What was about the (Western) International Community during the 1994 Rwandan Genocide?
Tutsi-related ethnic groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Zaire), aided by the Rwandan Government, clashed with elements of Zaire’s army that tried to force them out of the country [...]
By 1995 it had become clear that the (Western) international community’s experiment with multilateralism was under serious threat and, in fact, it failed in many cases like Rwanda, ex-Yugoslavia, Cyprus, etc. Nevertheless, continuing problems in different parts of the globe have meant that the OUN has had to remain committed to alleviating some of the worst atrocities. Nonetheless, before the US/UK military intervention in Afghanistan in 2001, there was a growing belief that there were too few humanitarian interventions. However, the failure to prevent atrocities in Rwanda and ex-Yugoslavia served as a stain on the conscience of many in the international community – since then there has been the perception that there have been too many humanitarian interventions because of the controversial wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq were justified at least in part on humanitarian grounds.
Simultaneously with the ongoing Rwandan genocide in 1994, the Tutsi RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Front) invaded Rwanda from Uganda and Burundi, occupied the capital Kigali, set up a new Government, and then chased the Hutu militias out of Rwanda. On assuming power in Rwanda, the RPF, led by the Tutsi Paul Kagame, intensified a program of widespread retribution killings of Hutu. Nevertheless, the Hutus have been in any case so terrified of what the Tutsi would do to them that they fled in the millions to neighboring Tanzania, Uganda, and particularly Zaire. It is estimated that some up to 1.5 million Hutu civilians, plus the more or less intact civilian Government and army structure, including many of the most radical organizers of the Rwandan genocide, fled to East Zaire taking refuge status while as many as a million Hutus did the same in Tanzania. However, the refugee camps in Zaire soon have been turned into the centers of Hutu governance and anti-Tutsi political ambitions. Nevertheless, the horrors of the Tutsi-Hutu Rwandan civil war have continued for many years in East Zaire/Congo, complicated by underdevelopment, the lure of mineral wealth, territorial ambitions of the Rwandan Government, and the ineffectiveness of both Congolese authorities and the international community.
The Western international and external factors created chaos in Africa after the end of the Cold War 1.0 without seeing that, in many cases, African people must be held accountable for their lives on the continent. Whether it is genocide, enslavement, abuse of women, or political corruption, not only Africans but the international community in general and the Great Powers, in particular, must be in a position to prevent the crime like in Rwanda in 1994. The Rwandan genocide stands out as historically significant not only because of the huge number of killed civilians who were exterminated during only of hundred days but as well as because of the way both America and Europe responded to the atrocities. Despite the intelligence provided before the genocide started, and international news media coverage reflecting the true scale of violence as the genocide unfolded, unfortunately, all Western Governments refused to intervene. The OUN itself refused to allow its peacekeeping operation in Rwanda, under Canadian General Roméo Dallaire, to take positive and useful action to stop the killing. Further, there were bitter recriminations and enough blame to go around in the world for allowing the murders to continue.
Later, US President Bill Clinton went to Rwanda and apologized for the inaction of the US authorities during the genocide calling the failure to intervene in Rwanda the greatest regret of his presidency (the bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999 was probably for him his greatest success being in office). Following the Rwandan genocide and once the Tutsi RPF had gained control of most of the country, the French established a “safe zone” for Hutu refugees to flee to (Operation Turquoise). Only by mid-July, over a million Hutus had fled to squalid camps in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (at that time Zaire). There, Hutu militias took control of the camps and launched attacks into Rwanda, and, therefore making it impossible for civilians (refugees) to return home. In the autumn of 1996, Tutsi-led Rwandan armed forces invaded several camps, forcing Hutu refugees either home or deeper into the Democratic Republic of the Congo and routing the Hutu militias that fled further westward into jungles. Consequently, the Hutu-Tutsi civil war became linked to politics in Zaire, which had been disintegrating politically and economically since the early 1990s and where dissatisfaction with long-time dictator Mobutu Sese Seko had grown.
