15 years later, Rwanda remembers the massacre/U.S. Says It Failed to Stop Rwanda Killings

[seemslikeadream]

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/africa/04/07/rwanda.anniversary/

(CNN) -- Crowds gathered in somber reflection near the Rwandan capital of Kigali on Tuesday, marking the 15th anniversary of the start of a 100-day genocidal massacre in Rwanda in which an estimated 800,000 people were brutally killed.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame addressed thousands during an emotional candle-lighting ceremony, criticizing the international community for not doing more to prevent the bloody wave of violence.

"I remind those experts that they need to go back to school," Kagame told reporters. "These children you saw here -- you think they are standing there because they are exploiting everybody's guilt?

Sparked by the assassination of then-Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, extremist militias made up of ethnic Hutus slaughtered ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus across Rwanda after Belgian peacekeepers left the country.

During a ceremony at the United Nations, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon reflected on what he described as a "horrifying scene and experience."

"Today is a day to open our eyes to this suffering and honor the memory of those killed in Rwanda 15 years ago," he said. "But beyond reminding us of the horror, that silence should spur us to action."


http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123915527594899839.html

U.S. Says It Failed to Stop Rwanda Killings


LAURIA
UNITED NATIONS -- The United States ambassador to the U.N., during a emotional ceremony here marking the 1994 Rwandan genocide, said that the U.S. government had failed to prevent the mass killings that began 15 years ago on Tuesday.

"Rwanda did not suffer from 'ancient hatreds' between Hutu killers and Tutsi victims," Ambassador Susan Rice said. "It suffered from modern demagogues, from ... those who were willing to kill in the warped name of ethnic difference, from those who saw division and death as a path to power."

Susan Rice, second from right, U.S. ambassador to the U.N., at Tuesday's commemoration of the fifteenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide.
Ms. Rice added, "it suffered from an international community, international institutions, and individual governments -- including my own -- that failed to act in the face of a vast, unfolding evil."

On the night of April 6, 1994, a plane carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi was shot down as it was landing at the airport of Rwanda's capital, Kigali. As the U.N.'s war crimes tribunal on Rwanda later established, militia for the majority Hutu ethnic group the next day put into motion a detailed plan to exterminate the minority Tutsis.

The U.N. says as many as 800,000 Tutsis, along with some moderate Hutus, were slaughtered in just three months with guns and machetes. On the National Security Council at the White House at the time of the genocide, Ms. Rice's position was director for International Organizations and Peacekeeping. In 1997, she got a brief on Africa at State as assistant secretary for African Affairs. She said she visited Rwanda in December 1994, six months after the genocide ended.

[Tab]

1. Well, certainly during the last 8 years

when the word "genocide" was being seriously tossed around, the U.S. did effectively nothing.

I'm sure, however, it's somehow Obama's fault.

[madrchsod]

2. remember Samantha Power?

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200109/power-genocide

it`s time for the usa to own up to what we did and did`t do during the genocide.

[givemebackmycountry]

3. When will we wake up and understand...

That when evil rises up we must stop it.
800 thousand dead.
Next thing we know it will be 6 million and we are right back where we were decades ago.
This must end.

We have to start to stop killing each other.

[uppityperson]

4. k&r with thanks for people everywhere

I was doing a check to see if anyone had posted the 15th anniversary info yet, and here you are.

What a total fuck up that mess was. Nasty people, hate radio, too much dithering to get help in.