Word: rwanda
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...evident from the beginning that the situation in Rwanda was going wrong. But we have not been accustomed to having preventive diplomacy. During the cold war, ((the U.S. was)) ready to have its bombers flying 24 hours a day, which cost you $1 billion a day. But ((now)) U.N. members will not agree to spend $50 million to send troops on a mission to avoid conflict...
...worst part of the triage is knowing that most of the sick never make it close enough to the medical tents to stand a chance. The refugees of Rwanda's civil war stretch for miles in every direction, building what are fast becoming death camps. The old, the young and the weak drop where they are. "You have to choose," says the young nurse, turning away from an older man crying out for help. There are always more voices, pleading with her, pulling at her legs. "You can't get to everybody...
Until last week, the world did not get to everybody either. It certainly did not get to Rwanda, a country so infected by tribal hate and civil war that it seemed beyond saving. Three months of fighting between followers of the majority Hutu government and the mainly Tutsi rebels of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (R.P.F.) left at least 500,000 dead. Most of the victims were Tutsi civilians slaughtered by Hutu militiamen. Of those who survived the genocide, at least 2.2 million have fled the country, including a million Hutu refugees who pushed northwest into the Zaire town of Goma...
That finally propelled President Clinton to action. Since the beginning of April the U.S. has contributed just over $150 million in aid to Rwanda but stoutly resisted leading a full-scale relief effort. On Friday Clinton ordered a round-the-clock airlift of food, water and medicine and dispatched the first of what could soon be up to 4,000 soldiers to distribute it throughout the border regions. The President was moved, he said, by the reports that Rwandans in the camps were dying at the rate of one a minute. "In the days to come," said the President...
Meanwhile, at the U.N., Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali was revising his figures upward as he urged a massive relief effort. The early estimate was $274 million, but "at this very moment, as I am speaking," he said on Friday, "Rwanda's needs are constantly growing." He put the new figure at $434 million, but who could precisely calculate the cost of a catastrophe that $ kept growing? That same day, U.N. relief agencies were busy redrawing their maps after 200,000 more refugees crossed the northwest frontier into Zaire in just 24 hours...