Posted on 12/20/2004 10:46:40 AM PST by areafiftyone
So much for the myth of "America's first black president": A new movie reveals that racist Bill Clinton not only did nothing to stop genocide in Rwanda, he pressured other nations to do nothing.
In a rare case of exposing one of Clinton's greatest scandals, the New York Times today discusses United Artists' "Hotel Rwanda," opening Wednesday, along with former Clinton national security adviser Anthony Lake. Among the appalling truths revealed:
Yes, the only genocide worth stopping for Bill Clinton was when white people were being wiped out in the Balkans.
When "Hotel Rwanda" opens, it will be fascinating to see whether it reveals the depths of Clinton's guilt, or even mentions that. A bad sign: It co-stars leftist actor Nick Nolte. Recall that the Tinseltown movie "Black Hawk Down" was recut to avoid giving Clinton the blame he deserved for his disaster in Somalia.
Well this proves that Clinton would be perfect to take over Koffi Annan's position. Turning a deaf ear to the face of genocide is the U.N.'s specialty!
This is just so heart breaking!
I can't wait till God destroys evil in this world, because it's just too rampant.
I saw an great interview with Don Cheadle about this movie....there is Oscar buzz as he plays the main character. I may have to see this one...
What a fine legacy. I'll wager that he bit his lip while reading the article.
Don't forget Allbright's role in this affair.
I've noticed this in academia, during one of the many series of lectures after 9/11. When the speakers were condemning something that took place during a Republican administration, they always said "Bush" and "Reagan." But if it was during a Democrat's administration, it was always just "The United States."
They still are, except now it is muslims wiping out Christians...
Yes well plenty of people were yelling about the murder of Christians in the Sudan under Clinton and they didn't listen. This does not surprise me. Evil Dums are the biggest Racist, anti-Religion. anti- life scum on the earth.
General Weasley Clark was involved in this disaster.
Well, after all, he did apologyze. What more can you ask?
The History Channel had an excellent 1.5 hour long documentary on what happened in Rwanda, and how the weasels annan, klintoon and albright played center stage in preventing any assistance to the Tutsis.
They also showed the long historical racial precedents to the genocide. how the Dutch had reinforced racial superiority, backed the Tutsis in gov't, etc. All in all very informative.
Sad commentary on our gov't during that era.
What was Allbirghts roll?
I am sure this will all be predonminately displayed in the Clinton library (NOT!) (/sarcasm)
Maddie "I didn't know I was a Jew" Albright represented the United States at the U. N. and urged that no immediate action be taken to stop the genocide. This was covered in the History Channel presentation on Rwanda.
Yea, 'Toon, you're building a legacy, all right (or should that be Albright??!!)
A Holocaust We Could Have Stopped
Nat Hentoff'
February 24 - March 2, 1999
We were pretending to be dead. They took stones and smashed the heads of the bodies. They took little children and smashed their heads together. When they found someone breathing, they pulled them out and finished them off. . . . They killed my family. I saw them kill my papa and my brother, but I did not see what happened to my mother.
— Valentina Iribagiza, a survivor of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda
They took one person out of the group and cut off his head. And even the pregnant women, they cut open their stomachs. . . . I saw my father being killed. They cut him to pieces.
— Placide Uwinagiye, another survivor of the holocaust in Rwanda
The graves are only half full— who will help us to fill them?
— The Hutu radio, exhorting Hutus to finish off the Tutsis, Rwanda, 1994
In March 1998, William Jefferson Clinton and the First Lady arrived in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. The hundreds of thousands of corpses had been somehow removed, and the president of the United States told the dignitaries greeting him at the airport:
"It may seem strange to you here, especially the many of you who lost members of your family, but all over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror."
On the contrary, word of the coming terror had reached the White House— and the State Department and the Defense Department and the UN— as early as 1989. But the warnings were ignored.
Clinton's culpability in this holocaust is not an impeachable offense, but it is the single most repellent charge against him and his administration.
In his extraordinarily detailed and probing book, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), Philip Gourevitch says plainly that "throughout the entire period" of the genocide, the Clinton administration's approach was not a failure to intervene but "a success of a policy not to intervene." (Emphasis added.)
