[Peace-discuss] Fwd: How dare Bush invoke Rwanda to justify his war.....

[Alfred Kagan]

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>>  How dare Bush invoke Rwanda to justify his war
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>>  By GERALD CAPLAN
>>  Wednesday, March 12, 2003 -
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>>  Just about every day, George W. Bush or his acolytes lie about why his
>>  administration is about to attack Iraq. Often these distortions are
>>  preposterous. An obvious example is Mr. Bush's dismissal of the United
>>  Nations as irrelevant because other Security Council members 
>>refuse to buckle
>>  under to U.S. demands. In fact, it's the United States that's done most to
>>  undermine the UN in the recent past, not least by withholding hundreds of
>>  millions of dollars that it's owed in dues.
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>>  But there are depths even Mr. Bush shouldn't be allowed to plumb without
>>  rebuttal. This week, his spokesman, Ari Fleischer, reached these limits.
>>  Pouring contempt on the UN's record of inaction, Mr. Fleischer 
>>said on Monday
>>  that, "from the moral point of view, as the world witnessed in Rwanda . . .
>>  the UN Security Council will have failed to act once again." In a literal
>>  sense, he is dead right; the Security Council did fail miserably 
>>in 1994. But
>>  his insinuation distorts what happened. With the ninth anniversary of the
>>  Rwanda genocide only weeks away, certain truths mustn't become casualties of
>>  U.S. spin doctors.
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>>  To begin, Mr. Fleischer should review an interview between ABC's Sam
>>  Donaldson and Mr. Bush during the 2000 presidential campaign. When Mr.
>>  Donaldson asked him what he would do if "God forbid, another Rwanda should
>>  take place," Mr. Bush replied: "We should not send our troops to stop ethnic
>>  cleansing and genocide outside our strategic interests. . . . I would not
>>  send the United States troops into Rwanda."
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>>  Second, as Mr. Fleischer must surely know, the Security Council failed to
>>  intervene in Rwanda because Washington opposed any such intervention. This
>>  was the stance pushed by UN ambassador Madeleine Albright on behalf of the
>>  Clinton administration, and the position of Republicans in Congress. A rare
>>  moment of U.S. political consensus allowed a clique of Rwandan extremists to
>>  orchestrate one of the classical cases of genocide in the 20th century,
>>  annihilating some 800,000 Tutsis and thousands of moderate Hutus.
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>>  To highlight today's moral irony, America's efforts to prevent the Security
>>  Council from intervening in Rwanda was fervently seconded by none other than
>>  Britain, then led by John Major. No wonder the world cringes when Tony Blair
>>  makes "the moral case" for invading Iraq and when Mr. Fleischer uses the
>>  phrase "the moral point of view."
>>
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>>  Let me stress that none of this is either esoteric or in dispute. Bill
>>  Clinton himself later went to Rwanda and publicly apologized for his failure
>>  to act, although he blamed his ignorance for his inaction. He was lying. The
>>  truth has been thoroughly documented. A 1999 TV documentary by BBC/PBS
>>  featured senior U.S. officials acknowledging that the administration had
>>  known exactly what was happening in Rwanda throughout the months of the
>>  genocide and deliberately chose to allow it to happen. A report I wrote the
>>  following year expanded the evidence, and a knockout blow was delivered last
>>  year in Samantha Power's formidable study, A Problem from Hell: America and
>>  the Age of Genocide.
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>>  It is true that many others abandoned Rwanda as well, most notably those
>>  passionate opponents of the impending war against Iraq: France and the Roman
>>  Catholic Church. Both, with unparalleled influence within Rwanda, could very
>>  possibly have stopped the genocide before it began. Neither even tried.
>>
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>>  But once the genocide was launched, the U.S. role at the Security 
>>Council was
>>  decisive. America alone possessed the influence and the resources 
>>to mobilize
>>  the kind of military force that General Romeo Dallaire, sitting in Rwanda
>>  commanding a puny UN military mission, repeatedly begged for. Coming as it
>>  did only months after the humiliating deaths of 18 U.S. Rangers in Somalia,
>>  with the Republicans denouncing the folly of foreign interventions, Mr.
>>  Clinton wasn't prepared to risk losing a single vote over a mere genocide.
>>  For domestic political reasons, his administration repeatedly made sure that
>>  the Security Council delivered no reinforcements to the UN mission, even
>>  going so far as to sabotage attempts to do so. As a result, during 
>>the entire
>>  100 days of slaughter, not a single extra soldier or bullet 
>>arrived in Rwanda
>>  to help Gen. Dallaire stop the slaughter.
>>
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>>  The world, led by the Americans, abandoned Rwanda at its time of peril. In
>>  all decency, the least we can expect now is that Mr. Bush doesn't compound
>>  the betrayal by invoking the genocide to justify his own unjust war.
>>  Gerald Caplan is the author of Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide, the report
>>  of the international panel of eminent persons that investigated the 1994
>>  slaughter in Rwanda.


-- 


Al Kagan
African Studies Bibliographer and Professor of Library Administration
Africana Unit, Room 328
University of Illinois Library
1408 W. Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61801, USA

tel. 217-333-6519
fax. 217-333-2214
e-mail. akagan at uiuc.edu