been handled better? Possibly/probably. Hell, I don't know at this great remove. But you know what? As awfully as you may feel for the victims of that genocide, there really isn't much we can do for them now, is there? They've been dead for, what, almost fifteen years now? They are far beyond anything we can do to comfort them.
So the comparison between Rwanda and New Orleans/the rest of the Gulf Coast is something of a non-starter, yes? The US Government has a long history of not always doing the right thing. As do, I think, most governments. To pick out just one example, it's fairly well documented that the US had knowledge of the Nazi death camps long before they did anything about them. As awful as it was, that genocide is a part of the past now, as is Rwanda, while events along the Gulf Coast are still unfolding. Doesn't mean we brush them aside or ignore them, but the needs of the living outweigh the needs of the dead.
Perpetrators of evil, no matter where they are or when they operated, need to be brought to justice. Again, I don't think there's gonna be much arguement on that count here. Self-flagellation, or flagellation of those not directly responsible, on the other hand, is rather self-defeating in my opinion.
As you say, not all of us are in control. Berating people who post to a particular website is fairly pointless, unless those people are very well-connected indeed. I can't speak for anybody else here but I'm just a citizen. I vote, I work for what is right (or at least I try to), I do what I can, but at the end of the day I don't really influence policy much at all.
So my suggestion to you is that you channel your righteous anger in ways that might actually be productive rather than telling us that we'd all be better off dead. Dead people can't work for change; live people can.
To everybody else: sorry, but quality booze gets me going. It's genetic.