Why did America intervene in the Balkans twice, but not in Rwanda?

[_Jumper_]

The genocide in Rwanda was MUCH greater than what occurred in the Balkans.

[alcuno]

1. The genocide was happening in the middle of Europe.

The countries surrounding it were mainly NATO countries and thus it was a NATO operation. The fact that no one intervened in Rwanda is a total disgrace.

[_Jumper_]

3. Was Eastern Europe part of NATO at the time?

?

[alcuno]

26. I don't think so, but Greece was a member.

[LibertyorDeath]

2. No strategic location & nothing to exploit.

[_Jumper_]

4. What interest was in the Balkans?

Preservation of NATO?

[DUreader]

17. One of the richest mines in the world is there

[Gore1FL]

38. Interest in the Balkans

was more the result of interest in a stable Europe than anything else. It was most of NATO's back yard. They took action, we committed too.

[bicentennial_baby]

5. No benefit to U.S.

Bad location, did'nt want a repeat of Somalia, no resources to exploit, no detriment to the U.S. by inaction, institutionalized racism, etc.

Many reasons, none of them adequate to explain our shameful inaction, imho.

If you want to read an excellent book on the Rwandan genocide, pick up "We Wish to Inform You that Tommorrow We Will be Killed with our Families", which is an accounting of the whole story.

Another good one is "A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide", which has chapters on Bosnia, Kosovo, and Rwanda.

[ermoore]

28. yeah, a lot of those.

We had just come off of Somalia (another sad example of the West not willing to do the right thing) and it was a lot easier to ignore than Serbia.

Rwanda is a sad, sad blemish on the world's humanitarian record. The world may not have known everything, but it knew enough and still did nothing. The only things sadder than the US's willingness to remain ignorant and pretend nothing was happening was France actually aiding the murderous regime. And also, afterwards the UN's inability to do a damn thing about the refugee camp situation in Zaire. All of it is disgusting.

Of course we haven't learned our lesson as more horrors and atrocities are being committed today in the Sudan. The Sudan? Yeah, I know, I haven't heard anybody anywhere really mention it either. Sad isn't it?

Philip Gourevitch's "We Wish to Inform that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families" is indeed an excellent book. I would highly recommend it.

[fujiyama]

29. Don't forget

what's happening in the Congo now...

[ermoore]

31. True, and other places.

Congo and Sudan probably aren't even the only bad spots in Africa, much less the rest of the world.

The way I see it, the West has fucked up a large part of the world (Africa, MidEast, SouthEast Asia, well, really just about all of it) through colonialism, communism, whatever. Anyway, seems like the West ought to do what it can to help out. Now, it obviously can't solve every problem, but that's no excuse for not doing what you can where you can.

In order to do this though, sometimes we will have to be willing to make sacrifices. Whether it be paying a little higher taxes or in military casualties, sacrifices are necessary. We've done this to them (or at least helped, some of them probably would be in bad shape anyway) and the problem isn't always economic.

[DoYouEverWonder]

6. Clinton has said this is one of his biggest regrets

He says that his administration (nor did anyone else) realize how quickly things were going from bad to worse there. The genocide/civil war in Rwanda happened over a period of just a few months as opposed to the Balkins where the war was going on for a number of years before we finally got involvoed. At the time Clinton say he was blind sided by the situation and just didn't react quickly enough. Couldn't be that Ken Starr and the continual harassment by the rabid GOP have anything to do with keeping him distracted from doing his job?

[bicentennial_baby]

8. Somewhat true

The genocide essentially lasted about 8 weeks, but there was more that we could of done, had we committed to doing it. After Somalia, it just was'nt going to happen, not in the political climate of the time (1994).

[DoYouEverWonder]

12. At least Clinton apologized

and faced the survivors.

http://www.rudyfoto.com/ClintonApology.html

President Clinton Apologizes

As reported by The Associated Press, March 25, 1998


Text of President Clinton's address to genocide survivors at the airport in Kigali, Rwanda, on March 25, 1998, as provided by the White House.



http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/rwaclint.htm

"Clinton Declares U.S. and the World Failed Rwandans," New York Times, March 26, 1998

KIGALI, Rwanda -- President Clinton came to Kigali on Wednesday to talk to scarred and mutilated survivors of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and to acknowledge that the world could have protected them, though it did not.

"We in the United States and the world community did not do as much as we could have and should have done to try to limit what occurred in Rwanda in 1994," the president told half a dozen people here who lost parents, siblings and children during three months of ethnic mass killing that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.

[1songbird]

13. David Corn the author of Bush Lies

states that Clinton did know about the genocide taking place in Rwanda

[DoYouEverWonder]

21. Yes he did know

he just didn't have a lot of time to do anything about it. The whole thing took place in less than 3 months. Do you think he could have gotten Congress or the UN or anyone else to react and send forces in time to be of any use? It's certainly a lot easier when you can be a Monday morning quarter back to say what should and shouldn't have been done under that particular set of circumstances.

[1songbird]

24. Those are all good questions

I guess we'll never know since he didn't try.

[TexasMexican]

7. Most Americans...

dont care about Africa.

[AP]

9. Rwanda was France's mess, I bet. The US didn't want to step on their toes

and France probably would have vetoed any UN action.

It was dirty filthy post-colonial politics with a healthy dose of racism thrown in.

[papau]

25. and the 800,000 killed in only 3 weeks - as we discussed what to do.

It happened very quickly - at least the horrific numbers did

[Character Assassin]

44. Wrong. They were killed over a period of three MONTHS and Clinton knew

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/evil/etc/synopsis.html

He doesn't get a pass on this one.

[loudnclear]

10. You beat me to the question.

But we all know the answer.

[sfecap]

11. Simple...the people in the Balkans were white and European

And there was nothing to exploit in Rwanda.

[number6]

15. ya, thats about it ....

.... no oil ......

[deminflorida]

14. Well, seeing how have my NATO medal from....

the former Yugoslavia, I'll put in my two cents.... historically the Balkans have been a tender box for World Conflict. A good example is my wife's country Poland which is squeezed between two of the most historically agressive nations on earth Germany and Russia. Then of course there was the spark that started WWI, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. Prior history would include the Franco-German War, 1870–71, conflict between France and Prussia(now modern day Germany and parts of Poland) that signaled the rise of German military power and imperialism. It was provoked by Otto von Bismarck (the Prussian chancellor) as part of his plan to create a unified German Empire.

So you see the entire Balkans region has always been a tender box for regional and global conflict.

I'll admit that the genocide that took place in Rwanda was tragic, but I can't ever recall a world confict starting in that region. One has to remember Abraham Lincoln when he was notified that a U.S. warship was attacked by Great Britan in the Civil War, his reply to his war secretary was "One War at a Time".

Of course Lincoln was a Republican, but one must remember that the Republican/Democratic party ideologies seem to have switched during that Dixie-crat thing in the sixties....

O.K. that's enough history my head is starting to hurt

:dunce:

[1songbird]

16. You have to follow the color chart

for this answer. The further you are down the color chart the less you matter.

[BlackFrancis]

18. many reasons

The U.S. is not a credible third party in the third world.

The U.S. has a nasty record of undemocratic, nasty, neocolonialism in the third world and it's inhabitants much like the denizens of the equator zone of 1984 who are unaligned with any of the three great superpowers understand completely that no one is there to "liberate" them or "save" them.

There are other powers that want their manpower or natural wealth but no one goes to war to help people. There is an inverted relationship between how close you are to the system and how much you know about it and your inability to understand what is really going on and the relationship it has to the warmaking powers motivations.

Given all this it didn't take the people of Rwanda long to figure out that no matter what side it came down upon it was there for it's own interests and not theirs and was fairly universally rejected.

