-----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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