US involvement

The United States, lead by President Bill Clinton, could have had a significant influence on the Rwanda genocide in 1994, but they chose to stay out of the situation. When the UN, specifically Canadian Major General Romeo Dallaire, warned the pentagon about this potential genocide they did not add it to their list of priorities. When James Woods of the Defense Department's African affairs bureau suggested this, his bosses basically told him, "Look, if something happens in Rwanda-Burundi, we don't care. Take if off the list. U.S. natinal interest is not involved and we can't put all these silly humanitarian issues on lists...Just make it go away" (Power 342). As you can see, either the US did not think Rwanda was significant in the first place or they wanted to ignore the issue in order to avoid another "Somalia situation." When the realization set in that something disastrous and catastrophic was happening in a country no bigger than the size of Maryland, the US still refused to step in and help.

The United States were given extensive warnings (all of which they ignored) about a planned massacre. The U.S. recieved these pieces of information prior to the plane crash on April 6. The US also denied Belgian requests to reinforce the peacekeeping mission in Rwanda. When the massacres began, the Clinton administration did not send troops to Rwanda to try to stop the killing and they also refused to help in many other ways as well. President Clinton did not organize any meetings of his senior foreign policy advisers to talk about U.S. options for helping Rwanda and creating peace. The president's top advisers rarely spoke out against the genocide and the US did not use its technical assets to jam the Rwandan hate radio that would issue names of the people who were to be killed next and would sent out anti-Tutsi "information." Also, the U.S. did not try to use their influence to have the Rwandan government's ambassador (who was in support of the genocide) to be removed from his position of power in the United Nations. The U.S. also withdrew their UN peacekeepers from Rwanda and would not authorize the deployment of UN reinforcements. The people and the Clinton administration did not want to enter Rwanda because of the reaction of U.S. involvement in Somalia, which was still fresh in their minds.

The United States Army went into Somalia from August 1992 to March 1994 in order to relieve the Somalian people of starvation. The U.S. troops were slowly dragged into interclan power struggles and "nation building" missions that were ambiguous and drawn out. Many American soldiers were killed in this intervention and it took much longer to pull the troops out of Somalia than initially expected.

I think that the blame of the killing 800,000 Tutsies in 100 day partly falls on the rest of the world because other countries did not intervene and help the people getting massacred. Most of the killings were primarily done with machetes (along with knives, spears, masu (big clubs with nails sticking out of them), screwdrivers, hammers, and bicycle handlebars). Another country, such as the U.S., Belgium, Germany, or France could have easily stopped this killing because they would have used automatic weapons (firearms); a bullet can easily defeat a machete.

(All of the pictures above are photos of murdered Tutsi people. These killings and the death depicted in these photos could have been prevented if another country would have had the courage and decency to step in and do something about the situation in Rwanda).

Sources:
http://www.history.army.mil/brochures/Somalia/Somalia.htm
A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide
http://www.interet-general.info/IMG/Rwanda-Genocide-1994-1.jpg
http://images.teamsugar.com/files/upl1/6/62144/15_2008/1000232.jpg

http://k53.pbase.com/v3/76/348376/2/50507510.MarksRwandaFile0215.jpg