US Guilt Over The Rwandan Genocide Is Leading To Another Bloody Foreign Policy Disaster

Former US President Bill Clinton meets Rwanda's President Paul Kagame during a visit to Kigali in 2006. Photograph: Reuters

Rwanda's Genocide And The Bloody Legacy Of Anglo-American Guilt -- The Guardian

Failure to intervene in 1994's horror means the US and UK have refused to rein in President Paul Kagame's excesses in Congo.

The United States is allowing one tragic foreign policy failure to compound another.

Eighteen years ago, President Bill Clinton watched passively as the Hutu extremist regime in Rwanda oversaw the murder of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis. His administration refused even to utter the word genocide for fear it would oblige the US to intervene.

Clinton wasn't alone. One of the leaders of the Tutsi rebels fighting the genocidal regime told me at the time that during his attempts to persuade the UK government to intervene at the UN, he concluded that British officials regarded the Tutsi victims as little more than ants. The French spent their time trying to get the UN to authorise action that would have propped up the Hutu extremist leadership because they feared the alternative would diminish Paris's influence in central Africa.

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My Comment: Most Americans/Brits do not remember the genocide in Rwanda .... and for those who do (like myself) .... we remember it as a time in which events quickly spiraled out of control that resulted in hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and Hutu moderates being slaughtered. Was it because of the West that this slaughter occurred .... no. Could the West have reacted more quickly .... probably .... but after the fiasco and disaster of "Black Hawk Down" in Mogadishu, Somalia .... Western appetite (at the time) for another African intervention was very low on the priority list.

Fast forward to today .... what I see today is a political class and a public that is tired of spilling blood and treasure in foreign wars. The conflict that is happening in the Congo today is horrible ....what the Rwandan government is doing is unjust .... but considering the history of the region I have no confidence that we have the resource or the will that will make a difference .... and if anything .... if we do intervene we will probably end up making the situation even worse than what it is today.