It asks for individual and organizational endorsements of letters to U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and to members of the UN Security Council. Please review the following talking points and letters, and if you are able to sign on, either individually or institutionally, please do so at your earliest convenience, and preferably by Friday, March 13, at 12 noon. Please re-distribute via your communication links. It is vital that we demonstrate support for this measure prior to President Clinton's historic trip to Africa. In 1994, a similar ethnic dynamic in neighboring Rwanda led to genocide, as 800,000 people were murdered in a period of ten weeks.
Some observers fear that Burundi is moving in the same direction.
Yet the West has largely passed this tragedy by. No camera crews record the people's pain, and although African leaders have made valiant efforts to bring peace and stability to their troubled neighbor, the U.S., in the opinion of many, hasn't provided them with adequate support. In fact, there is a lot that the U.S. could do at relatively little cost, if it had the political will to act. This idea was first proposed by regional African leaders at a summit on Burundi held in September, 1997. They had previously imposed a regional embargo, but this measure proved to be far too porous, did not directly address the flow of arms into the country, and had some unintended, collateral damage.