Watching Hotel Rwanda, can't believe we let it happen, Sudan?

[usregimechange]

Where was I when this was happening? What is the current situation in Sudan?

[Tempest]

1. Just as Nick Nolte's character said

The U.S. media doesn't care if black people in a impoverished country kill each other.

You didn't know about it because the U.S. corporate media didn't report it.

If you liked Hotel Rwanda, look for HBO's movie "Sometimes in April".

[usregimechange]

2. I watched that one first. I feel like crap. I should have known.

[Tempest]

5. So did I (saw Sometimes in April first)

I still wanted to see Hotel Rwanda, despite knowing how I'd feel afterwards.

Seeing both movies was important. You got to see it through the eyes of a civilian and through the eyes of a reluctant military officer.

The movies intertwined quite often. In "Sometimes in April", the narrator took refuse in the hotel which was the subject of Hotel Rwanda.

[NewInNewJ.]

3. I felt the same way when

I watched. It is so heart wrenching. I can't remember where I was either when this blood bath took place. Makes you sick to think we sat back and allowed this to happen.

[Tempest]

6. The part where I felt the sickest

Was the footage of the Clinton official parsing over the word genocide.

Recently, Clinton said it was a mistake on his part not sending troops to prevent the massacres. He said it was one of the low points of his administration.

[woodleydem]

12. Clinton has admitted that it was the biggest mistake of his administration

I was able to see Bill Clinton speak my senior year at the University of Florida, and he mentioned that the biggest regret of his two-term administration was his failure to intervene in Rwanda. The Clinton official in Hotel Rwanda who was parsing words was Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers, who insisted on saying "acts of genocide" instead of genocide on the the advice of the State Department. It doesn't bring back the 800,000 lost lives, but at least Clinton admits his errors. The incidents in Somalia a year earlier made the Clinton Administration gun-shy about intervening.

[usregimechange]

4. Do we have a human rights DU group? looking.

[Darranar]

7. It's a mess. And so is the Congo...

And, typically, the North looks away.

There is a ton that could be done with a minimum of violence.

[usregimechange]

9. What is a good source for keeping up on this type of stuff?

Amnesty?

[Darranar]

10. Yes, a good one. HRW is excellent too. n/t

[dogman]

8. General Wesley Clark was working on a plan in the Pentagon.

He stated that our failure to follow through led him to work on a solution for Kosovo and vowed that he would do all he could to stop it from happening again. He has spoken out about Sudan but with the neo-cons in power there is not much hope for those people.

[Tom Rinaldo]

13. Yes, that was one reason why I came to support him

It helped me see past Clark being a military man at a time when I had more of a bias against that than I do now. Clark knew the United States had a moral obligation to intervene in Rwanda and he advocated for that, and yes, when we continued to sit back and let that genocide happen Clark vowed to do more to prevent another one. It became a source of friction between Clark and some others in the Pentagon as major parts of the former Yugoslavia became subject to "ethnic cleansing".

On a recent Bill Maher show Clark directly said that the U.S. military should be part of an effort to stop the current genocide in Sudan. He didn't mince words or make conditional statements. He's the only leading politician I've heard be that clear concerning what it happening in Sudan and what needs to be done to stop it.

[Totally Committed]

24. You might be interested to read his fine speech...

In which he talks about Dafur. It takes it further and spells it out better than he did on Maher:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=1762578&mesg_id=1762578

TC

[usregimechange]

11. Join to keep informed, never let this happen again.

You can join Amnesty International's action team here:

http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/join/

[Name removed]

22. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[alarimer]

14. I watched this tonight

Very moving film. Why in the hell did we not do anything? I think it was because they were Africans. We intervened in Bosnia when the white folks were killing each other. It made me sick to watch this. I am deeply ashamed of my goverment at the time (It was on Clinton's watch). I think Clinton didn't take a stand because the Republicans would have had a shit fit. And he didn't have the guts to stand up to them.

[wyldwolf]

15. Wesley Clark lobbied to go into Rwanda...

oops! Didn't see that someone had already pointed that out.

[CAG]

16. If we could just convince Cheney that Sudan sits over oil

then he would be able to care about their human rights. After all, the repubs all of a sudden care about human rights in countries as long as our corporations can grab all of the nations natural resources.

By the way, how is it not obvious to anyone with an IQ over 30 that the reason we here so much propaganda against the DEMOCRATICALLY-ELECTED Venezuala leader Chavez is that he simply doesn't sell enough oil to us and he won't let our corporations raid Venezuala's natural resources????

That may be the longest sentence on this message board this year.

