A RWANDAN PROTESTS: Heck, this is one of many things I meant to post recently but forgot to.
It’s from Isidore Munyeshyaka, who contributes to a Rwandan-affairs group I’m in. He was responding to Ari Fleischer’s invocation of the UN’s failure to act to prevent genocide in Rwanda in 1994 as a stick to beat the UN ’round the head and neck with, in order to help excuse bypassing the UN on attacking Iraq. (Also invoked: Kosovo.)
“Madeleine Albright who was then the US Representative at the UN lobbied the UN and urged it to treat the genocide of Tutsis as inter-ethnic massacres!” Isidore recalls, quite correctly. “While now to attack Irak, they have dispatched hundreds of thousands of
troops to the Gulf in preparation of the imminent war, they [the US government of that time] voted for scaling down the contigent of the then ‘toothless’ UNAMIR! in Rwanda.”
(Actually, I think it was worse than that. I seem to recall reading in Sam Powers’ excellent account of US decisionmking during those ghastly weeks of genocide that the Clinton administration was in favor of dismantling UNAMIR altogether. It was only the heroic commitment of Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian commander on the spot, that succeeded in keeping any elements of the force on the job at all. And those few hundred who did stay there– in contravention of Clinton and Albright’s clear policy directives– succeeded in saving thousands of lives of threatened Rwandans.)
“Bush and Blair — or any leader of the time — should feel ashamed,” Isidore wrote, “and should never evoke Rwanda to explain their unjustified war against the people of Irak!”
He ends up, unpacifically, “I wish hell and fire!” But you get the gist of his complaint, I’m sure.
On March 12, Gerald Caplan, the author of Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide, the report of an international panel that investigated the 1994 slaughter in Rwanda, published an article along exactly these same lines in the Toronto Globe & Mail. Read it here.
I guess I’d gotten used to the Bushies ignoring the facts, twisting the evidence, generally misusing the tools of reason in their drive to drive us into this war. But I think this attempt to exploit the tragic history of Rwanda for their own political ends marks a new low.