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Ten Years After: Rwanda and the G Word, p. 2 The
OAU report found: "There was no issue of insufficient information
in the U.S. Human Rights Watch and the US Committee for Refugees, both
of whom had firsthand knowledge from within Rwanda, persistently held
public briefings and issued regular updates on the course of events.
That it was a genocide was beyond question. Within two weeks, the International
Committee of the Red Cross estimated that perhaps hundreds of thousands
were already dead." The report also charged Clinton by name: "President
Clinton insists that his failure was a function of ignorance. The facts
show, however, that the American government knew precisely what was
happening... But domestic politics took priority over the lives of helpless
Africans." "Stopping
the genocide would not have required a major military operation,"
explains Stephen Morris of Johns Hopkins University's Advanced International
Studies. "The killers were militarily incompetent mobs armed mostly
with clubs, spears and machetes. The then commander of the UN Assistance
Mission claimed that 5000 men and a mandate to act would have been sufficient
to stop the killing." "In
reality the United States did much more than fail to send troops,"
says Samantha Power, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Problem from
Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. "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,
US 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 US policy
objective." President
Clinton visited Rwanda in March 1998 to put some spin on the genocide. "All
over the world," he told the Rwandans, "there were people
like me sitting in offices who did not fully appreciate the depth and
speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror." "He
knew exactly what was going on," says Hentoff. Samantha
Power sums up succinctly: "The United States had never in its history
intervened to stop genocide and had in fact rarely even made a point
of condemning it as it occurred." The
fate of Rwandans ten years ago (or Iraqis today) did not depend on which
branch of the corporate party raised enough money to send their war
criminal to occupy the White House for four years. It's what the people
who live in the world's richest, most powerful nation choose to do (or
not do) that can make a difference in preventing genocide (and preemptive
wars) in the future. "The obligation is not to be personally pure," says Ward Churchill. "The obligation is to effect a measurable change." END This article is adapted from "The Seven Deadly Spins: Exposing the Lies Behind War Propaganda" by Mickey Z.--to be published by Common Courage Press in June 2004.
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