Yesterday marked the ten year anniversary of the assassination of President Habyarimana that sparked the genocide in Rwanda. Radical Hutus blamed a rebel Tutsi faction for shooting down the president's plane, though whether the Hutus had done this themselves in order to set in motion an organized massacre is still debated. Extremists mobilised militias and incited citizens, calling for an exercise of "Hutu Power" in retaliation. 900,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates were killed in next three months. Millions of refugees from both sides fled to neighboring countries.
Since then, the international community, particularly the U.S. and U.N., have come to realize that the genocide was not unavoidable. Clinton traveled to Rwanda and apologized in 1998. Kofi Annan has also admitted he should have done more.
But Rwanda itself is still torn. It has yet to achieve a true democracy. Former Tutsi rebel leader Paul Kagame won the first election last year with a farcical 94% of the vote, and has since banned the main opposition party. The genocide has become a wedge issue, with Kagame labeling his opponents as apologists.
At the Center for American Progress, Gayle Smith gives some reasons for the West continuing lack of interest in an area of the world which -- based on the actual circumstances on the ground as opposed to the consideration of Western interests -- arguably demands the greatest attention. Her basic argument: nobody cared about central Africa then, and nobody cares about central Africa now. The U.S. government, people and media were only concerned with countries that possessed resources we coveted, threatened our security, or could be a useful ally. Without these advantages, countries such as Rwanda have little hope of benifiting from American aid, either economic or, in situations such as these, military. And of course, not much has changed, except perhaps for the worse.
As U.S policy veers toward our interests in the Middle East, countries that are unable to provide economic, strategic, or military support are largely unheeded. Unfortunately, these are necessarily the countries that need the most help. Those countries that are already poor, war-torn, and undemocratic will not get the benefit of significant aid from the U.S., nor will the U.S. encourage change since the benefit of a stable Middle East has taken an even greater precedence than before over stability in other regions. Not that we have always been interested in or effective at bringing about such change, but there are benefits to it, and were we not preoccupied with Iraq we might have been able to
The crisis in Sudan has garnered some attention, and Kofi Annan seems focused on learning from the mistakes in Rwanda in order to prevent a genocide there. but there is no indication that the U.S. will involve itself in anyway, other than the commanding rhetoric from Bush that other governments love so much. It is just one example of American indifference toward the third-world. DR Congo has been at war for years, with over 3 million dead, and Western governments have done shockingly little to intervene. Poverty, human rights abuses, and dictatorships are still widespread in our world. After ten years, the problem is not that lessons have not been learned as much that we have been indifferent in the first place. And Bush's war has only made the problem worse, leaving not only Iraq and the U.S. worse off, but the entire third world as well.