Tutsi-related ethnic groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Zaire), aided by the Rwandan Government, clashed with elements of Zaire’s army that tried to force them out of the country. By late October 1996, anti-Mobutu forces had formed under the command of Mobutu’s long-time foe, Laurent-Désiré Kabila whose rebels, aided by several African states and the USA, all angered by Mobutu’s support of rebels in their countries, started to move against him. All of them have been seeking influence in Zaire with the intention to share Zaire’s natural resources, especially diamonds, timber, and tantalum – a metal that is vital in making cell (mobile) phones. East Zaire fell into rebel hands quickly. The Government of Zaire in the capital Kinshasa, long unable to exercise authority over both its own forces and the country’s huge hinterland, became no longer able to exercise sovereignty. By the spring of 1997, all Zaire’s major cities had fallen to Kabila’s forces while Mobutu fled, and Kabila declared himself president. In this year, Zaire became renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
However, Kabila himself soon lost popularity owing to his authoritarian rule. He alienated his Rwandan and Ugandan allies by turning against them and Congo’s Tutsis as he sought to shore up his support among the Congolese. In mid-1998, Tutsis, aided by Rwanda and Uganda, moved against Kabila in a reply to what had happened two years earlier. Kabila, in turn, was aided by Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Chad, and Sudan. Therefore, the initial conflict in which Rwandan militias of both Hutus and Tutsis had a significant impact had become a genuinely transnational war in which between 1998 and 2008, about seven million people died. Consequently, state failure has had tragic consequences, giving rise to bloody violence against civilians in front of the eyes of the (Western) international community which did simply nothing to stop the violence and mass killings of the civilians.
Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirovic
Ex University Professor
Research Fellow at Centre for Geostrategic Studies
Personal disclaimer: The author writes for this publication in a private capacity which is unrepresentative of anyone or any organization except for his own personal views. Nothing written by the author should ever be conflated with the editorial views or official positions of any other media outlet or institution.
Originally published on 2022-10-22
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.
Read our Disclaimer/LegalStatement!
DonatetoSupportUs
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.
On Sunday September 24, 2017, the Pan-Pontian Federation of USA and Canada in collaboration with another 15 organizations celebrated the publication of the new book “Genocide in the Ottoman Empire: Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks, 1913-1923”, at the Hellenic Cultural Center in Astoria. The book consists of academic papers presented at the 2013 Academic Conference that the Asia Minor and Pontos Hellenic Research Center (AMPHRC) organized at the Holocaust Museum in Skokie, Illinois.The event featured a keynote presentation by the editor of the book and noted historian Mr. George Shirinian. Mr. Shirinian is the Executive Director of the Zoryan Institute, an ...
Message in the Bottle, One Hundred Years LaterSmyrna, Ottoman Empire, September 1922 Dear World – Our time has come to disperse like wildflower seeds in the wind. We are the last storytellers and children of the Ancients, their legacy and their accomplishments. The men and women have been separated. Many men were sent to the interior. Women clutching their babies, even in death, have walked miles. The elders have fallen by the roadside. The children, oh, the sweet children, their eyes are glazed with fear, their words lost, and, yet, they see a butterfly and for one moment, they smile. If only … ...
Genocide accusations are, it would seem, the latest fashion spreading out of the Balkans. On December 5, a former minister in the “government” of NATO occupied and administered Kosovo, Ivan Todosijević, who happens to be an otherwise occupation friendly and cooperative ethnic Serb, was sentenced to a two-year prison term. The court found him guilty of making what it considered the outrageous claim that the so-called genocidal “Račak massacre,” which in 1999 triggered NATO aggression against Yugoslavia, was an imposture. Since the trial began just two days before, by Balkan standards the swiftly reached verdict was remarkably expeditious, suggesting the ...