[Spazito]

19. Here is an article about the General in charge of the UN ....

peacekeeping force who tried desperately to get the countries involved in stopping the genocide and the effect it had on him. He just wrote a book about it.

http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/Swissinfo.html?siteSect=143&sid=4449932

The Article is titled "Canadian won't let Rwanda genocide die"

[Demonaut]

20. iTS A COLOR ISSUE

[baldguy]

23. Yes.

The Kosovars looked like they were from Cleveland.

The Rwandans were made to look like space aliens in comparison.

[economic justice]

30. Silly

There we go again.

NATO/U.S. hasn't intervened to stop humanitarian calamities MANY times. Since this happened in Rwanda, it must be because of race? Name off all the others outside of Africa that were ignored, was that race, too? If we were to intervene in Africa to stop these things we would be one busy country as --- fact --- it's the most uncivil, corrupt continent on the planet. As a black American, I am NOT proud of that, but would anybody really dispute that? The African continent does NOT need a new colonialism.

[1songbird]

32. Hmmm, please name the other humanitarian calamities that were on

the same scale and were ignored. My memory needs a little refreshing.
Were talking millions in Rwanda.

[ermoore]

34. Well . . .

They're not as recent, but also are on a much larger scale.

Pol Pot killed over 2 million in Cambodia from 1968-1987.
Yahya Khan killed around a million and a half in 1971 in Pakistan.
Tito killed over a million more in the Yugoslav area from 1941-1987.
Not to mention Mao, who killed nearly as many people as Stalin but never had a finger lifted against him.
My source for these figures:


Saddam was ignored until he invaded Kuwait and then again until well . . . recently. I believe more died in Iraq during his reign that did in Rwanda. It's at least in the same ball park.

Still though, does it matter that people are only dying in the hundreds of thousands instead of the millions?

[slaveplanet]

39. hmm- and what was

the percentage of those countries that had goverment enforced civilian disarmament.

and what was the average # of months from the time of the disarmament decrees to the onset of the genocide.

those would be interesting stats.

# of disarmed citizens dispatched by evil governments worldwide:

20th century -170,000,000 est
21st century-?????

[JI7]

22. fears of somalia

i think that has a lot to do with our resistance to intervening in africa on humanitarian grounds. even in the balkans it took some pressure on the clinton administration by human rights activists to finally do something.

[Terwilliger]

27. financial considerations, no doubt

which is why Rwanda is a shame when we justify things like Bosnia and the further hypocrisy in Iraq

[Lexingtonian]

33. Because some people matter more than others to the U.S.

Genocide is simply not a strict criterion for American intervention. For there to be an intervention the interests of some domestic power bloc has to be profoundly affected, that is one essential hurdle, and then there has to a defensible 'moral' reason to prevent PR embarrassments.

The raison in Bosnia and Kosovo was that the crime was occurring on the margins of the West proper, as the American elites define it, so it was an embarrassment to the claim of there existing a Western Civilization. Europeans were less embarrassed and are in some ways less invested in the concept of Western Civilization- WW2 did a lot to convince them that civilization, as they define it, inside Europe is based in particular nation states/ethnic societies rather than the continent as a whole. White Americans- especially conservatives- need the concept of 'the West' badly because otherwise white American culture is what it appears to be, a morally problematic orphan society.

In Rwanda the only tangible thing at stake for the U.S. was its claim to a high concept approach to world politics. Clinton and Albright knew that Republicans only play that game if it can be done on the cheap. But Rwanda had the bad luck of being logistically much farther away than Kuwait is and deeply inland, and trivial levels of American preparation for the challenges posed by the local politics, geography, economics, language barriers, and culture.

[ermoore]

35. Just out of curiosity . . .

Would any of you have supported military intevention in Rwanda? Would you have been willing to use force to remove the Hutu Power regime? Maybe this should be in another thread, but I was just curious.

Also, I have to go to bed soon, or I'd stay and discuss, but I think I would have been ok with it.

[Selwynn]

36. We have no national interest in Rwanda...

..that's why. That is always why we don't intervene in countless other places in the world where horrible injustice is occuring, or why we often support tyrants ever bit as vile as Saddam in many occaisions. It all has to do with what is in our interests.

George W. Bush said so himself in the nationa debates 2000. He was asked about foreign policy on the question of intervention, and he said "we should only intervene when our national interests are at stake." Two questions later he was asked to define our national interests. He said, "Economic."

Money.

We don't intervene unless there is an issue of profit or power that affects us.

[slaveplanet]

37. "In such countries as this, genocide is not too important."

Throughout the late '80s and early '90s, Rwanda's Hutu Power dictatorship had enjoyed the patronage of France. As a former Belgian colony, Rwanda was a French speaking country, and Paris's neo-colonial policy in Africa was to support those who spoke its language at all costs. In the early '90s, when Rwanda was plunged into civil war between the Hutu government, and the predominantly Tutsi rebel group, the Rwandese Patriotic Front, France threw its military support behind the Hutu regime. After all, the RPF came out of Uganda--where its leaders had been living in exile--and Uganda is an English speaking country. French leaders were unconcerned by their murderous Hutu Power clients. As the genocide reached its peak in the early summer of 1994, France's President François Mitterand was reported to say, "In such countries as this, genocide is not too important." Sadly, by their actions and inactions during the Rwandan slaughter, the rest of the world's great powers signaled that they agreed.


... Rwanda is landlocked and dirt-poor, a bit larger than Vermont and a bit less populous than Chicago, a place so dwarfed by neighboring Congo, Uganda, and Tanzania that for the sake of legibility its name has to be printed on most maps outside the lines of its frontiers. As far as the political, military, and economic interests of the world's powers go, it might as well be Mars. In fact, Mars is probably of greater strategic concern. But Rwanda, unlike Mars, is populated by human beings, and when Rwanda had a genocide, the world's powers left Rwanda to it.

On April 14, 1994, one week after the murder of the ten Belgian blue-helmets, Belgium withdrew from UNAMIR--precisely as Hutu Power had intended it to do. Belgian soldiers, aggrieved by the cowardice and waste of their mission, shredded their U.N. berets on the tarmac at Kigali airport. A week later, on April 21, 1994, the UNAMIR commander, Major General Dallaire, declared that with just five thousand well-equipped soldiers and a free hand to fight Hutu Power, he could bring the genocide to a rapid halt. No military analyst whom I've heard of has ever questioned his judgment, and a great many have confirmed it. The radio transmitter of the genocidal propaganda station RTLM would have been an obvious, and easy, first target. Yet, on the same day, the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution that slashed the UNAMIR force by ninety percent, ordering the retreat of all but two hundred seventy troops and leaving them with a mandate that allowed them to do little more than hunker down behind their sandbags and watch.

The desertion of Rwanda by the U.N. force was Hutu Power's greatest diplomatic victory to date, and it can be credited almost single-handedly to the United States. With the memory of the Somalia debacle still very fresh, the White House had just finished drafting a document called Presidential Decision Directive 25, which amounted to a checklist of reasons to avoid American involvement in U.N. peacekeeping missions. It hardly mattered that Dallaire's call for an expanded force and mandate would not have required American troops, or that the mission was not properly peacekeeping, but genocide prevention. PDD 25 also contained what Washington policymakers call "language" urging that the United States should persuade others not to undertake the missions that it wished to avoid. In fact, the Clinton administration's ambassador to the U.N., Madeleine Albright, opposed leaving even the skeleton crew of two hundred seventy in Rwanda.

Albright went on to become Secretary of State, largely because of her reputation as a "daughter of Munich," a Czech refugee from Nazism with no tolerance for appeasement and with a taste for projecting U.S. force abroad to bring rogue dictators and criminal states to heel. Her name is rarely associated with Rwanda, but ducking and pressuring others to duck, as the death toll leapt from thousands to tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, was the absolute low point in her career as a stateswoman.

