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.
Through a deliberate decades-long campaign of ethnic cleansing, Turkey eradicated its minority communities and denied their history. Now it’s time to speak up.Deep in the heart of the Syrian desert, some 280 miles east of Damascus, lie the ruins of the Armenian Genocide Martyrs’ Memorial. Constructed in 1990, the memorial long served as a sight of pilgrimage for thousands of Armenians, descendants of a systematic genocide that once drove their ancestors into these same desert sands over a century ago. With its beige marble walls and pointed domes, the building was a premier example of Armenian architecture in a country ...
The Greek Genocide (or Ottoman Greek Genocide) refers to the systematic extermination of the native Greek subjects of the Ottoman Empire before, during and after World War I (1914-1923). It was instigated by successive governments of the Ottoman Empire; the Committee of Union and Progress Party (C.U.P), and the Turkish Nationalist Movement of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. It included massacres, forced deportations and death marches, summary expulsions, boycotts, rape, forced conversion to Islam, conscription into labor battalions, arbitrary executions, and destruction of Christian Orthodox cultural, historical and religious monuments. According to various sources, approximately 1 million Ottoman Greeks perished during this period.The first ...
My refusal to believe ongoing Western media reports of “Russian aggression” makes me a “Kremlin troll”. My punishment for not towing the “party line” – simple, effective “shunning” by Western media – has not, however, diminished my ongoing commitment to seeing the other side.Having previously investigated the Crimean reunification with Russia, this May I turned my attention to the birth of two new government formations in Eastern Ukraine, the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) and the Lugansk People’s Republic (LNR). Americans only hear either what Kiev “reports”, or the US propaganda machine puts out – these are puppet regimes born of ...
Is Israel and its infamous Wall of Separation representative of a modern evolving democratic state, based upon Biblical principles and teachings, as applied towards the original indigenous Palestinian peoples of Palestine, or is it an example of yet another ethnic-cleansing, apartheid state, possessive of the same genocidal-racist tendencies as those 19th century colonial-imperialistic powers – like the United States, Canada, Australia and South Africa – who also once invaded and committed wholesale destruction of other ancient indigenous peoples entire ways of life; sweeping their survivors aside onto reservations, reserves and Bantustan-type compounds to be ultimately ignored and forgotten?Professor Ilan Pappe, ...
Dr. Steven Leonard Jacobs holds the Aaron Aronov Endowed Chair of Judaic Studies and is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama-Tuscaloosa. An ordained rabbi, Professor Jacobs is a specialist on the Holocaust and Genocide, Biblical Studies, Jewish-Jewish Christian Relations, and is one of the foremost authorities on Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959), who coined the term “genocide” and devoted his life to the enactment of an international law on the punishment and prevention of genocide.Among his numerous publications, Prof. Jacobs is the author of the chapter entitled, “Lemkin on Three Genocides: Comparing His Writings on the Armenian, Assyrian, ...
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 … ...
Note: We are republishing this essay by S. Brian Willson describing the true history of genocide in the United States which stands in stark contrast to the myth of Thanksgiving because of its popularity with readers and its educational value.The Defining and Enabling Experience of Our “Civilization” As we again plan to celebrate what US “Americans”call Thanksgiving, let us pause for a moment of reflection. Let us recognize that accounts of the first Thanksgiving are mythological, and that the holiday is actually a grotesque celebration of our arrogant ethnocentrism built on genocide.Native Americans in the Caribbean greeted their 1492 European invaders ...
The ‘mainstream’ Western media is, almost by definition, the last place to consult for honest reporting of Western crimes. Consider the appalling case of Yemen which is consumed by war and an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe.Since March 2015, a ‘coalition’ of Sunni Arab states led by Saudi Arabia, and supported by the US, Britain and France, has been dropping bombs on neighbouring Yemen. The scale of the bombing is indicated in a recent article by Felicity Arbuthnot – in one year, 330,000 homes, 648 mosques, 630 schools and institutes, and 250 health facilities were destroyed or damaged. The stated aim of ...
For several decades, the Turkish government and its propagandists have been announcing that the state documents, particularly the Ottoman archives, are fully open and available to any researcher from around the world.What Turkish officials and their supporters do not say is that many documents of the Ottoman archives have been removed, destroyed, sold, or otherwise disposed of. In addition, some of the most sensitive archives are still closed to outsiders.Last month, Turkish journalist Uzay Bulut wrote a revealing article, “Turkey Uncensored: A History of Censorship and Bans,” published on the Philos Project website, regarding the status of Turkish archives and ...
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: ...
