After World War II, when the full horror of the Jewish Holocaust was revealed, the world said: "Never again".Genocides will continue regardless of the pronouncement of Never Again simply because governments do not want to intervene when it does not suit them and it puts human rights ahead of the rights of tyrants and regimes to do as they wish within their own borders. Genocidal dictators would not support measures to intervene in genocide in other parts of the world because their own actions at home would become suspect and subject to international action.
But in 1994 an extremist Hutu government in Rwanda began the systematic slaughter of the minority Tutsis.
It is estimated some 800,000 people were killed in 100 days as the rest of the world stood by.
On a hill in the Rwandan capital Kigali a memorial stands to those killed in the genocide.
Mass graves contain anywhere up to 250,000 people and inside a specially constructed building there are displays teaching a new generation of Rwandans about what happened in 1994.
Also, international action is limited only to peacekeeping, not peace making. If one wants to stop genocide from occurring, one has to have the ability to make the parties stop - peacekeeping suggests only that the international community will enforce whatever peace agreement has been reached. By the time peace rolls around, the genocide is already committed and nothing can be done for the victims except to memorialize them and claim that it will never happen again. Well, for the victims, it will never happen again. They're already dead.
Technorati: Human Rights, Genocide
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