A week after UNAMIR was slashed, when the ambassadors of Czechoslovakia, New Zealand, and Spain, sickened by the barrage of irrefutable evidence of genocide in Rwanda, began pushing for the return of U.N. troops, the United States demanded control of the mission. But there was no mission to control. The Security Council, where Rwanda conveniently occupied a temporary seat in 1994, could not even bring itself to pass a resolution that contained the word "genocide." In this proud fashion, April gave way to May. As Rwanda's genocidal leaders stepped up efforts for a full national mobilization to extirpate the last surviving Tutsis, the Security Council prepared, on May 13, to vote once again on restoring UNAMIR's strength. Ambassador Albright got the vote postponed by four days. The Security Council then agreed to dispatch five thousand five hundred troops for UNAMIR, only--at American insistence--very slowly.-snip-

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/evil/readings/french.html

so there you have it -Pdd25,Clinton , Albright, UN, Mitterand...all have bloody hands, knowingly or unkowingly.


To me it just sounds more like convenient Population control, something that's not as urgently needed in Europe.

[JackRiddler]

40. There WAS an open Western intervention in Rwanda...

After the Hutu Power regime was driven out of Kigali in 1994, the French deployed 500 troops (actually a huge force in this context) to secure the retreat of the Hutu Power forces into western Rwanda and Zaire. In other words, the French had backed the regime and helped it escape AFTER the genocide.

Furthermore, from the early 1990s there was a U.S. covert intervention in the region to topple the French-backed regimes in Uganda, Rwanda and finally Zaire, and you can bet this had nothing to do with imposing more humane ones. The U.S. and France adopted and armed their proxies among the central African factions, exacerbating the existing conflicts. I am not implying that the genocide was a U.S. or French plan, but the

Of course, this is almost NEVER how it is presented. We are always told that the Rwandan conflict came out of nowhere, and that "the West" failed to intervene, when in fact Western powers were intervening all along and helping to cause the problems in the first place! Rwanda is used as a lesson in why we need new "humanitarian interventions."

As with Saddam and Osama, the right thing to have done would have been not to have supported and armed the murderers in the first place.

Here is a small but important piece of the picture:

From http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/MAS109A.html

Senior officials of the United Nations and Canadian government were involved in covering up important details and evidence concerning the
April 6, 1994 attack on the aircraft carrying the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, according to former UN investigators who looked into the affair. The dual assassination resulted in a genocide and counter-genocide that resulted in the deaths of possibly one and a half million Tutsis, Hutus,
and others.
The most dramatic revelation concerns the whereabouts of the downed Mystere Falcon 50's cockpit voice recorder or "black box." According to officials involved with UN air movements in the region, the black box was secretly transported to UN Headquarters in New York where it remains to this day. Officially, the Rwandan government claims the black box went missing. According to the UN sources, data from the black box is being withheld by the UN under pressure from the government of the United States.
There may be good reason for this. According to former UN investigators who were on the ground in Rwanda, it was their belief that the missiles
that downed the presidential aircraft came from the United States and were delivered to the RPF. This bolsters similar claims made by by senior French government officials to the French National Assembly's Commission that
investigated the Rwanda genocide and claims by former Rwandan Patriotic
Front (RPF) intelligence agents.