1. Catholic extermination campsSurprisingly few know that Nazi extermination camps in World War II were by no means the only ones in Europe at the time. In the years 1942-1943 also in Croatia existed numerous extermination camps, run by Catholic Ustasha under their dictator Ante Pavelic, a practicing Catholic and regular visitor to the then pope. There were even concentration camps exclusively for children!In these camps – the most notorious was Jasenovac, headed by a Franciscan friar – orthodox-Christian Serbians (and a substantial number of Jews) were murdered. Like the Nazis, the Catholic Ustasha burned their victims in kilns, alive ...
Twenty years ago, President Bill Clinton commenced bombing Serbia in the name of human rights, justice, and ethnic tolerance. Approximately 1,500 Serb civilians were killed by NATO bombing in one of the biggest sham morality plays of the modern era. As British professor Philip Hammond recently noted, the 78-day bombing campaign “was not a purely military operation: NATO also destroyed what it called ‘dual-use’ targets, such as factories, city bridges, and even the main television building in downtown Belgrade, in an attempt to terrorise the country into surrender.”Clinton’s unprovoked attack on Serbia, intended to help ethnic Albanians seize control of ...
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]
‘Blowing from a Gun’ depicted by Vasily Vereshchagin in his painting ‘Suppression of the Indian Revolt by the English’ on the rebellion of 1857. Queen Victoria’s agent bought this painting, in an attempt to suppress it. ‘Blowing from the Gun’ was a means of execution where the prisoner is tied to the muzzle of a cannon, which is then fired, popping the victim’s head about 15 meters (50 feet) into the air, apparently a sort of juvenile entertainment for the colonizers.Following colonization, along came ‘decolonization’ and what do you suppose happened with colonial borders? They mostly remained as laid down ...
A Serb from Bosnia, General Mladic, protected Muslims civilians and gave them buses, food and water for to leave fighting zones (as you can see). There was no genocide over Muslim population in Srebrenica like main stream media want you to believe – there was no genocide over Bosniaks because all Bosnian Muslims victims were jihad fighters who had been killed during fight (in war). Even the so called „tribunal“ in The Hague for ex-Yugoslavia admitted that there was no genocide!Now, you can see here how djihadistes have treated the Serbian population – the content is very hard, not for ...
Fourteen years ago the U.S. Government de-classified the now famous “La Vista Report” of May 15, 1947, a top-secret U.S. Army Intelligence report documenting the Vatican’s role in aiding the escape of numerous high-ranking Nazi war criminals, among them Ante Pavelic, fascist leader of wartime Croatia; Franz Stangel, Commander of Treblinka; Eduard Roschmann, “the Butcher of Riga”; Klaus Barbie, “the Butcher of Lyon”; SS General Walter Rauff, inventor of the mobile gas truck; Adolf Eichmann, “architect of the Holocaust”; and tens of thousands of others. Writing about the document prior to its release, internationally renowned Nazi hunter Charles R. Allen ...
In the Balkans truth generally lacks a transcendent or ontological dimension, it tends to be purely tribal.July 11 this year will mark the 26th anniversary of the tragic events that took place in 1995 in the east Bosnian district of Srebrenica. With each passing year the ceremony loses some of its luster and pomp, as genocide fatigue sets in. The inquirer into these matters will get radically different answers and interpretations, mainly depending on the ethnicity of the local informant. As Diana Johnstone accurately observed, in the Balkans truth generally lacks a transcendent or ontological dimension, it tends to be ...
Genocidal corporate media presstitutes follow the all-too-familiar script of blaming the victim for the crimes perpetrated by aggressor nations.NATO terrorists, for example, are invading and occupying Syria, and the Syria government is blamed for the ensuing disasters, but the presstitutes omit this this from their narratives and instead find creative ways to blame the al Assad government whose duty it is to protect Syria, its sovereignty, and its territorial integrity. When terrorists are occupying cities, as they do in Syria, innocent people will always be victimized, including during government operations to clear out the terrorist infestations, but the presstitutes blame ...
Vatican: St Peter ChurchWhat role, if any, did the Vatican play in the genocide committed in the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), a Roman Catholic state sponsored by the Vatican? This has been a controversial topic regarding World War II historiography. Renewed debate was stirred in 1999 with the publication of Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (New York: Viking, 1999) by John Cornwell.Vatican KnowledgeThe nature of the Ustasha NDH regime was well-known by the Vatican and by the US government as early as 1941. It was no secret that the Ustasha government sought to exterminate the entire ...
