Interview:Madeleine Albright["Ghosts of Rwanda"]

PBS ^ | April 1, 2004 | FRONTLINE

[Western Phil]

"Do you think they'll repeat this?"

I think that is up to the individual station. If I remember right, our local station said that they buy the program and have the rights to broadcast it twice. Here they seem to re-run things again in the summer, when they are done with all the programs in a series or sometimes at 2 or 3 in the morning.

Part of this fiasco was due to the fact that Clinton was not a leader. He did polls on everything, did not like or respect the military and just did not care about Black Africa. They had an interview with him towards the end of the show. He said something to the effect that the advisors did not give him adequate information or push the right decisions.

We can't really tell about history and what might have been necessary to stop the killing, but this program gives the impression that a little bluster in the UN or by the president to the media might have made a difference over there.

[finnigan2]

I remember clearly that the Canadian general (Dollaire?) in charge of UN Forces in Rwanda kept pleading with Coffee Can to allow him to intervene and to send him more peacekeepers to stop what he was continuously reporting as an ongoing massacre on a genocidal scale. Finally, 15 to 20 Belgian soldiers under his command radioed back from a remote location that they were under attack from locals and asked him for help. Dollaire made the mistake of going up the line for permission to use force in going to their aid. It was refused and the soldiers were all murdered. Dollaire came home and had a nervous breakdown - I suspect because he knew that if he had ignored UN Headquarters, he could have saved their lives and many natives besides.
At this time I still vividly recall seeing Albright on TV at an emergency meeting of the Security Council that went on till midnight and in which they discussed whether to send the troops that Dollaire had so recently pleaded for. In a break during the meeting, Albright got up to stretch her legs and I'll never forget her dancing the Macarena with another delegate in the aisles behind the Council table. Everybody was all smiles and laughs as she then sat down to cast the US vote to defeat the resolution to provide the help that would have stopped what turned out to be the genocidal massacre of almost one million natives, most of them hacked to death with machetes. All because Klintoon didn't want to risk another Mogadishu for a bunch of fuzzy wuzzys. What a leader!