Carrying out the Clinton policy of letting the killing continue was Madeleine Albright, then our ambassador to the United Nations. Says Gourevitch:
"Her name is rarely associated with Rwanda, but ducking and pressuring others to duck— as the death toll leapt from thousands to tens of thousands— was the absolute low point in her career as a stateswoman."
So far.
Clinton's name is also rarely associated with Rwanda. The American press noted the corpses at the time, but largely failed to begin to cover Clinton's complicity in this crime against humanity, as it essentially failed to cover Franklin Roosevelt's refusal to rescue Jews from the Nazis.
More and more of the bloody facts emerge. Gourevitch first began to tell the story in the December 18, 1995, issue of The New Yorker. Whatever Tina Brown's mistakes as editor of that magazine, her financial and personal support of Gourevitch during the many months of his research and writing was a lasting and honorable achievement.
On January 26, 1999, more of the ghastly story of Rwanda (and the rest of the world's determination to avert its eyes) was told on PBS's Frontline, in a report called "The Triumph of Evil." Since 1983, Frontline has been the only television series to equal the standards set by Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly at CBS, back in the days when network news operations covered foreign affairs— and atrocities— in penetrating depth.
Watching "The Triumph of Evil," Bill Steigerwald of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had the same reaction I did to Clinton's "apology" four years later in Rwanda:
"Before presenting the president of Rwanda a tacky plaque honoring the victims of a holocaust that consumed at least 800,000 humans in 100 days, Clinton made a vague apology for the failure of the international community to fully appreciate 'the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror.'
"But by the time the president is seen making that carefully worded statement at the end of 'Triumph of Evil,' Frontline has exposed it to be a shameful lie."
Next week, the story behind that shameful lie. And at the end of this series, I will again ask how the American left can continue to insist that this man remain in office. Clinton has corrupted many of the most decent people I have known in previous battles against injustice.
In an earlier Frontline program on the holocaust ("Valentina's Nightmare," April 1, 1997), the narrator tells of what happened in a churchyard in a remote village, Nyarbuye, in southeast Rwanda. There, where 13-year-old Valentina Iribagiza became an orphan, "the house of God had become one of Rwanda's most terrible killing grounds."
In April 1994, a mob of Hutus surrounded the village church as the radio blared: "All Tutsi will perish. They will disappear from the earth. Slowly, slowly, we will kill them like rats."
Valentina remembers: "Their leader said we were snakes. That was when they started to cut people up."
And the order came from the Oval Office not to intervene.
This month, Bill Clinton was listed as one of the nominees for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Triumph of Evil - Rwanda overflowed with corpses
Nat Hentoff
March 3 - 9, 1999
In April 1993, the new president of the United States dedicated the new Holocaust Museum in Washington. Clinton said: "The evil represented in this museum is incontestable, but as we are its witness, so must we remain its adversary in the world in which we live."
On January 26, 1999, after watching Frontline's "The Triumph of Evil," a report on the holocaust in Rwanda, John Koch of The Boston Globe wrote about how that PBS program contrasted "Clinton's platitudes [at the Holocaust Museum] and a view of the serene Potomac with footage of Hutus methodically dismembering their victims [the Tutsis], some of whom were still alive."
Parts of that scalding Frontline program originated with the BBC, but Frontline producers Mike Robinson and Ben Loeterman added new material focusing on America's lethal refusal to prevent— and later stop— the killing in Rwanda.
On camera, James Woods, deputy assistant secretary at the Defense Department from 1986 to 1994, says: "In the spring of '93, when the Clinton administration came in, we were asked to develop lists of what we thought would be serious crises this administration might face . . . I put Rwanda on the list, but I received guidance from higher authorities: 'If something happens in Rwanda-Burundi, we don't care.
" 'Take it off the list. United States national interest is not involved, and you know, we can't put all these silly humanitarian interests on lists— unlike important problems like the Middle East, North Korea. . . . ' "
Before 1993, the Hutu majority in Rwanda had long nurtured a deep resentment against the Tutsi minority who had been, under Belgian rule, the country's aristocracy, subjugating the Hutu underclass.
