Word: rwanda
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Rwanda is the kind of place that takes away all faith in humanity, all hope that the world is making progress toward some higher plane. This year, the world gasped as genocide in its purest form raged through the country. First, the Hutu-dominated government unleashed a frenzy of killing against the minority Tutsis. Then, when the Tutsis launched a rebellion and seized the country, thousands of Hutus fled in fear to border camps. There, thousands more died from cholera and dysentery. By the time the worst had ended, as many as half a million people had died...
...Rwanda proof of the limits of international humanity? Clearly it was, as Somalia was before it. The logistical capacities and the political will to put a stop to such abuses do not exists. There is though, a world of difference between accepting limits on what can be done, and accepting what has happened. The former is necessary, the latter unconscionable...
...foreign policy of sentiment lurches from one good deed to another, arbitrarily picking its spots for doing good. Rwanda, no; Bosnia, maybe; Somalia, until they start dragging G.I.s through the streets; Haiti, if only the ingrate will...
...peacekeepers had last month unearthed two graves containing 5,400 corpses, just a fraction of the 500,000 minority Tutsi believed murdered. The new repository surfaced only after the U.N. workers had begun digging for soil to fill in the smaller sites. Meanwhile, the flow of defeated Hutu from Rwanda has apparently ceased, in spite of internal U.N. accusations that the victorious Tutsi government was killing returning Hutu refugees for revenge...
...case, many of the evils of the planet (General Cedras and the atrocities of Haitian politics, for example, or the slaughters in Rwanda) undeniably arise from a brutal, uncivilized, masculine side of human character. It may be advisable -- and constitutionally imperative -- for American Presidents to keep American soldiers out of such satanic messes. Clinton has been neither aggressive nor effective in facing the tragedies of Bosnia and Somalia, which may be part of the reason he felt tempted by the apparently more manageable case of Haiti. But if a President asks American soldiers to go in, what is needed...