Word: rwanda
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...have spent the past few days flipping back and forth mentally between the Clinton-Lewinsky business and a new book by the New Yorker's Philip Gourevitch titled We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda...
...disproportion between the two subjects is grotesque, almost a joke. To crowd Lewinsky and Rwanda into the same viewfinder is not just to discuss apples and oranges but to compare, forgive me, apples and severed heads. Each of the dramas discloses a nation in moral crisis, but as Bill Clinton might point out, it depends what you mean by "moral." What a difference in the nations--and in the crises...
...contrast, Rwanda (average monthly income: less than $25) gets rivers clogged with corpses. America's wealth entitles its citizens to work themselves into a moral froth over office fellatio. America's vast First World privilege also means that its scandals are infinitely less dangerous to the man and woman in the street. America's samurai of opinion scream at one another on talk shows; political argument in Rwanda means a million people hacked to pieces by machetes...
...notice one damning convergence. In 1994, the United States, having been burned in Somalia, was desperate to stay out of Rwanda. How to manage that? By pettifogging. By arguing about semantics: the Clinton way. His Administration, pressed to honor the 1948 Genocide Convention (not to mention human decency) by intervening, quibbled at a furious rate about the meaning of the word genocide. Madeleine Albright, who was Clinton's ambassador to the U.N. in 1994, temporized as the death toll in Rwanda climbed into the hundreds of thousands. It was, as Gourevitch writes, "the absolute low point of her career...
CONVICTED. JEAN-PAUL AKAYESU, an ex-mayor from central Rwanda; of genocide; by a U.N. tribunal in Tanzania. It is the first such verdict by an international court. Former Rwandan Prime Minister JEAN KAMBANDA, who pleaded guilty to the crime, was sentenced to life in prison...