David Corn: Lying About Rwanda's Genocide

Lying About Rwanda's Genocide

As a fellow who wrote a book contending that the current president is a serial prevaricator, I often am asked by conservative critics: So did you ever call Bill Clinton a liar? My reply: Yes; I am a nonpartisan accuser. But I'm not talking about the obvious lies. Back in those days, I did say that Clinton's lies about his affair with intern Monica Lewinsky were wrong and serious--but not worth impeachment. (And now they seem puny when compared with the assortment of untrue statements George W. Bush deployed to grease the way to war.) But what was more outrageous was a lie Clinton told about one of the greatest failures of his presidency: his inaction regarding the Rwanda genocide of 1994.

Why revisit this today? Two reasons. First, this month marks the tenth anniversary of the start of that horrific event, in which half a million people, mainly of the Tutsi minority, were slaughtered over three months by Hutu extremists, in one of the most time-efficient massacres of the 20th Century. Second, the National Security Archive, an independent, nongovernmental research institute that collects and analyzes government records, recently released a report that provides more evidence for the case that Clinton lied to the people of Rwanda.

That lie came four years after the genocide. During a 1998 presidential tour of Africa, Clinton stopped at the airport in Kigali, Rwanda, and issued an apology. Sort of. Speaking of those nightmarish months in the spring of 1994, he said, "All over the world there were people like me sitting in offices who did not fully appreciate the depth and speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror." He acknowledged that the United States and the international community had not moved quickly enough in response to the horrors under way. To emphasize his sorrow, he said, "Never again."

Clinton seemed to be taking responsibility, but actually he was making an excuse. He had inadequately reacted to the genocide, he said, because he had not really known what had been happening in Rwanda. That was a disingenuous cop-out.

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Lying About Rwanda's Genocide

Burundi, 1972.

The reaction of the U.S. government to the events was typical of most foreign governments. Thomas P. Melady, who was then the American Ambassador, believed that his first responsibility was protecting the one hundred and fifty Americans in Burundi. Soon after the killings began, he rebuked the American Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, for briefing American correspondents there about the troubles. Melady feared that news reports in American newspapers would be easily traced by the Burundi government to the American Embassy in Bujumbura and its main sources, the American missionaries. The clamp on the news became so tight that Senator Edward M. Kennedy complained in June, 1972, that the State Department was even withholding from Congress its information on the massacres.

The United States did not criticize Burundi in public until May, 1973, when President Nixon made a small reference to the troubles in his annual foreign-policy report to Congress. ". . . Countries have a right to take positions of conscience," Nixon wrote. "We would have expected that the first responsibility for taking such positions rested upon the African nations, either individually or collectively. The United States urged African leaders to address the problem of the killings in Burundi. . . . All of the African leaders we spoke to voiced their concern to us; some raised it with Burundi's leaders. But ultimately none spoke out when these diplomatic efforts failed." Nixon neglected to mention that, in this matter of conscience, the United States had also refused to speak out when its diplomatic efforts, such as they were, failed.

The U.S. government avoided the issue by persuading itself that the killings were an African problem. If African governments chose to ignore it, American officials reasoned, why should the U.S. government make an issue of it? Moreover, American officials believed that protest was futile.

http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/rwanda/meisler.htm

NB. I had to turn off javascript to get that page to load. YMMV.

For me, the belief that we can afford to ignore massive atrocities and conflicts just because they seem remote is not merely barbaric, but profoundly stupid.

...instigated by Kagame's bid for power was backed by the US from the embassy in Uganda. A string of countries in Africa are falling out of the French and Belgian orbit into our lap, thanks to the ruthless schemes of Rhodesian corporatist planners with no names in our country. This is a battle for control of Africa and its resources. The lives of Africans count for nothing in this period of 19th Century style American colonial expansion. One mining coming headquartered in Hope, Arkansas, made a deal with Kagame soon after his military campaign succeeded.

www.globalresearch.ca has a series of informative articles on this. Some even portray Kagame, who plotted the assassination that started it all, as a savior.