Bystanders to Genocide

Michael Pugliese debsian at pacbell.net
Tue Aug 21 17:51:43 PDT 2001


-----Original Message-----

From: LeoCasey at aol.com <LeoCasey at aol.com>

To: Michael Pugliese <debsian at pacbell.net>

Date: Tuesday, August 21, 2001 5:40 PM

Subject: Fwd: Bystanders to Genocide

This got garbled, and since I do not return to work until tomorrow, I can not

send it plain text. Can you do me the honors?

Click here: The Atlantic | September 2001 | Bystanders to Genocide | Power

The Atlantic Monthly | September 2001

Bystanders to Genocide

The author's exclusive interviews with scores of the participants in the

decision-making, together with her analysis of newly declassified

documents, yield a chilling narrative of self-serving caution and flaccid

will—and countless missed opportunities to mitigate a colossal crime

by Samantha Power

I. People Sitting in Offices

In the course of a hundred days in 1994 the Hutu government of Rwanda and

its extremist allies very nearly succeeded in exterminating the country's

Tutsi minority. Using firearms, machetes, and a variety of garden

implements, Hutu militiamen, soldiers, and ordinary citizens murdered some

800,000 Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu. It was the fastest, most

efficient killing spree of the twentieth century.

A few years later, in a series in The New Yorker, Philip Gourevitch

recounted in horrific detail the story of the genocide and the world's

failure to stop it. President Bill Clinton, a famously avid reader,

expressed shock. He sent copies of Gourevitch's articles to his second-term

national-security adviser, Sandy Berger. The articles bore confused, angry,

searching queries in the margins. "Is what he's saying true?" Clinton wrote

with a thick black felt-tip pen beside heavily underlined paragraphs. "How

did this happen?" he asked, adding, "I want to get to the bottom of this."

The President's urgency and outrage were oddly timed. As the terror in

Rwanda had unfolded, Clinton had shown virtually no interest in stopping

the genocide, and his Administration had stood by as the death toll rose

into the hundreds of thousands.

Why did the United States not do more for the Rwandans at the time of the

killings? Did the President really not know about the genocide, as his

marginalia suggested? Who were the people in his Administration who made

the life-and-death decisions that dictated U.S. policy? Why did they decide

(or decide not to decide) as they did? Were any voices inside or outside

the U.S. government demanding that the United States do more? If so, why

weren't they heeded? And most crucial, what could the United States have

done to save lives?

So far people have explained the U.S. failure to respond to the Rwandan

genocide by claiming that the United States didn't know what was happening,

that it knew but didn't care, or that regardless of what it knew there was

nothing useful to be done. The account that follows is based on a

three-year investigation involving sixty interviews with senior, mid-level,

and junior State Department, Defense Department, and National Security

Council officials who helped to shape or inform U.S. policy. It also

reflects dozens of interviews with Rwandan, European, and United Nations

officials and with peacekeepers, journalists, and nongovernmental workers

in Rwanda. Thanks to the National Security Archive (

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/), a nonprofit organization that uses the

Freedom of Information Act to secure the release of classified U.S.

documents, this account also draws on hundreds of pages of newly available

government records. This material provides a clearer picture than was

previously possible of the interplay among people, motives, and events. It

reveals that the U.S. government knew enough about the genocide early on to

save lives, but passed up countless opportunities to intervene...

Leo Casey

United Federation of Teachers

260 Park Avenue South

New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)

Power concedes nothing without a demand.

It never has, and it never will.

If there is no struggle, there is no progress.

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who

want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and

lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.

-- Frederick Douglass --

Leo Casey

United Federation of Teachers

260 Park Avenue South

New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)

Power concedes nothing without a demand.

It never has, and it never will.

If there is no struggle, there is no progress.

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who

want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and

lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.

-- Frederick Douglass --

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