[FrenchieCat]

17. Samantha Power said it succinctly....

Power, Harvard Professor and pulitzer award (2003)winning author of "A Problem from Hell" America and the Age of Genocide
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060541644/qid=1114936910/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-7692952-2877630?v=glance&s=books
I spent about seven years looking into American responses to "genocide in the twentieth century, and discovered something that may not surprise you but that did surprise me, which was that until 1999 the United States had actually never intervened to prevent genocide in our nation's history. Successive American presidents had done an absolutely terrific job pledging never again, and remembering the holocaust, but ultimately when genocide confronted them, they weighed the costs and the benefits of intervention, and they decided that the risks of getting involved were actually far greater than the other non-costs from the standpoint of the American public, of staying uninvolved or being bystanders. That changed in the mid-1990s, and it changed in large measure because General Clark rose through the ranks of the American military.

The mark of leadership is not to standup when everybody is standing, but rather to actually stand up when no one else is standing. And it was Pentagon reluctance to intervene in Rwanda, and in Bosnia, that actually made it much, much easier for political leaders to turn away. When the estimates started coming out of the Pentagon that were much more constructive, and proactive, and creative, one of the many deterrents to intervention melted away.
http://www.kiddingonthesquare.com/2004/01/index.html

[southlandshari]

18. 5/4 Heads Up! "Sometimes in April" on PBS tonight, 8:00 pm CST

More info here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x3598905

[Fire Walk With Me]

19. Darfur

Even in the film "Sahara" the despot chief said, "This is Africa. No one cares about Africa."

Darfur:

http://www.darfurgenocide.org/

[FrenchieCat]

21. Yes we are....letting it happen all over again...most shameful!

As Clark did about Rwanda and Kosovo, he has been advocating that we should intervene in Dafur. Again, his cries land on deaf ears. I will say that Kosovo was acted upon BEFORE a Genocide could actually take place, and for that, Clark has been criticized by those who needed 300,000 dead bodies before they would consider it a genocide. Figures!

http://www.eamedia.org/2005/nr05/01.php
US FORCES SHOULD INTERVENE IN DARFUR, SUDAN – GEN. WESLEY CLARK
Almaty, Kazakhstan, April 23 – The United States should intervene militarily to stop the killing in the Darfur province of Sudan, General Wesley Clark told a media conference in Kazakhstan.

"US forces with a mandate and adequate cover should go in and stop the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Darfur," he said in answer to a question. "It has gone on long enough. Enough is enough. It must stop."

http://www.keepmedia.com/pubs/USATODAY/2004/07/06/501055?extID=10026
Out of time in Darfur
By Wesley Clark and John Prendergast | Jul 06 '04

For the past year, the international community has shamefully acquiesced to the crimes against humanity occurring daily in the Sudanese province of Darfur.

"Janjaweed" militias, Arabs backed by the Sudanese government, are continuing to conduct mop-up operations against non-Arab villagers in a massive ethnic-cleansing campaign in the region. The current conflict flared early last year when two rebel groups in Darfur attacked government forces. The swelling crisis could leave hundreds of thousands dead in the coming months.

Also, Clark is a board member of this group here:
http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=3060&l=1
as a Vice Chair -- of which George Soros is a chairman...
http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=1139&l=1

[Adelante]

20. This was in ABC's The Note today

Retired Gen. Wes Clark was scheduled to speak at the United States Holocaust Memorial museum last night. An excerpt from his prepared remarks:

"It was my duty, as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, to witness what the news media called ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. Now, I don't know what ethnic cleansing is supposed to mean but what I saw was neighbors raping and killing neighbors. Thugs and gangs calling themselves armies and officers carrying out the devils own work against their fellow man. People they knew and didn't know. President Clinton ordered the end of the killing and raping, remembering our promise, our prayer of never again. We put an end to the systemic slaughter of innocent people in the Balkans and we put Slobodan Milosevic behind bars."

"Today we are still well short of our ideal, however. In the Darfur region of the Sudan, people are being slaughtered on the basis of their race. To date, our best public estimates read that more than 200,000 men, women and children have been killed, often with blunt force trauma or machetes. Can it be said by our children's children that we are keeping the promise we made in 1945? Will our legacy reflect the commitment the people in this room have to the end of genocide? That will be up to each of us."

John DiStaso also Notes that Clark will be in New Hampshire on June 12 for the Manchester City Democratic Committee's annual Flag Day fund-raiser, and Gov. Bill Richardson (D-NM) will keynote the next Politics and Eggs breakfast on June 7.


Edit to add the link, altho it probably won't be good after today:
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/TheNote/story?id=156238

I want to recommend two books to you:

A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power

War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges

[usregimechange]

23. kick