Rwanda was supposed to be easy. Ten years ago, when the
United Nations sent peacekeepers to this small,
Central African nation -- with the full support of the
U.S. government -- most of the policy-makers involved believed it would be a straightforward mission that would help restore the
U.N.'s battered reputation after failures in
Bosnia and
Somalia. Few could imagine that, a decade later, Rwanda would be the crisis that still haunts their souls.
"
Ghosts of Rwanda," a special two-hour documentary to mark the
10th anniversary of the
Rwandan genocide -- a state-sponsored massacre in which some 800,
000 Rwandans were methodically hunted down and murdered by
Hutu extremists as the
U.S. and international community refused to intervene -- examines the social, political, and diplomatic failures that converged to enable the genocide to occur.
"With the perspective of time, the Rwandan crisis can be seen as a crucial test of the international system and its values -- a clash between the ideals of humanitarianism and the cold logic of realism and national interest," says
FRONTLINE producer
Greg Barker.
Through interviews with key government officials, diplomats, soldiers, and survivors of the slaughter, "Ghosts of Rwanda" presents groundbreaking, first-hand accounts of the genocide from those who lived it: the diplomats on the scene who thought they were building
peace only to see their colleagues murdered; the Tutsi survivors who recount the horror of seeing their friends and family slaughtered by Hutu friends and co-workers; and the
U.N. peacekeepers in Rwanda who were ordered not to intervene in the massacre happening all around them. The documentary features interviews with
Canadian Gen. Romeo Dallaire,
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, former
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, former U.N. Secretary-General
Boutros Boutros-Ghali, and former
National Security Adviser Anthony Lake as well as haunting interviews with the Hutu killers themselves, and a powerful interview with
BBC journalist
Fergal Keane who travelled through Rwanda as the genocide was drawing to a close.
"For me, the failure of Rwanda is ten times greater than the failure of
Yugoslavia," former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali tells FRONTLINE. "Because in Yugoslavia the international community was interested, was involved. In Rwanda nobody was interested. So we have to fight two problems. The tragedy as such and the indifference of the international community."
In addition to dramatic accounts of events on the ground in Rwanda -- including the frenzied evacuation of all
U.S. citizens and foreign nationals even as Rwandan citizens begged in vain for protection from the murdering mobs -- "Ghosts of Rwanda" follows the "high politics" of
Washington, New York, and
Europe, examining how an internal policy debate that placed national interest above humanitarian responsibilities prevented officials from responding to the Rwandan crisis.
According to Anthony Lake,
President Clinton's national security adviser, there was little discussion at his level about Rwanda. "I asked some of the people from the
Defense Intelligence Agency, `So what's going on? Who's killing who? I haven't seen much about this.' And they couldn't tell me,"
Lake recalls. "I should have reached out and said `
Tell me more.'
And I didn't. [I was] concentrating mostly at the time on Bosnia and
Haiti."
The film also reveals in detail how the Rwandan Hutu extremists not only secretly planned and executed a detailed plan for genocide, but also calibrated their actions to ensure that the
West would not intervene.
Today, many in the West still question how they could have intervened in a crisis about which they had little understanding. "This was also a lesson that I learned profoundly as a diplomat,"
Ambassador Prudence Bushnell, principal deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs for the
Clinton administration, tells FRONTLINE. "To come with our own assumptions, our own values, to move either diplomatically, physically, psychologically into another country and think that we can understand it because we are sharing the same vocabulary words, is to really delude yourself." She adds, "What was happening in Rwanda was very complicated, and certainly beyond my understanding."
Follows at
PBS Frontline site
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ghosts/
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Onada Expansiva. Un blog como expresión de una perspectiva y posición en asuntos internacionales, muy especialmente derechos humanos, situaciones de conflicto y otros temas merecedores de interés y acción. Onada expansiva tiene como objetivo ser un catalizador para el debate internacionalista sobre temas de actualidad con análisis propios y aportaciones de cualquier otra fuente. Materiales y recursos en
Inglés, Catalán,
Castellano y Francés. Movemos cosas casi diariamente a través de @onadaexpansiva
http://onadaexpansiva.blogspot.com/
- published: 19 Jan 2014
- views: 66921