After independence in the late 1950s, the Hutus seized power and oppressed the Tutsis. Following a civil war, the Hutus agreed to share power with the Tutsis, but, the pact was doomed because Hutu hatred of their former overlords was too deep.
Before the killings started, Kofi Annan (then in charge of the UN's peacekeeping mission and now UN secretary general) was told that the Hutus were piling up weapons and that the UN forces there could seize those weapons. Annan refused to give the order— although many lives could have been saved.
UN commanders in Rwanda also told Kofi Annan that an order had been given to register all Tutsis in Kigali, the nation's capital. They were to be exterminated. Still, the UN did not act.
Belgium tried to at least get the UN to increase the peacekeeping forces in Rwanda, but failed. As Alan Kuperman pointed out in the December 29, 1998, Washington Post:
"The United States blocked this final effort to bolster the peacekeepers prior to the genocide. . . . Washington was acting on Clinton's new peacekeeping policy (eventually codified as Presidential Decision Directive 25), drafted in the wake of U.S. casualties in Somalia in October 1993."
As Philip Gourevitch reports in his book, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), Clinton ordered in that presidential directive that America avoid being involved in UN peace missions— and urged that the United States should persuade other nations not to get involved in any peacekeeping missions that the United States didn't want to join.
The genocide began. As early as the end of April 1994, Frontline revealed, a secret State Department intelligence report called the killings genocide.
On Frontline, Tony Marley, a consultant at the State Department in 1994, says that a Clinton administration official cautioned him that in view of the coming congressional elections, the Democrats could lose votes if Clinton "admitted that genocide was taking place in Rwanda and was seen to do nothing about it. . . . It indicated to me that the calculation was based on whether or not there was popular pressure to take action— rather than taking action because it was the right thing to do."
William Jefferson Clinton survives because of his close— often daily— attention to polls telling him the popular thing to do.
Frontline's narrator on "The Triumph of Evil":
"The objective reality of what was happening in Rwanda couldn't be kept quiet forever. Rwanda's dead had begun to float downstream into the outside world. The country was literally overflowing with corpses."
At one point, Tony Marley recommended that, at least, American military radio equipment could be used to jam Hutu radio transmissions, which were urging that not a single Tutsi be left alive. ("All Tutsis will perish! They will disappear from the earth.")
Marley's suggestion was turned down. "In fact," Marley told Frontline, "one lawyer from the Pentagon made the argument that [jamming the Hutu radio] would be contrary to the United States constitutional protection of freedom of the press and freedom of speech."
The Clinton administration had presented the Hutu assassins with our First Amendment to get the president off the hook.
In his book, Philip Gourevitch tells of a conversation at a bar in Rwanda's capital city with an American intelligence officer:
"I hear you're interested in genocide," the American said. "Do you know what genocide is? A cheese sandwich. Write it down. Genocide is a cheese sandwich.
"What does anyone care about a cheese sandwich? Genocide, genocide, genocide. Cheese sandwich, cheese sandwich, cheese sandwich. Who gives a shit? Did you see a crime committed against you? Hey, just a million Rwandans [were massacred]. The international Geneva Convention [which provides for humane treatment of prisoners] makes a nice wrapping for a cheese sandwich."
And Clinton ate it. You can't blame Ken Starr for that.
Do you have a link to that? I want to send it to a Clinton lover! That article just made me sooo angry and sick to my stomach!
Weasel words from an accomplished tail covering sophist. You know they discussed it. It just wasn't at a cabinet meeting, formally speaking. The idea that Clinton didn't make the call is laughable on its face. But Lake wants to avoid talking about the actual discussion, and tries to leave the impression is just never came up. Which is ridiculous, as he also says they were listening to the radio and knew exactly what was happening, and the US went out of its way to pressure others not to do anything about it.
The right movie on this has already been made, as a work of fiction. By a non-leftist, Bruce Willis - Tears of the Sun. A fine movie, about what should have happened in such a case, but did not.
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