The image of Srebrenica tells us more about the reality of the majority of the media and of course the “Muslim victim card” is being used in order to cleanse the Bosniak Muslims. After all, from enslaving Orthodox Christians during their brotherly love with the Turkish slave masters of the Ottoman Empire to having Muslim SS units who supported Adolf Hitler; then “victimhood” is needed in order to justify their history and culture.Of course the wishy-washy brigade will tell us that the Ottoman period was enlightened and that the system of taking the eldest Christian boy (devshirme system) in the ...
In the Associated Press story “Albanian family honored for helping Jews”, Marcus Franklin rehashed and regurgitated the Albanian propaganda claim that Albanians “rescued” Jews during the Holocaust and played no role in the Holocaust. This is a total falsification, distortion, and manipulation of the Albanian role in the Holocaust.The Holocaust Chronicle, researched by prominent Holocaust historians and scholars, documents that 10 to 12 Jews from Albania proper were sent to the Nazi death camp at Bergen-Belsen. This research disproves the Albanian propaganda claim that 100% of Albanian Jews were “rescued” during the Holocaust. Moreover, Harvey Sarner reported that the Ardel ...
Historical research into the Nazi era rarely throws up many surprises any more. German historian Stefan Ihrig, however, is an exception to this rule. By studying long-published sources, he has uncovered the fascination that Ataturk's modern Turkey held for the German far right, which has been seriously underestimated until now and which set an example for Hitler and the National Socialists.From a right-wing viewpoint, what Ataturk had achieved was an unattainable goal for Weimar-era Germany. Using force of arms, he had managed to reverse the Treaty of Sevres, which had been forced on his country by the Entente in 1920, ...
Clinton/NATO Intervention In Balkans Revealed As Half-Witted DhimmitudeFebruary 26, 2007- San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Twelve years after the alleged Srebrenica massacre, the International Court of Justice [ICJ] has found that charges alleging that a systematic policy of ethnic cleansing by the Bosnian Serb government was used against the Bosnian Muslims are baseless, yet the court adamantly maintains a belief in the myth of Srebrenica, much in the way that Islamists worldwide hold on to the Jenin hoax because both serve to stoke anti-Western, anti-Israel sentiment.From the beginning it should have been clear that the Clinton administration's decision to ...
The world has suddenly realised that there is a “refugee crisis”. There are more refugees now than at any time since World War II. The number has grown three-fold since the end of 2001. The problem is treated as if it arose just recently, but it has been a long time coming. The pressure has been building and building until it has burst the dams of wilful ignorance.Death and despair has migrated to the doorsteps of Europe. But tens of millions of people do not simply abandon home and native land for an insecure dangerous future of desperate struggle. The ...
The American Empire is crying genocide again. It’s an old song that the war class loves to sing, but one that never fails to get their compliant colleagues in the mass media dancing. No matter how woke these presstitutes pretend to be they always jump at the opportunity to virtue signal over the flag of some poorer nation of color and wax philosophic about the cultural superiority of western democracy as if they’ve never smelled a dead Indian. It’s the kind of absurdly hypocritical prestige racism that only sells with perfect government-corporate synergy. This time the tragedies being sung about ...
May 19, 1919 has different and even opposing meanings in Turkey and Greece, just as May 15, 1948, marks both the establishment of Israel and, for Palestinians, the start of the Nakba (“catastrophe”).In Turkey, this date marks the first step that led to the establishment of the Turkish Republic, while for descendants of Ottoman Greeks and Greece it marks the end of the centuries-long Pontic Greek presence on the shores of the Black Sea. Whereas Turks celebrate May 19, Greeks mourn it. Researcher Tamer Çilingir summarised the issue in a 2016 interview with the Turkish-Armenian daily Agos:“The Pontic Genocide is the ...
Wednesday, December 5, 2012, the Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha advocated granting Albanian citizenship to all Albanians, wherever they reside. This statement was made during a visit of the city of Vlora where the independence of the Albanian state was declared, only 100 years ago. At the time Albania had just liberated itself from Ottoman rule.This declaration follows a separate statement, collective this time, that Sali Berisha had made with his Kosovar counterpart Hashim Thaci a few weeks ago, promising the union of all Albanians. The place was, I must say, well chosen since the vast majority of the inhabitants ...
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, ...
Hardly any knowledgeable person doubts that Zionist ideology is the purest form of racism. Zionism is Jewish disguised racism as a raison d’etat. Israel comes right after the U. S., as far as racism is concerned. That is why the U. S. donates to this racist regime $ 3.8 bn per year in order to keep this occupation regime going. Should anybody doubt the racism of the Israeli leadership, read the following article.[1]Racism among the Israeli leadership is legendary. It started out with the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, saying: “Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it ...
Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirovic
