In 1994 the world watched a genocide and did NOTHING.

Beginning on April 6, 1994, Hutus began slaughtering the Tutsis in the African country of Rwanda. As the brutal killings continued, the world stood idly by and just watched the slaughter. Lasting 100 days, the Rwanda genocide left approximately 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu sympathizers dead.  Think about it 800,000 dead in just 100 days……not even the Nazis were capable of that……..

At 8:30 p.m. on April 6, 1994, President Juvénal Habyarimana of Rwanda was returning from a summit in Tanzania when a surface-to-air missile shot his plane out of the sky over Rwanda’s capital city of Kigali. All on board were killed in the crash.

Since 1973, President Habyarimana, a Hutu, had run a totalitarian regime in Rwanda, which had excluded all Tutsis from participating. That changed on August 3, 1993 when Habyarimana signed the Arusha Accords, which weakened the Hutu hold on Rwanda and allowed Tutsis to participate in the government. This greatly upset Hutu extremists.

Although it has never been determined who was truly responsible for the assassination, Hutu extremists profited the most from Habyarimana’s death. Within 24 hours after the crash, Hutu extremists had taken over the government, blamed the Tutsis for the assassination, and begun the slaughter.

While this was happening what was the rest of the world doing?  basically, ignoring the 800 lb gorilla in the room……..declassified documents tell part of the tale…….

Newly declassified cables from 1994 show that with Rwanda poised on the brink of genocide, world leaders were anxious to get UN peacekeeping forces out of the country as quickly as possible, reports the New York Times. They did so, and an estimated 800,000 people were massacred in 100 days. “It’s clear, in hindsight, that the pullout of peacekeeping was the green light for genocide,” says Tom Blanton of the National Security Archive at George Washington University. It obtained the 300 cables along with the Holocaust Museum and was highlighting them this week at a conference in the Hague on what world leaders did, and did not, do to stop the killing. (You can access the full trove here.)

The cables show that Bill Clinton’s White House—still stung from the “Black Hawk Down” disaster in Somalia only months earlier—pushed to remove the vast majority of the peacekeepers. One of the cables is from UN ambassador Madeleine Albright instructing the State Department to take that position. Albright recalls that she had been swayed by African criticism that a withdrawal would be a mistake, but she failed to convince the White House. “I was an instructed ambassador, not the secretary of state, but I do wish I had argued harder,” Albright tells the Times. The Security Council voted on April 21, 1994, to reduce the force from 2,100 troops to 270, and the Canadian leader of the force wrote that those who remained were “standing knee-deep in mutilated bodies.” Still classified are internal White House emails, which would shed further light on US decision-making.

We did NOTHING!  I realize that the central part of Africa holds little interests for us in the west…….but I recall someone after the holocaust saying that the world would never allow such a act again……idle words like so many of our other promises and statements.

We seem to be prepared to blame our prez and his staff for an incident in the recent past…..but if we hold them responsible for the inaction then I say lets hold ALL of them responsible…..for Beirut…..from Iraq…….ALL of them….unless all this is just what i think….a political game where No life is important just the outcome of an election.

And if that is the case then we are a PATHETIC LOT!