|
Banned
|
A month aftet the genocide in Rwanda began, Time reported the sentiment in the US and in the rest of the world, and....don't forget, it came less than a year after the American military experienced the "Black Hawk Down" episode in Somalia....and it was a mid-term election year....and Newt's contract with America did not sweep into office because of American inaction, that spring and summer, with regard to Rwanda...
Quote:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...980732,00.html
Posted Monday, May 16, 1994
The pictures are as appalling as any that have come across global television screens, yet no one is calling for direct intervention to stop the month-old killing spree in Rwanda. However troubled they might be by the scale and ferocity of the slaughter, Western nations have offered little more than emotional expressions of sympathy for the victims.
The American appetite for such missions, even in cases of dire human need, has been dulled by experiences like Somalia. "Lesson No. 1," President Clinton said last week, "is, Don't go into one of these things and say, maybe we'll be done in a month because it's a humanitarian crisis." <b>His reluctance mirrors the public's: a TIME/CNN poll last week showed that only 34% of respondents favored doing something to quell the violence, while 51% opposed any action. </b>Clinton confirmed that judgment with a new presidential directive on U.S. participation in peacekeeping abroad: those operations, it says, "should not be open-ended commitments, but linked to concrete political solutions."
Rwanda is an almost perfect example of the problem Clinton's directive addresses. The horrifying slaughter is another explosion in a mainly ethnically based civil war that outsiders understand imperfectly if at all -- and therefore do not know how to solve. No one is even certain what sort of diplomatic efforts might persuade the Rwandan factions to halt the bloodletting. The only obvious alternative to traditional diplomacy would be for a well-equipped army to move into Rwanda -- shooting if necessary -- and force a cease-fire. But no one is volunteering for such an army.
<b>A U.N. peacekeeping force already in Rwanda to police an agreement last August for power sharing with Tutsi rebels in the Hutu-led government was hastily reduced from 2,600 to 470 when the massacres began and 10 Belgian blue helmets were killed.</b> The signal sent, says a senior African diplomat, "was, Look, you are on your own. You may do whatever you want."
Sanctions, the response of choice at the U.N., are widely regarded as useless in this case: Rwanda's economy is already destitute, and people are fighting just to stay alive. As the situation worsens, Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali is looking for about 8,000 troops to send into the country to stop the killing. He has asked the Organization of African Unity to take on the responsibility, but has had no response.....
|
Quote:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...1487-7,00.html
<a hre="http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,981487-1,00.html">Posted Monday, Sep. 26, 1994</a>
NO ONE COULD ACCUSE BILL CLINTON OF FAILING TO give peace a chance. Even as American warships reached their invasion stations off the shores of Haiti, and the President faced the moment when he would have to issue the order for U.S. troops to go in shooting, a tense weekend of negotiations was devoted to the possibility that strongman Raoul Cedras and the rest of the ruling Haitian military clique had finally got the message and were ready to quit. At the 11th hour, the President proved willing to talk.....
......The Administration counters with a moral argument: the U.S. should do what it can to foster democracy and remove a murderous tyranny. Well, then, say critics, why not use military force in Bosnia or Rwanda, where worse atrocities have been committed, and on a much larger scale? Because they are far away and would require a major effort entailing heavy casualties with uncertain support from allies, Clinton's aides rejoin. The U.S. has a special obligation to promote democracy and oppose tyrannous atrocity in its own hemisphere. Haiti is one place where that can be done quickly, with worldwide backing and minimal loss of life. The U.S. should indeed promote democracy among its neighbors, reply the critics, but by political, diplomatic and economic pressure, not military force. Washington has no divine commission to impose democracy on its neighbors by brute strength.
Then, embarrassingly, there is the U.S. Constitution, which grants Congress the sole power to declare war, though it also makes the President the Commander in Chief of the armed forces and thus able to order them into harm's way. The debates over the constitutional status of an invasion of Haiti have been wildly distorted by partisanship. Democrats who insisted George Bush had to seek congressional approval to start the Persian Gulf War -- as he finally did, successfully -- contend that an invasion of Haiti would be a much smaller, less dangerous undertaking. Comparable, in fact, to the Reagan Administration invasion of Grenada and George Bush's pre-Kuwait invasion of Panama, which the Democrats now retroactively approve. <b>Republicans who backed those invasions even though Congress was never consulted in advance now insist the plain sense of the Constitution is that the President must not send troops into combat on his own hook if it can be avoided.</b> Discounting for hypocrisy on both sides, <b>Clinton's critics would seem to have the better of the argument.</b> In the case of Haiti, the President can hardly claim he must act quickly to ward off a threat to the U.S. or to save American lives -- the two traditional excuses for shooting first and telling Congress later........
|
GW Bush had the backing of at least 3/4 of American voters when he ordered the invasion of Iraq, IMO, Clinton was hardly in a position, politically, after ten UN troops were killed, and the UN reduced it's force by 80 percent in the Rwandan region, just eight months after the US military fiasco in Mogadishu, Somalia, to send US troops to intervene in the civil war in Rwanda.
