*******OFF TOPIC: SLAUGHTER AND SELECTIVE INDIGNATION*******
When you figure out why no one cared about the Chechnya slaughter, then you can start working on why no one cared about the African massacres - not even the African American community.
Once before, on this thread, I brought up the absolutely astounding absence of reaction in this country to the Rwandan massacres ....Half a million people slaughtered in less than a month!! Cut down in churches where they had fled for sanctuary!!
Nothing in recent history can compare with that...
As far as the general public is concerned, I fear that its basic indifference to the slaughter may be attributed partially to the belief that Africa is "like that" (but Europe is/should not be "like that"). As for Afro-Americans: well, this was "black on black" violence; typically, they have gotten more exercised about "white on black" violence in Africa (as in South Africa).
As for the government's lack of reaction, I would suggest several reasons for it. There was no one "Bad Guy" to pinpoint: it was majority Hutus against minority Tutsis; the slaughter was not carried out by an organized army, but by hordes of free-lancers armed with machetes, etc. In other words, there was no one to bomb. And we certainly were not going to commit any peace-keeping troops, to expose "our boys" to possible slaughter by machete.
That's just a guess, however. There is a new book just out which I have not read yet (although I certainly plan to), and which should provide better answers to your question: We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, by Philip Gourevich. It got a bang-up review in The Washington Post (a "milestone of foreign reporting," "a chronicle of evil rarely rivaled since Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, etc.).
In any event, the international community (including the USA, of course) takes a beating in the book: Gourevich reportedly tells a "chilling tale of the international community's cowardice, moral equivocation, downright lies and refusal to stop the initial slaughter or its bloody consequences" (from the WP review).
Gourevich's general conclusion (in his own words): "If Rwanda's experience could be said to carry any lessons for the world, it is that endangered peoples who depend on the international community for physical protection stand defenseless."
Sounds like required reading to me.
jbe |
