Opinion/Vincent Browne: Bill Clinton went to Rwanda in 1998, while he was still president. He made an emotional address at Kigali 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 speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror."
It was a whopper of a lie. Clinton and his administration fully appreciated the depth and speed with which the Tutsi population of Rwanda were being engulfed by that terror. Recently published intelligence reports, made available to Clinton and his cabinet shortly after the start of the genocide, show that they were fully aware of a planned "final solution to eliminate all Tutsis". The documents also show that the US administration deliberately obscured the reality of the genocide in the course of a strategy that had as a priority, not the saving of human lives, as required by the Genocide Convention of 1948, but the avoidance of any engagement either by the US or the UN.
The US was not alone in averting its gaze from the horror that was unfolding in Rwanda in 1994. Repeatedly in the months before the genocide, from August 1993 onwards, the UN was informed that Rwanda was on the verge of a major catastrophe. Nothing was done other than to insist that UN troops would not intervene.
When the genocide did start, the UN ignored pleas from its representatives on the ground in Kigali for more peacekeepers. When eight Belgian UN soldiers in the UN contingent were murdered, the UN ordered the withdrawal of all its troops. France and Belgium sent thousands of troops to arrange for the evacuation of their nationals.
These troops looked on while the killings went on around them. In what was suspected as a deeply cynical gesture, France eventually sent a force into Rwanda, purporting to stop the genocide but its only accomplishment was to save the perpetrators of the genocide from the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which had assumed control of the country in late June 1994.
There has been a lot of hand-wringing and apologies about all this in the last few weeks and some of the world's media have also expressed regret for their wilful misrepresentation of what was happening and their general indifference. But right now the world is wilfully ignoring much of what is happening in this very same region of Africa.
In a report to the UN Security Council on March 25th, Kofi Annan raised concerns over the viability of the peace agreement in Democratic Republic of the Congo (DCR).
He reported a massacre in a village on the shores of Lake Albert in January where more people were killed than in the Madrid al-Qaeda bombing (over 200) and nobody paid the slightest bit of attention. He noted another massacre in Kitenge and "particularly horrendous acts of torture, rape, child recruitment and mutilation".
He reported on "the widespread practice of detaining prisoners in underground cells". He wrote: "Across the Democratic Republic of the Congo, looting, armed robberies, extortions, illegal taxation, arbitrary arrest and illegal detention continued to be key means of subsistence for unpaid soldiers . . . Rape and sexual violence against women and young girls is perpetrated with impunity throughout the DRC".
On Sunday evening it was reported by the UN from Goma that the bodies of at least 25 people, mostly women and children, hacked to death by unidentified assailants, have so far been discovered in Lutwegi, in the east of DCR.
There was an attempted coup d'etat in the capital of DCR, Kinshasa, two weeks ago and all the indications are that the December 2003 peace agreement is unravelling.
It is reported that almost 5 million people have lost their lives in DCR in the last six years because of the conflict there, and, throughout, the world has stood aside and the media have ignored it. The African holocaust is a matter of indifference.
Bordering on the Congo, in Sudan, there is what the UN humanitarian coordinator, Mukesh Kapila, says is the "world's greatest humanitarian and human rights catastrophe". This involves the killing, torturing and mutilation of civilians by government and rebel forces, mass rapes and sexual violence against women (in one instance 41 school girls and their female teachers were gang-raped by 14 men), massive population displacements, the bombing of villages, large scale malnourishment.
In the northern region of Uganda, there are killings, displacements, famine and gross human rights abuses. In Burundi, where Michael Courtney, the Irish papal nuncio, was killed in January, the peace agreement there too seems under threat. At least 21 people have been killed in four days of fighting last week. More than 300,000 people have been killed in Burundi's civil war since 1993.
As the Progressive Democrats have discovered, nobody cares about black Africans, except when they try to escape their misery - and then we can't wait to send them home.