Quote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mogadishu
......Intense battling between these rivals and other clan-based rebel factions damaged many parts of Mogadishu in 1991-1992 and led to tens of thousands of casualties as an intense drought-induced famine ravaged rural Somalia.
A contingent of United States Marines landed near Mogadishu on December 9, 1992 to spearhead United Nations peacekeeping forces. The United Nations sought to capture warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid in 1993 to enable the establishment of a transitional government. Somalis loyal to him ambushed the peacekeepers and killed 24 Pakistanis.
On October 3, 1993, the United States Army Rangers and the Army's Delta Force went on a mission to capture two of Aidid's warlords. Although the mission was successful, five American army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters were shot down during the battle (two in the city [Durant's "Super 64" and Wolcot's "Super 61"] and 3 at a safe area), causing about 100 United States Army Rangers and Delta Force operators to be pinned down in the city, trying to rescue survivors and recover the dead. In this Battle of Mogadishu, the Somalis killed 18, one soldier three days later in a mortar strike and 1 Malaysian soldier and injured several dozen. Estimates put the number of Somali casualties at 500-1000 militia and civilians dead and 3000-4000 injured. The later nonfiction books Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War, In The Company Of Heroes, and motion picture Black Hawk Down dramatized the events of this battle.
Aerial view of a residential area of Mogadishu, with a U.S. Marine Corps helicopter in the foreground, December 1992.
Aerial view of a residential area of Mogadishu, with a U.S. Marine Corps helicopter in the foreground, December 1992.
With these casualties, United States President Bill Clinton withdrew American forces in 1994. ........
|
Quote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwanda
....In 1990, the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) invaded Rwanda from Uganda. During the course of the fighting, top Rwandan government officials, mainly Hutu, began secretly training young men into informal armed bands called Interahamwe (a Kinyarwanda term roughly meaning "those who fight together"). Government officials also launched a radio station that began anti-Tutsi propaganda. The military government of Juvénal Habyarimana responded to the RPF invasion with pogroms against Tutsis, whom it claimed were trying to re-enslave the Hutus. In August 1993 the government and the RPF signed a cease-fire agreement known as the Arusha accords in Arusha, Tanzania to form a power sharing government, but fighting between the two sides continued. The United Nations sent a peacekeeping force named the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), under the leadership of Canadian Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire. UNAMIR was vastly underfunded and under-staffed. More details of this aspect of the conflict are starkly explained in Dallaire's 2003 book Shake Hands With the Devil.
During the armed conflict, the RPF was blamed for the bombing of Kigali. These attacks were actually carried out by the Hutu army as part of a campaign to create a reason for a political crackdown and ethnic violence. On April 6, 1994, President Habyarimana was assassinated when his Falcon 50 trijet was shot down while landing in Kigali.[1] It remains unclear who was responsible for the assassination — most credible sources point to the Presidential Guard, spurred by Hutu nationalists fearful of losing power, although others believe that Tutsi rebels were responsible, possibly with the help of Belgian mercenaries. Over the next three months, the military and Interahamwe militia groups killed between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates in the Rwandan genocide. The RPF continued to advance on the capital, and occupied the northern, the east and the southern parts of the country by June. Thousands of civilians were killed in the conflict. U.N. member states refused to answer UNAMIR's requests for increased troops and money. Meanwhile, French troops were dispatched to stabilize the situation under Opération Turquoise, but this only resulted in an exacerbation of the situation, with the evacuation limited to foreign nationals.
On July 4, 1994, the war ended as the RPF entered the capital Kigali. In the resulting Great Lakes refugee crisis over 2 million Hutus fled the country after the war, fearing Tutsi retribution. Most have since returned, although some Hutus remained in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, including some militia members that became involved in the First Congo War and Second Congo War. In 1996, after repeated unsuccessful appeals to the UN and the international community to deal with the security threat posed by the remnants of the defeated genocidal forces on its eastern border, Rwanda invaded eastern Zaire in an effort to eliminate the Interahamwe groups operating there. This action, and the simultaneous one by Ugandan troops, contributed to the outbreak of the First Congo War and the eventual fall of longtime dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.....
|
mixedmedia, our military is not a force of miracle workers. Tragic as the killing in Rwanda was, at the time, there was no grassroots domestic pressure upon the POTUS to involve US troops, and even if Clinton had overridden objections, the description above makes an argument for the idea that it would not have been a responsible use of US troops, given the level of unrest and the lack of support from other UN members. The lack of support from other UN members was a good argument for delaying the March, 2003, US invasion of Iraq, too. |