by Philip Giraldi, The Unz Review:
Earlier this month I published a long article on the notorious 1994 genocide in Rwanda, explaining that the actual facts may have been very different than what I’d always assumed.
As reported by the Western media, Hutu extremists assassinated the country’s moderate Hutu president by shooting his plane out of the sky and then immediately unleashed a campaign of mass slaughter against Rwanda’s Tutsis, seeking to completely exterminate that 15% minority population. Inflamed by genocidal radio broadcasts, Hutu mobs often armed merely with simple machetes soon killed many hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
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That rampage was only halted by the military victory of a rebel Tutsi army led by the heroic Paul Kagame, who then reunified his ethnically-divided country and has very successfully governed it for the last thirty years, becoming the exemplar of a new generation of enlightened African rulers. Meanwhile, the horrified world established an international tribunal to prosecute the Hutu leaders of that African genocide, who had fled the country after their defeat.
This shocking story was very widely covered in our media at the time, and has been reinforced over the decades by numerous books and articles, even becoming the subject of Hotel Rwanda, a successful, Oscar-nominated Hollywood film. Much of the most important early reporting on the Tutsi genocide and its aftermath came from journalist Philip Gourevitch, whose series of long New Yorker articles later became the basis of his award-winning 1998 bestseller. That famous work was glowingly reviewed in our leading publications, thereby bringing elements of his gripping narrative to the attention of many additional millions of readers, myself included.
Although in previous decades, most major countries had signed anti-genocide conventions, when the minority population of a weak and impoverished African nation suffered exactly that fate, all our international leaders stood by and did nothing. In the aftermath of the Cold War, the leaders of the Clinton Administration had boastfully proclaimed America as the world’s sole superpower, but faced with reports that a genocide taking place in a small African nation, they looked the other way.
As I explained in my article, during the months and years that followed, many writers and public intellectuals reacted with outrage to these horrific events, and one journalist decided to write a long book on the genocides of the previous hundred years. That work became a huge bestseller, attracting enormous attention and eventually having an important impact on global public policy.
Once the grim facts about the massive scale of the genocide became widely known, elite Western political and media circles felt tremendous shame that their governments had done nothing.
Samantha Power was then in her mid-20s, a naturalized Irish immigrant who had graduated from Yale and was working as an overseas war correspondent. She and many others were outraged that no American officials had resigned in protest over their government’s lack of action over Rwanda, a personal sacrifice that might have provoked enough media attention to pressure the West into taking action, thereby saving hundreds of thousands of lives. Returning to America to attend Harvard law school, that simmering righteous anger—heightened as she realized that lack of timely government action had also occurred in other such situations—inspired her to write a paper on the subject.
