A decade ago, fresh from a disastrous intervention in Somalia, the Clinton Administration and the United Nations failed to intervene in Rwanda, and the result was one of the worst episodes of genocide of the 20th century. In 1994, Rwanda’s president was mysteriously assassinated, and an existing civil war between the two main ethnic groups — the Hutu and the Tutsi — turned into a campaign of genocide, which the rest of the world largely ignored. An estimated 800,000 people (mainly Tutsis) were murdered in 100 days.
In this interesting post, Daniel Drezner addresses the long-term implications of the world’s tepid response to the Rwanda genocide. Given the ongoing genocide currently taking place in Sudan, and the potential for it in places such as Iraq, one is certainly justified in asking: When will the world learn?