Outside the Beltway

Blame for Rwanda

James Joyner · Wednesday, April 7, 2004 · 3 comments

ChinaView: West is to blame for Rwandan genocide in 1994: Rwandan president

Rwandan President Paul Kagame on Wednesday accused Western countries of adopting an indifferent attitude toward the 1994 genocide which claimed some one million lives in only 100 days.

Addressing a public ceremony in commemoration of those victims in the Kigali National Stadium, Kagame said the United Nations hadits peacekeeping force in the country, but they did not stop the mass killing.

The 1994 genocide is a tragedy for Rwanda, and it is also a huge failure of the international community in peacekeeping mission, he noted.

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In his speech, Kagame said the Western powers had capacity to stop the killings, but they stood by with their arms folded. He accused the United States, Belgium and Britain of failing to stop the genocide.

In particular, he slammed the French government for training and arming the Hutu army and militia, who later used brutal means against their Tutsi friends, neighbors, classmates or colleagues.

While it’s reasonable to question why the West didn’t do more to stop the bloodshed, the idea that we’re to blame for it is rather bizarre. With the exception of the French complicity for supplying the Hutus, this was almost entirely a tragedy of Rwanda’s own making. The thugs with machettes who butchered hundreds of thousands of their “own” people are to blame here, not the United States and Belgium.