Alison Des Forges Dead in Plane Crash
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Also aboard was Alison Des Forges, one of the world’s foremost experts on the 1994 Rwanda genocide and its aftermath, said New York-based Human Rights Watch. Des Forges had served as a senior adviser to the organization’s Africa division for almost two decades.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...efer=worldwide
'We knew before, during, and after'
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Why the US didn't intervene in the Rwandan genocide
After a disastrous peacekeeping mission in Somalia, the US vowed to stay away from conflicts it didn't understand.
By Scott Baldauf | Staff
Johannesburg, South Africa - The Clinton administration and Congress watched the unfolding events in Rwanda in April 1994 in a kind of stupefied horror.
The US had just pulled American troops out of a disastrous peacekeeping mission in Somalia – later made famous in the book "Black Hawk Down" – the year before. It had vowed never to return to a conflict it couldn't understand, between clans and tribes it didn't know, in a country where the US had no national interests.
From embassies and hotels in Kigali, diplomats and humanitarian workers gave daily tolls of the dead, mainly Tutsis but also moderate Hutus who had called for tribal peace. The information came in real time, and many experts say that the US and the Western world in general failed to respond.
'We knew before, during, and after'
Yes we did. And when President Clinton vowed "never again" in 1998 we knew the damn war was still going on.
Tom
Bush Defends Clinton's Record on Genocide in Rwanda
I truly am amazed by the simple minded responses given. At least Clinton offered a mea culpa.
A phone call?
The irony is that the US did make such phone calls and halfway expected them to have an effect.
So in bringing up phone calls as a defense of his "brother" President Clinton, President Bush actually got it right as he got it wrong.
I wonder if either of them caught that. Somehow I doubt it.
Tom
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Bush Defends Clinton's Record on Genocide in RwandaPresident Bush, at one point calling President Clinton "brother," defended his predecessor's record on Rwanda during the former U.S. leaders' face-to-face discussion Friday on a range of issues in Toronto.
The event's moderator had asked Clinton whether he had done enough to stop the genocide in Rwanda that occurred early during the Clinton administration, the CBC reported.
"We couldn't have saved all of them," Clinton said, but he lamented that "we could have saved as many as 300,000 lives. ... I have no defense."
But Bush added that it was "not realistic" to think that the Rwandan genocide could have been stopped with a mere phone call by the U.S. president, the CBC reported.