Remembering the Rwandan genocide

[Yerdaddy]

<p>In case this degenerates into a political tard fight, I'm posting this in a new, more lockable thread.</p><p>Hello all. Today's dispatch is something of a departure from the zany travelogue you've perhaps grown accustomed to, but it's not a normal day here today. I apologize if this dispatch sounds like a sermon. For me it just felt necessary.</p><p>Today Rwandans are commemorating the 11th anniversary of the start of the genocide here. I can&rsquo;t presume to understand what people who lived through it or returned to rebuild in its aftermath are thinking or feeling today. I&rsquo;m having a difficult time understanding my own feelings. All I can say is today is different from yesterday &ndash; looks different; feels different. Businesses are closed. People are quieter. There&rsquo;s a general stillness in the air that magnifies what normal life is still going on &ndash; cars and motorcycles going by, conversations, footsteps on muddy roads, children playing. It feels like the heavy burden of remembering, that everyone seems to carrying around with them every day, today has flooded these valleys of the &ldquo;Land of a Thousand Hills.&rdquo;</p><p>My good friend, Mary, and I started off today by going to the memorial in Gisoze, just outside downtown Kigale. We knew there would be a memorial there but we wee uneasy about attending. This is a city of survivors in a country of survivors and we didn&rsquo;t know if there was room at a small ceremony today for outside onlookers. We decided to take a taxi to the memorial and decided how we felt when we got there. The place was just starting to fill up when we arrived. We parked and our driver, who we had come to know a little bit on previous trips around town, got out and inquired about the ceremony to get us an idea of whether we should stay. His opinion was that we could, that there would be other westerners attending, but we still felt like we were intruding on something intensely private. We decided to leave and attend a larger ceremony at the city&rsquo;s stadium tonight. There&rsquo;s nothing in our experiences here or in what we saw to make us think we would be unwelcome, but we wanted to avoid the chance that we would be a distraction or an intrusion on other people&rsquo;s grieving.</p><p>The ceremony was in part a funeral. On our way back up the hill into town we stopped on the side of the road out of respect for a procession of cars and marchers going to the Gisoze memorial. Among them were trucks carrying caskets to be buried at the site along with the other 250,000 victims of the genocide who were killed in the capital. When we were there last week we were told that as the various court systems, that are still trying accused perpetrators of the genocide, progressed, information was coming out that was revealing the locations of undiscovered bodies. The bodies were then being brought to the memorial site to be interred in the mass graves there. The staff at the site was struggling with the decision to begin construction of an additional tomb for the undeterminable number of bodies that would be discovered in the future. The people being brought to the site this morning, escorted by the survivors, were probably only recently discovered &ndash; almost 11 years after their deaths. I can&rsquo;t know how many families are just now finding closure for their lost loved ones, or how many of these victims were members of families of which there were no survivors. It&rsquo;s remarkable how few of the 250,000 buried at the memorial have even been identified. Those that have are named on a wall above one of the tombs but there aren&rsquo;t more than a thousand names on the wall. Similar memorials and mass graves dot this tiny country, and are the final resting places of over 800,000 people.</p><p>While I&rsquo;m fighting the temptation to give a history of the genocide, there are some points that I feel compelled to express today. Most importantly is that this tragedy was preventable. It was neither &ldquo;spontaneous&rdquo; nor the result of &ldquo;age old animosities&rd

[HBox]

<p><font size="2" face="tahoma,arial,helvetica,sans-serif">I think I'm gonna risk it...........</font></p><p><font size="2" face="tahoma,arial,helvetica,sans-serif">&nbsp;</font></p><p><font size="2" face="tahoma,arial,helvetica,sans-serif">::starts the slow clap:: </font></p>

Let Us Trim Our Hair In Accordance with Socialist Lifestyle!

[Kevin]

<p>Clap clap clap That was great man.&nbsp;I still can't believe that after WWII This crap was still allowed to go on again. Its really depressing.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v303/Kevin2700/Comincopy.jpg" align="middle" border="0" /></p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;The strong man is not the good wrestler; the strong man is only the one who controls himself when he is angry. </p>

<font color=black>This message was edited by Kevin on 4-7-05 @ 1:31 PM</font>

[FUNKMAN]

<p>Clap clap clap That was great man.&nbsp;I still can't believe that after WWII This crap was still allowed to go on again. Its really depressing.</p><p></p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>not surprising ... they're black and have no natural rersources</p>

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[Ndugu]

<p> political tard fight</p><p>not surprising ... they're black and have no natural rersources</p><p>4 posts a new record!</p>




"my comments dont speak well of my ability to debate, or my overall intellectual curiosity"

[HelghastElite]

<font style="font-size: 9px" face="Verdana">quote: </font><font style="font-size: 9px" face="Verdana">quote: </font><p>Clap clap clap That was great man.&nbsp;I still can't believe that after WWII This crap was still allowed to go on again. Its really depressing.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>not surprising ... they're black and have no natural rersources</p>Congratulations, you win.<br />

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[furie]

<font face="Verdana" style="font-size: 9px;">quote:</font><font face="Verdana" style="font-size: 9px;">quote:</font> <p>Clap
clap clap That was great man. I still can't believe that after WWII
This crap was still allowed to go on again. Its really depressing.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p> </p><p>not surprising ... they're black and have no natural rersources</p>

<img border="0" src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v53/monster6sixty6/guests/fm3_sig.jpg" /><br />They have plenty of natural resources. they have gold, tin and tungsten. they just don't control the industries.<br />



