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We’re sorry, chump, but “arable land” < “oil” and “Middle Eastern outpost”

rwanda_president_wide.jpg
From Reuters, “Rwanda’s Kagame Scolds Outside World Over Genocide”, April 4, 2004:

Rwandan President Paul Kagame accused the outside world of deliberately failing to prevent genocide on Sunday, opening a week to mark the tenth anniversary of the killing of some 800,000 fellow countrymen.
The United Nations, the United States and European countries have all faced criticism for failing to intervene during the three-month genocide in Rwanda, which ended in July 1994 when Kagame seized the capital at the head of a rebel army.
“We should always bear in mind that genocide, wherever it happens, represents the international community’s failure, which I would in fact characterise as deliberate, as convenient failure,” Kagame told the start of a genocide conference.
“How could a million lives of the Rwandan people be regarded as so insignificant by anyone in terms of strategic or national interest?” he told the meeting at a hotel used 10 years ago as a base by military planners directing the massacres.

RELATED:
Worldbank Data for Rwanda
CIA Factbook, Rwanda (Natural resources: gold, cassiterite (tin ore), wolframite (tungsten ore), methane, hydropower, arable land)
Official Website of the Government of Rwanda (www.rwanda1.com…at what point did nations start having to adopt the equivalent of AOL usernames for their WWW domains?)

4 replies on “We’re sorry, chump, but “arable land” < “oil” and “Middle Eastern outpost””

OK, jean-luc, who do you see as the bad guys here?The UN peacekeepers (french & belgian) who turned tail & ran (in the great tradition of non-american UN troops)? And where was the EU, those lovely principled folks for whom it’s NOT all about oil (except for the french & russians, that is)? Or are you trying to blame Clinton, who has all the nuance & multilateral skill Dubya lacks? But you know, if America (with the only strong military able or WILLING to attempt policing the world) had actually stepped in to stop the genocide, guess who’d have been accused of invading a nonthreatening country for no reason? Anyhow, if the rwandans had really wanted to get rid of Saddam — I mean to stop the genocide, they’d have done it for themselves. Chomskybots would have pointed out that the American imperialists just want a base in the area or that the Mossad had revealed the existence of some hidden natural resource to Halliburton.
As usual, your point is . . . oh, forget it.

edition 2 of the kingjack primer:
EQUAL OPPORTUNITY BLAMING: the usual suspects: clinton, albright, UN, et al
COMMENT CLARIFICATION: “guess who’d have been accused of invading a nonthreatening country for no reason?” check your mid-nineties news and other tracts, and you’ll see nary a person would have had a problem with this sort of endeavor. save for perhaps gingrich, who was too busy shutting down the government, or clinton, who was too busy bailing out mexico, which turned out to be a good idea in the face of a lot of negative pressure, or the non-nation-building republican party. see, it’s all about equal opp blaming.
oh, and nice “mossad” hookup, too. it’s good to throw out the anti-semite/conspiratorial tag every now and again.
NAME CLARIFICATION: i’ve now changed it to “andre”, for your benefit.

You’ve got to hand some credit over to the adorably irrelevant Kofi Annan, who apologized 10 years after the afct, and, more tellingly, a couple of days after Richard Clarke got public accolades for his “mea culpa.” And no, I am not too cynical. ;-0

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