Sunday, December 16, 2012
Reading on Rwanda
In my continuing effort to enlarge my knowledge about African history I am now reading Linda Melvern, A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda's Genocide, New Updated Edition, (London: Zed Books, 2009). I understand that Susan Rice who is a hero to many self described American "liberals" and "progressives" got her start in facilitating the mass murder of Africans in 1994 under the Clinton Administration during the Rwandan Genocide. So far, however, the main bad guys besides the Rwandan players have been the "progressive" and "social democratic" states of Belgium and France so beloved by American "progressives." The American "Left" always likes to condemn American imperialism, but they almost never mention the long standing imperialist and neo-colonialist policies of European states like France and Belgium towards Africa. It is almost as if the EU has become the new USSR for American "progressives".
"Facilitating" is probably unfair.
ReplyDeleteNaivety and incompetence play a much bigger role in American foreign policy than outright malignity.
P.S. I knew someone, now dead, who was the American ambassador to Rwanda a few years before the fighting broke out. He was insistent, to his dying day, that neither he nor anyone in the State Department ever imagined that such a thing might happen.
I've heard that Roméo Dallaire's "Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda" (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004), good too.
ReplyDeleteAdam Jones has a list of books he recommends at http://www.genocidetext.net/.