[slaveplanet]

41. Yep- everyone should be up on this

//the French deployed 500 troops (actually a huge force in this context) to secure the retreat of the Hutu Power forces into western Rwanda and Zaire. In other words, the French had backed the regime and helped it escape AFTER the genocide.//

"Operation Turquoise"-But within a week of their arrival, French troops occupied nearly a quarter of the country, sweeping across southwestern Rwanda to stand face to face with the RPF. At that point, France suddenly reinterpreted its "humanitarian" venture and declared its intention to turn the entire territory it had conquered into a "safe zone." The RPF was not alone in asking: safe for whom? France's own ex-President, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, accused the French command of "protecting some of those who had carried out the massacres."

and see how the French got their ASSes handed back to them by the rebels- caught red handed trying to protect the Genocidal maniacs.


more from the Frontline article:

"Something like that," Kagame told me. "It occurred during our approach to Butare. I received from General Dallaire of UNAMIR a message from the French general in Goma telling me that we should not enter Butare. They were trying to tell me there would be a fight." Kagame told Dallaire that he "could not tolerate such a provocation and such arrogance on the part of the French." Then, he recalled, "I told the troops to change course, to move to Butare now. They arrived in the evening. I told them just to surround the town and stay put. I didn't want them to get involved in a firefight at night. So they took positions and waited until morning. When our troops entered, they found that the French had secretly moved out to Gikongoro"--to the west. "But then, through Dallaire, they asked permission to return for some Catholic sisters and some orphans they wanted to take away. I cleared it. The French came back, but they didn't know that we had already secured the route from Gikongoro to Butare. We had set a long ambush, nearly two companies along the road."

The French convoy consisted of about twenty-five vehicles, and as it left Butare, Kagame's forces sprang their trap and ordered the French to submit each vehicle to inspection. "Our interest was to make sure none of these people they were taking were FAR (Hutu power army) or militias. The French refused. Their jeeps were mounted with machine guns, so they turned them on our troops as a sign of hostility. When the soldiers in the ambush realized there was going to be a confrontation, they came out, and a few fellows who had rocket-propelled grenade launchers targeted the jeeps. When the French soldiers saw that, they were all instructed to point their guns upward. And they did. They allowed our soldiers to carry out the inspection." In one of the last vehicles, Kagame said, two Hutu government soldiers were found. One ran away, and was shot dead, and Kagame added, "Maybe they killed the other one, too." At the sound of shooting, the French vehicles that had been cleared to go ahead turned on the road and began firing from afar, but the exchange lasted less than a minute.

[JackRiddler]

42. This story was covered only in France & Germany...

German opinion was decisive in pressuring the French to withdraw, but by then many Hutu Power forces had escaped and set themselves up among the refugees in Zaire. The story of foreign interventions in this region is very murky, but the myth of non-intervention is definitely untrue.

Reported cross-border attacks on Rwanda by Hutus based in Zaire later prompted the RPF to support Kabila's incursion into Zaire, which in turn overthrew Mobuto. Later, Rwanda turned on Kabila and its forces again invaded the eastern Congo (as the country was renamed). Since then you've had half a dozen African countries send forces to support one or another side; I am anything but expert in this area and don't know what the Western covert roles have been, but if the usual suspects (France, U.S., Belgium) haven't been involved it would be unprecedented!

[slaveplanet]

45. agreed-details are hard to come by

and we're not going to get the real deal from the US press. All this gives me the feeling there was some sort of proxy war with the US/anglo backed forces pitted against the Francophile backed forces, and the death toll is of no concern . I hate to say it but the purpose being Population control. The sides get switched often through bribery ,intimidation,food supply control, and look for whomever that controls the local media outlets to be corrupt.

[SoCalDem]

43. Africa has never really been in the USA's sphere of influence

We are willing to buy stuff and sell stuff there, but as a rule our government has always "ignored" the bad things in frica.. I really think that most of the people in power, still have that "darkest Africa" mentality, and do not even consider Africa as having any civilized people there.. Of course the exception would be South Africa, but the US considers that place as Britain's problem..

The conservatives here are loathe to intervene in any case, because a "depopulated" Africa fits their world view better anyway.. The depopulation can occur via disease,war,famine.. whatever.. they do not seem to care how it happens..

When Africa is decimated , and all that remains is the resources, they will be more than happy to "help" (help themselves to the treasure, that is)..

:(