Salon.com > Rwanda

The real reason not to intervene in Syria

Fri, 03 May 2013 17:22:00 +0000

Demands by politicians and pundits for intervention in Syria have become so strong that they now seem to be influencing U.S. policy. But are they right? The most emotionally powerful arguments came from the State Department former policy planning head Anne-Marie Slaughter. The Obama administration is in danger of letting genocide akin to the one in Rwanda in the 1990s occur, she wrote, in the Washington Post. The case of Rwanda haunts Democrats. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called not saving Rwandans her “greatest regret” from her time in office, “something that sits very heavy on all our souls.” U.N. ambassador Susan Rice has similarly expressed agony over U.S. failure to intervene in Rwanda.

U.S. again under fire over Rwanda

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 16:23:00 +0000

Human rights advocates and U.N. diplomats have criticized the U.S. for its failure to act over the current crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Critics charge that U.S. officials, primarily U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice, should put more pressure on Rwanda to end its support for the Congolese M23 rebel movement.

According to the New York Times:

[C]ritics — who include officials of human rights organizations and United Nations diplomats — say the administration has not put enough pressure on Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, to end his support for the rebel movement whose recent capture of the strategic city of Goma in Congo set off a national crisis in a country that has already lost more than three million people in more than a decade of fighting. Rwanda’s support is seen as vital to the rebel group, known as M23.

Support for Mr. Kagame and the Rwandan government has been a matter of American foreign policy since he led the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front to victory over the incumbent government in July 1994, effectively ending the Rwandan genocide. But according to rights organizations and diplomats at the United Nations, Ms. Rice has been at the forefront of trying to shield the Rwandan government, and Mr. Kagame in particular, from international censure, even as several United Nations reports have laid the blame for the violence in Congo at Mr. Kagame’s door.

Last week, Rice decried the actions of M23 via Facebook. "The U.S. condemns in the strongest terms horrific M23 violence. Any and all external support has to stop,” she wrote, drawing criticism for not naming Rwanda's president. Rice, who has been under fire in recent months over the narratives surrounding the September attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, remains a strong contender to replace Hillary Clinton as secretary of state.

Congolese rebels seize strategic city and international airport

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 17:56:00 +0000

GOMA, Congo (AP) — A rebel group created just seven months ago seized the strategic provincial capital of Goma, home to more than 1 million people in eastern Congo, and its international airport on Tuesday, officials and witnesses said, raising the specter of a regional war.

Explosions and machine-gun fire rocked the lakeside city as the M23 rebels pushed forward on two fronts: toward the city center and along the road that leads to Bukavu, another provincial capital which lies to the south. Civilians ran down sidewalks looking for cover and children shouted in alarm. A man clutched a thermos as he ran.

By early afternoon the gunfire had stopped and M23 soldiers marched down the potholed main boulevards, unimpeded. Their senior commanders, who the United Nations has accused of grave crimes including recruiting child soldiers, summary executions and rape, paraded around the town in all-terrain vehicles, waving to the thousands of people who left their barricaded houses to see them.

The United Nations peacekeepers, known by their acronym MONUSCO, were not helping the government forces during Tuesday's battle because they do not have a mandate to engage the rebels, said Congolese military spokesman Olivier Hamuli, who expressed frustration over the lack of action by the peacekeepers.

Real-life body-snatchers

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 21:00:00 +0000

At first glance, everything looked the same. In the 1956 original, the possessed don’t act much different from their former selves. They don’t stare hollowly; they don’t shuffle. They’re just a little unemotional. And, really, what’s so wrong about that? In the 1950s, people cultivated blandness of affect. You went along to get along. The alternative got you labeled hysterical, with its connotations of effeminacy and madness. Hysterical, of course, is how Kevin McCarthy looks when he bursts out of the examining room in the opening scene and babbles warnings at a dubious shrink. Somebody give the guy a Klonopin. "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers" has been read as an allegory of communism and an allegory of McCarthyism, though Joe McCarthy always seemed hysterical himself, with his jittering gaze and vigilante’s snarl. In both readings, the film locates evil in the collectivity, the passive, homogenous mass that stirs to action only when it scents the presence of one of the unpossessed. Can’t you see? They’re here already. You’re next!

Philip Gourevitch: Memory is a disease

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 20:31:00 +0000

On July 25, Philip Gourevitch gave the keynote address to the Human Rights Lecture Series at Stanford University. A long-time staff writer for The New Yorker, Gourevitch has written about the Iraq War and Abu Ghraib, the 2004 U.S. presidential campaign, French politics, and conflicts in Africa and the Middle East. His account of the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was included in the Guardian’s list of the 100 greatest nonfiction books. In 2009, Gourevitch started reporting again from Rwanda.

We met over drinks before his lecture to discuss the challenges of writing about the history that we are in the midst of making, the burdens of memory and the appeal of forgetting, the dangers of narrative simplification, the limits of humanitarianism, and the messiness of politics.