[lbo-talk] Rwanda, Congo, Clinton, etc.

[Michael Pugliese]

http://www.monthlyreview.org/1203robinson.htm
Review by Lukin Robinson of:
Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton University Press, 2001), 384 pages, paperback $16.95.

Linda Melvern, A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide (London and New York: Zed Books, 2000), 288 pages, hardcover $69.95, paperback $19.95.

In Rwanda, in four months of 1994, as many as a million people were massacred in a well prepared and organized orgy of killing amounting to genocide. Seldom in recorded history has there been such a concentrated frenzy of mass murder of innocent people. How could such a thing have happened? Who was responsible? Could it have been prevented and why wasn’t it? These questions are the subject of the two books under review.

   Also see Mahmood Mamdani piece in Socialist Register 2003 and 
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/09/power.htm , "Bystanders to Genocide: 

Why the United States Let the Rwandan Tragedy Happen

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 
<SNIP>