800,000 DEAD RWANDANS--Why Didn't Clinton do what was right? [View All]

[FrenchieCat]

Oh yeah....what am I talking about; Bill said sorry 4 years later.

Why did the United States not do more for the Rwandans at the time of the killings? Did the President really not know about the genocide, as his marginalia suggested? Who were the people in his Administration who made the life-and-death decisions that dictated U.S. policy? Why did they decide (or decide not to decide) as they did? Were any voices inside or outside the U.S. government demanding that the United States do more? If so, why weren't they heeded? And most crucial, what could the United States have done to save lives?

In March of 1998, on a visit to Rwanda, President Clinton issued what would later be known as the "Clinton apology," which was actually a carefully hedged acknowledgment. He spoke to the crowd assembled on the tarmac at Kigali Airport: "We come here today partly in recognition of the fact that we in the United States and the world community did not do as much as we could have and should have done to try to limit what occurred" in Rwanda.

This implied that the United States had done a good deal but not quite enough. In reality the United States did much more than fail to send troops. It led a successful effort to remove most of the UN peacekeepers who were already in Rwanda. It aggressively worked to block the subsequent authorization of UN reinforcements. It refused to use its technology to jam radio broadcasts that were a crucial instrument in the coordination and perpetuation of the genocide. And even as, on average, 8,000 Rwandans were being butchered each day, U.S. officials shunned the term "genocide," for fear of being obliged to act. The United States in fact did virtually nothing "to try to limit what occurred." Indeed, staying out of Rwanda was an explicit U.S. policy objective.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200109/power-genocide

The Rwandan Genocide was the 1994 genocide of the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutu sympathizers in Rwanda and was the largest atrocity during the Rwandan Civil War. This genocide was mostly carried out by two extremist Hutu militia groups, the Interahamwe and the Impuzamugambi, over the course of about 100 days, from April 6 through mid-July, 1994. At least 500,000 Tutsis and thousands of moderate Hutus died in the genocide.<1> Some estimates put the death toll between 800,000 and 1,000,000.<2>

In the wake of the Rwandan Genocide, the international community, and the United Nations in particular, drew severe criticism for its inaction.

Even at the inception of the genocide, the U.S. government clearly knew what was about to unfold. In fact, the State department of the U.S. was aware of the spreading of anti-Tutsi propaganda by radio, through which Hutu militias were coordinating and organizing massacres.<29> They were aware of what was occurring in Rwanda however, they failed to recognize the gravity of the situation. In fact U.S. officials called it an "inevitable, unstoppable ethnic conflict," that was a result of "ancient tribal hatreds" and that it was in a way "typical" of the region.<30> It was this intuition and mindset that led them to dismiss the possibility of intervention.

Unlike Bosnia, the people being massacred in Rwanda were black, and neither country "maintained strategic or economic interests" in that region.<33> Policy makers argued that "intervention did not align with American interests," and as a result nothing was done to put a halt to the violence and destruction.<34> The U.S. thus denied the truth that events in Rwanda constituted genocide, and remained inactive and apathetic towards an escalating.

In March 1998, on a visit to Rwanda, U.S. President Bill Clinton spoke to the crowd assembled on the tarmac at Kigali Airport: "We come here today partly in recognition of the fact that we in the United States and the world community did not do as much as we could have and should have done to try to limit what occurred" in Rwanda.<40> Four years after the genocide, Clinton issued what today is known as the "Clinton apology," in which he acknowledged his failure to efficiently deal with the situation in Rwanda.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_Genocide