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<a href="http://fallingtowardsapotheosis.blogspot.com/">mental vomit</a>

[Recyclerz]

<p>&nbsp;</p><p>Well said, Yerdaddy.</p><p>Unfortunately, the question isn't &quot;Why did we let this happen again?&quot;&nbsp; but &quot;Why are we surprised and chagrinned every time it DOES happen again?&quot;&nbsp;&nbsp; Since the Holocaust we've had Stalin's continued purges, Mao's Cultural Revolution, East Timor, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, Liberia, et cetera, et cetera.</p><p>If Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, the Buddha et al. couldn't fix human nature, I certainly don't have a clue.&nbsp; My only suggestion is to adapt the environmentalist slogan &quot;Think Globally. Act Locally.&quot;&nbsp; You may not be able to stop genocide, you can only die trying.&nbsp; </p>

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[b]There ain't no asylum here.
King Solomon, he never lived 'round here[b]

[Bulldogcakes]

<p>Good piece Yerdaddy. Something tells me you're an aspiring Journalist. </p><p>I
agree with most of your points, except when you tie the West into what
happened there (Colonialism, Globalism). I find the link tenuous, and
unnecessary. I dont think we need to blame ourselves to understand the
need to prevent the slaughter of 800,000 innocent people. Its a clear,
obvious, moral case. What's lacking are triggers at the UN level and
the force to back them up. And to get there you need the willingness of
Nations to send troops to die somewhere that nation has little/no
national interest in. That's a tough sell, unfortunately. I never
forgave Clinton for failing to intervene in this genocide, which
everyone knew was going on (Though Madelaine Albright claims otherwise)
and was reported about daily in the NY Times. But I understand why
Clinton failed to act. After the humiliating fiasco in Somalia, he was
very hesitant to send soldiers to die in Africa again. I wish I had a
simple answer to this obvious tragedy, but I dont. But one thing,
Globalization expands our interests abroad. And that may eventually
lead us to a place where we WILL have reason to act, in our own
national interests. <br />
</p>

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Can placebos cause side effects? And if so, are the side effects real?

[El Mudo]

<p>There was a great article in my College Newspaper to-day about this subject.&nbsp; It profiled a Rwandan Tutsi&nbsp;who goes to school here in TerpTown and gives the story of how he survived the genocides...</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p class="mainnavlink"><a href="http://www.diamondbackonline.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2005/04/07/4254d81612527">http://www.diamondbackonline.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2005/04/07/4254d81612527</a></p><p class="mainnavlink">&nbsp;</p><p class="mainnavlink">The poor guy saw his own brother get beheaded and was the only survivor of his family...</p>

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[Yerdaddy]

<p>They have plenty of natural resources. they have gold, tin and tungsten. they just don't control the industries.<br /></p><p>Actually their four top exports are: coffee, tea, hides (?!) and tin. The other resources are small partially because the country is landlocked, lacks good transportation infrastructure and with fuel prices so high the costs of importing and exporting goods is prohibitively expensive, a major factor in Rwanda's poor economy, (the average per-capita GDP is $250 annually). Normal grocery items here are about equal to or higher than in the US - and much higher than in Yemen which has highly accessible seaports and its own oil. </p><p>This is the sort of thing that makes me weary of Bulldogcakes' philosophy of economics as dominant engine of international progress. I'm certainly on board with it to some degree. I learned from working on sweatshops in Indonesia that the workers and labor rights activists certainly didn't want the jobs to go away. What they wanted was support in obtaining protection of labor rights from their government, something that was not a prominent feature of trade with US companies or US government trade policies with Indonesia. </p><p>Rwanda is illustrative as well. Funkman makes a valid point that if Rwanda had had strategic or trade value for the United States, that would have given an incnetive for the Clinton administration to intervene. So that's the problem I have with attatching every foreign policy issue to trade - it's arbitrary. If you don't have resources, or strategic value, you're fucked? I think we can live up to higher standards than that. </p><p>As to the colonial history, I didn't intend to use it to assign blame, but to note the intertwined history between the west and Africa, the responsibility of the west who benefitted from the recources of Africa in what they left behind, and to point out that European colonialization changed Africa so dramatically that the current conflicts cannot be written off as the result of &quot;ancient animocities.&quot; The fact is that the reasons this genocide was planned was more political and economic than tribal or ethnic. It just so happened that the ethnic identities were made the dominant political identifier in 1926 when the Belgians assigned every Rwandan an identity card with a tribal assignment and made that the basis of social and political hierarchy. Prior to this, Hutus and Tutsis related more to farmers vs cattle-raisers more than ethnicity, and Hutus and Tutsis could change their status by changing occupations, intermarrying or acquiring wealth. That had an undeniable impact on the future politics of Rwanda, and the conflicts and eventual genocide. And believe me, it still does today. </p>

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[high fly]

<p>Thanks, Yerdaddy.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Clinton has always said he reall regretted not going in there and stopping it.</p><p>While I guess Superstar Bill Clinton could be criticized for not intervening, I don't think the Republicans were screaming for us to go in there, and I don't think Bush41, Dole, Perot, Bush43 or Nader or anyone else would have gone in there.&nbsp;</p><p>You make a good point in saying that it wasn't some spontaneous event, but was known beforhand.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Although it was a horrible, horrible thing, I do not believe we should commit our troops to fight and die when our nation is not threatened.</p>

" and they ask me why I drink"
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[newport king]

i hear the hotel there is Fabulous! serioursly, good movie check it out.

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