A project for Greater Albania – conspiracy or legitimate? According to a 2010 Gallup Balkan Monitor report, 83% of Albanians in Albania supported the idea of a Greater Albania, with 81% and 53% of Albanians in Kosovo and North Macedonia respectively supporting such an ambition.The ultimate goal? To have Kosovo and the Preševo Valley in Serbia, southern Montenegro, Epirus in Greece and western North Macedonia into a single Greater Albanian state. Although this may not be official policy of the Albanian Republic, it is ingrained into the Albanian mythos. The very idea of a Greater Albania has roots in the 1913 Treaty of London that left roughly 40% ...
After the Donald Trump administration’s decision to recognize the disputed city of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move the US embassy there from Tel Aviv, the national aspirations of the Palestinian people to live in their own state have been severely dashed by Washington’s move. Ever since the formation of the United States, it has been American policy to destroy aspirant nations like the internationally-recognized State of Palestine.The first nation destroyed by the United States was the Cherokee Nation, or Tsalagihi Ayeli, which, beginning in 1794, was slowly decimated by forced removals from territory in Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Alabama, ...
When I was a schoolchild in the US a couple of short decades ago, I spent my time acquiring important life skills, ranging from how to fake a wrist fracture in order to obtain a purple cast, to how to craft a teepee replica out of a paper bag.The latter art was perfected in accordance with the holiday of Thanksgiving, which arrived each November to great fanfare, and which, in addition to teepee replication, required my classmates and I to mass-produce turkey drawings, paper Pilgrim hats, and modified, feathered headdresses.These materials were then incorporated into our reenactments of the "original" ...
Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]SaveSave
The Kaunas Garage Massacre of the Jews in June 1941It was with great interest that I read the op-ed jointly penned by Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi and his Lithuanian counterpart, Gabrielius Landsbergis, in last Friday’s Jerusalem Post. As could be expected, such initiatives are usually written to offer a rosy picture of the wonderful relations between two countries and the bright prospects for future cooperation. As a descendant of Lithuanian Jews, a frequent visitor to Lithuania ever since independence, and the co-author of a recent book on the rampant Holocaust distortion orchestrated by successive Lithuanian governments, I didn’t know whether to ...
When we use the genocide label for other kinds of killing (e.g. death through neglect, or bureaucratic elimination) do we diminish the weight of the word genocide? Many non-Indigenous Canadians bristle at the notion that a label like genocide applies to Canada.As early as November, 1907, the Canadian press was acknowledging that the death rate within Indian residential schools exceeded 50% (see Appendix, “Key Newspaper Articles”).And yet the reality of such a massacre has been wiped clean from public record and consciousness in Canada over the past decades.Small wonder; for that hidden history reveals a system whose aim was to ...
What is wrong with the American people? After several years of horrific policy toward the waking world, democracy’s standard bearers seem to be drowning in a lake of selfishness. Distracted, apathetic, or simply dumbed and numbed by unrelenting propaganda, the most admired society on Earth has turned to a wriggling mush of diverging ideals. I fear that American have become what we ultimately deplored, just another despicable cultural hegemony. Here’s a short brief on the matter.A recent article by James Carden at The Nation prompted me to discuss this unsavory truth today. The title of the piece, “Trump’s Syria Policy: ...
Protesters have called for all statues of the former imperial ruler to be removed in recognition of his massacres in the Congo. As 10,000 people took to the streets of Brussels on Sunday (7 June) to protest as part of the Black Lives Matter movement, there was one landmark which drew their ire more than any other: the equestrian statue of King Leopold II outside Belgium’s royal palace.“Murderer!” the protesters cried as they climbed the statue and waved the flag of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Had the statue been flimsy enough to pull down they would have done it, just as fellow BLM protesters toppled ...
Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirovic
