Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Quando il genocidio c'e' stato veramente

L'articolo qua' sotto parla dell'ex-comandante ONU in Rwanda.
Un posto dove, a differenza degli orrori tirati fuori per scopi
politici (Saddam/Milosevic/Afghanistan/...)
a)  C'era veramente un genocidio in corso
b)  Ne siamo venuti a conoscenza in tempo reale
c)  Era possibilissimo (materialmente e politicamente) fermarlo.
Nei dibattiti del 2000, sia Bush che Gore erano d'accordo che non
era opportuno intervenire in Rwanda, mentre "era opportuno" farlo in Kossovo.
(Chissa che diranno sull'Iraq).
http://www.amnestyusa.org/amnestynow/general_and_genocide.html
The General and the Genocide
BY TERRY J. ALLEN
Terry J. Allen is editor of Amnesty Now. She has reported for numerous
U.S. and international newspapers and magazines, including the Boston
Globe, American Prospect, and Salon.
In an indifferent world, Gen. Romeo Dallaire and a few thousand
ill-equipped U.N. peacekeepers were all that stood between Rwandans and
genocide. The Canadian commander did what he could-did more than anyone
else-but he sees his mission as a terrible failure and counts himself
among its casualties.
After a 100-day reign of terror, some 800,000 Rwandan civilians were dead,
most killed by their machete-wielding neighbors. Dallaire had sounded the
alarm. He'd begged. He'd bellowed. He'd even disobeyed orders. "I was
ordered to withdraw...by [then-U.N. Sec. Gen. Boutros] Boutros Ghali about
seven, eight days into it...and I said to him, 'I can't, I've got
thousands' -by then we had over 20,000 people-'in areas under our
control,'" Dallaire said in a recent interview with Amnesty Now. The
general's hands, always moving, rose beside his face as if to block the
memories. "The situation was going to shit. ...And, I said, 'No, I can't
leave.'"
The U.N. had sent Dallaire and 2,600 troops, mainly from Bangladesh and
Ghana, to Rwanda to oversee a peace accord between the region's two main
groups, Hutus and Tutsis. But on April 6, 1994, eight months after the
peacekeepers arrived, a plane carrying the Rwandan and Burundian
presidents, both Hutus, was shot down over Kigali, the Rwandan capital.
Hutu-controlled radio blamed the Tutsis and immediately began calling for
their extermination, as well as for the murder of moderate Hutus
considered friendly to the Tutsi "cockroaches." The broadcasts gave
details on whom to kill and where to find them.
Dallaire and his troops were about to become spectators to genocide. As
bodies filled the streets and rivers, the general, backed by a U.N.
mandate that didn't even allow him to disarm the militias, pleaded with
his U.N. superiors for additional troops, ammunition, and the authority to
seize Hutu arms caches. In an assessment that military experts now accept
as realistic, Dallaire argued that with 5,000 well-equipped soldiers and a
free hand to fight Hutu power, he could bring the genocide to a rapid
halt.
The U.N. turned him down. He asked the U.S. to block the Hutu radio
transmissions. The Clinton administration refused to do even that. Gun-shy
after a humiliating retreat from Somalia, Washington saw nothing to gain
from another intervention in Africa, and the Defense Department, according
to a memo, assessed the cost of jamming the Hutu hate broadcasts at $8,500
per flight-hour.
Dallaire's pain is palpable as he remembers his yearlong mission. His
words, raw as a wound, make a grim contrast to the carefully parsed
regrets of the world leaders who actually had the power to stop the
genocide but turned away. He has just spoken at an Amnesty-sponsored
conference in Atlanta on law and human rights, and he looks tired-older
than his 56 years. His eyes are close set, raptor-like, but his gaze is
warm and direct. "When you're in command, you are in command," he says.
"There's 800,000 gone, the mission turned into catastrophe, and you're in
command. I feel I did not convince my superiors and the international
community," he says. "I didn't have enough of the skills to be able to
influence that portion of the problem."
Three days after the Rwandan killings began, with Dallaire's troops
running short of rations as well as ammunition, about 1,000 European
troops arrived in Kigali. The general watched with frustration as the
well-armed, well-fed Westerners landed and left again as soon as they'd
evacuated their own nationals. Then, after Hutu militias killed 10 Belgian
paratroopers, Brussels withdrew all of its peacekeepers (the only
significant Western contingent and the only one that was properly
equipped) from the U.N. mission. Dallaire's depleted force was on its own.
Even as the already desperate situation worsened, Washington called for a
complete withdrawal of peacekeepers. On April 21, after international
pressure, the U.S. agreed to a limited force and supported a Security
Council resolution slashing the force to 270 peacekeepers. U.S. Secretary
of State Madeline Albright accurately described the tiny force as enough
"to show the will of the international community."
Remarkably, with scant resources-indeed, with only one satellite telephone
for the whole mission-Dallaire was able to maintain safe areas for those
20,000 terrorized Rwandans. But he could do little else, and the killing
continued.
Eight years later, in daylight and in dreams, Dallaire still hears the
cries of wounded children, the weeping of survivors, the voice of the man
who died at the other end of a phone line as the general listened. He
still can't escape the smell of death, the memories of hacked-off limbs
scattered on the ground, and worst of all, he says, the "thousands upon
thousands of sets of eyes in the night, in the dark, just floating and
looking back" at him in anger, accusation, or eternal pleading.
With counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder, and a handful of pills
a day, he is working to use his experiences to prevent another Rwanda. But
the baleful ghosts remain, and the book he is writing about the slaughter
is rousing them. "As I go over what I have written," he says, "more and
more I see lost opportunities; more and more I see errors because of lack
of intelligence or simply from mis-assessing a situation. I'd take a
decision on the phone, and people would die within seconds. I was getting
pressure from everybody not to use my soldiers." His voice fades to a
whisper . "It's horrific because every day decisions were taken on life
and death. Every day. Real people, real people."
We are sitting in a dark taxi and I can't see his face. He may be
remembering when the Belgian senate blamed him "at least partially" for
the deaths of its paratroopers. Or he may be listening to his Rwandan
voices. As we near his hotel, he says, "I always have people with me. Like
tonight, I'll ask the guys at the desk to just check on me because I'm not
supposed to be alone because it can go to extremes."
Dallaire says that about 20 percent of troops and humanitarian workers on
missions like his suffer much the same thing, as do 5 to 10 percent of
diplomats. "They are casualties," he tells me. "High suicide rates, booze,
drugs, pornography, finding themselves on skid row."
When Dallaire returned to Canada from Rwanda, he tried to drink himself
into a stupor of forgetfulness. He raged at his family. He tried to kill
himself. In 2000 a few months after he was medically released from the
Canadian Forces, he was found passed out drunk under a park bench in Hull,
Quebec. ''He was curled up in a ball,'' photographer Stephane Beaudoin,
alerted by a police report, later told the Ottawa Citizen. ''I never took
a photo. I felt sad for him. I thought, 'This man has done so much for us.
How did he come to be here?'"
Dallaire's reluctance to give himself credit for what he managed to
accomplish certainly contributed to his breakdown. Asked directly, he
admits saving people, "sometimes by the thousands, you know, just by
giving appropriate orders to my troops." Past and present merge as
Dallaire remembers one day when he, his driver, and aide-de-camp "were
making our way through a large population move in the hills. It was
raining and cold because it's fairly high up. And there this woman was,
right there by the road, and people are walking around her, and she is
giving birth. And so, as we're inching, the child came out. The woman,
already emaciated, sort of picked up the child and then fell back. So we
jumped out, you know, because nobody was stopping. The mother was dead. We
tried to wrap the baby up as best we could, brought it back, and then
other people sorted it out."
But Dallaire quickly returns to the people he failed to save and to the
limits of his skills. "Thirty years ago when I joined the army, if
somebody mentioned human rights, we immediately equated them with
communists," Dallaire now says. The former career officer has come to
believe that, along with the ability to attack and kill, soldiers must
learn peacekeeping, negotiation, and human rights preservation. That
belief is reflected in the war stories he chooses to tell. Rather than
tales of derring-do, he offers anecdotes that plumb the moral ambiguities
of modern soldiering.
"A young officer is entering a village," Dallaire recounts. "The village
has been wiped out except for a few women and children still alive [in a
ditch filled with bodies]. There is 30 percent AIDS in that area. There is
blood all over that place, no rubber gloves. Does the platoon commander
order his troops to get in there, into the ditch risking AIDS, and help?"
The question, it turns out, is not an exercise in armchair ethics. "When I
asked the platoon commanders, those from 23 of the 26 nations that sent
forces said they would order their troops to keep marching. Commanders
from three nations-Holland, Ghana, and Canada-were saved the complexity of
the question because by the time they turned around their troops were
already in the ditch."
Dallaire continues, his hands alive, his eyes still, the Gallic-tinted
accent of his native Quebec growing more pronounced. "Or a soldier is
watching two girls, 13 or 14, both with children on their backs, with a
crowd spurring on the one with a machete to kill the other girl because
she is different. What does the soldier do? Shoot the girl with the
machete, possibly killing her baby? Shoot into the crowd? Do nothing?"
"Should I myself," he asks, "negotiate with a militia commander with gore
on his shirt and his hands from the morning's work, making a joke, to get
him to withdraw his gang so I can move thousands of people [to safety] Or
do I pull out my pistol and shoot him between the eyes?"
"The corporal," says Dallaire, returning to the soldier watching the
machete-wielding girl, "tried to negotiate his away through the crowd to
stop the attack but headquarters in his home country ordered him not to
intervene. That corporal is now an injured ex-corporal," Dallaire says,
and like the ex-general himself, a casualty of post-traumatic stress.
For all the blame he heaps on himself, Dallaire also faults the strictures
that bound him in 1994 and that will have to change if the world is to
avoid another Rwanda. The institution of peacekeeping missions, he says,
is deeply flawed. Even if he had received the political and humanitarian
training the job demanded, the U.N.'s rules would have robbed him of the
ability to use his military skills. With thousands of civilians begging
for protection as they were hunted down in their homes and churches, "I
could tell [the peacekeepers] to do things," he says, "but they would
check with their country. The troops are under my operational command, but
they remained under the ultimate command of their nations, so...if a
national capital feels that a [rescue] mission is unwarranted, or too
risky, or something, the soldiers can turn around and say, 'No, I can't do
it.'"
Asked to name one of the countries that ordered its soldiers not to move
injured Rwandans to safe areas, even when Dallaire told them to, the
general hesitates for a long time before saying, "Bangladesh." It was the
Ghanaians, he adds, who performed most humanely.
With the exception of the Red Cross, the non-governmental organizations
were clueless, Dallaire says. "When they started sending people in, they
kept sending me assessment teams. Assessment teams! 'Listen, I don't need
a goddamn assessment team. I need food, medical supplies, water for 2
million people, and I've got to feed them twice a day. Get the shit in
here. We'll sort out the distribution.' "
If Dallaire's anger at those who did too little is fierce, his fury at
world leaders who feigned ignorance and did nothing is white hot. He
cannot forget, for example, that President Clinton stopped for a few hours
in Kigali in 1998, after it was all over, and with the engines of Air
Force One running, said he was sorry; he didn't know.
Or that David Rawson, the U.S. ambassador to Rwanda at the time of the
mass murders, waited a month before declaring a "state of disaster," and
then dismissed the slaughter as "tribal killings." Calling what happened
in Rwanda "tribal" conflict made intervention seem futile. U.S. Deputy
Assistant Secretary of State Prudence Bushnell, who had pushed hard for
the U.S. to "neutralize" Hutu hate radio, later explained to author
Samantha Power, "What I was told was, 'Look, Pru, these people do this
from time to time.'"
The designation of "tribal" conflict also nicely avoided the word
"genocide." Had a major power or the U.N. invoked that term in time, all
states that were signatories of the 1948 convention on genocide would have
been obliged to condemn the slaughter and act to stop it.
Avoiding the word did not however avoid the fact. "They knew how many
people were dying," Dallaire says, no matter what word they used. "The
world is racist," he says bitterly. "Africans don't count; Yugoslavians
do. More people were killed, injured, internally displaced, and refugeed
in 100 days in Rwanda than in the whole eight to nine years of the
Yugoslavia campaign," he says, and there are still peacekeeping troops in
the former Yugoslavia while Rwanda is again off the radar.
"Why didn't the world react to scenes where women were held as shields so
nobody could shoot back while the militia shot into the crowd?" he asks.
"Where . . . boys were drugged up and turned into child soldiers,
slaughtering families? . . . Where girls and women were systematically
raped before they were killed? Babies ripped out of their stomachs? . . .
Why didn't the world come?"
Dallaire supplies his own answer: "Because there was no self interest.
...No oil. They didn't come because some humans are [considered] less
human than others."
Nonetheless, Dallaire still calls himself an optimist. Despite its
troubles, he believes that the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda,
which operates out of Arusha, Tanzania, "is one of those great potential
instruments of the future." His own job, he says, won't be done until the
tribunal finishes its investigation. "My duty as force commander who
ultimately became head of mission will not end until the Arusha Tribunal
says it doesn't need me to testify anymore, or when the tribunal decides
to hold me accountable."
There is virtually no chance the international court will blame him. The
question is whether he'll one day stop blaming himself. "The work I'm
doing helps," he says, referring to his campaign to stop the use of
children as soldiers. Counseling seems to be helping, too.
"One day after a couple hours of therapy," he says, "we're sitting there,
and, you know, to-ing and fro-ing. I all of a sudden felt joy in my
stomach. You know when you feel happy in your tummy? And I had not felt
that in the seven years since Rwanda. All of a sudden I said, 'jeez, I
feel, I feel better.'" Dallaire stopped, tilted his head as if to listen
to his own words and broke into a smile as sweet as warm winter sun. "My
therapist let me savor that-and then we talked. And at the end of it, I
said, I think I have moved from survival to living. And maybe to getting
better."
The world, he knows, has not. Without the political will and institutional
mechanisms to stop it, "Rwanda" will happen again.

cut<
Giorgio, perchč ti stupisci? i militaristi questa volta sono stati bravi...
no alla guerra senza se e senza ma... cosa dovevano fare? fare una guerra?
Sono stati bravi anche i pacifisti... neanche uno in piazza per protestare
contro il genocidio di un popolo... beghe interne d'altra parte...
Meno bravi sul fronte pacifista i francesi... loro sono intervenuti.
Peccato che proprio i tutsi, i massacrati, non erano proprio contenti di
questo intervento visto che il governo hutu, i massacratori, erano nell'area
di influenza francese del governo francese...
Come ti giri a guardare entrambi gli schieramente trovi merda...
rgrds
Sun Tsu
--------------------------------
Inviato via 
http://usenet.libero.it

era opportuno intervenire in Rwanda,
Nel 2000 il genocidio in Rwanda era gia' finito da un bel pezzo e il
relativo tribunale era gia' operativo :)
-Stefano

 Come ti giri a guardare entrambi gli schieramente trovi merda...
Questo e' vero :-/
GT

 GT


l'Indonesia nel Timor Est).
Se lo dici tu...
-Stefano

 Se lo dici tu che sono stati tirati fuori per scopi politici :))
In effetti Torrieri e' stato tenero: avrebbe potuto aggiungere che nel
caso di Saddam i motivi economici erano (sono) ancora piu' forti di
quelli politici.
Saluti
Woodridge
-- 
Posted via Mailgate.ORG Server - 
http://www.Mailgate.ORG

quelli politici.
Se lo dici tu... :)))
*LOL*
-Stefano

Caro Stefano, in un altro momento ti avrei pungolato osservando che
rispondi senza risposta, un "se lo dici tu" ripetuto indipendentemente
dalla persona a cui rispondevi e dalle cose dette.
Ma in questa occasione non posso.
Mi ritrovo infatti con la coda di paglia, in quanto anche quello che ho
scritto io ha valore zero (cose dette e stradette, vero o false che
siano, noiose o banali), e non mi aspettavo infatti alcuna risposta.
Ma siccome hai voluto perdere parte del tuo prezioso tempo a
rispondermi, ti faccio una confessione.
Ho intenzione di scrivere un libro, da persona comune, fatto di
riflessioni su argomenti vari.
Se dovessi scommettere, scommetterei onestamente che non scrivero' mai
nemmeno la prima parola del libro, e che se anche lo scrivessi tutto (ma
sarebbe piu' facile che un cammello passasse nella cruna di un ago) non
sarebbe mai pubblicato da nessuno (addirittura, sarebbe piu' facile che
un ricco entrasse nel regno dei cieli).
Tuttavia, il mio senso di autostima mi impone di credere a questa
intenzione. Su questo NG menti illuminate riportano spesso spunti
interessanti di riflessione. Per non perderli, do' una risposta, in modo
che posso sempre poi ritrovarli cliccando sull'opzione "show only my
messages" (sono un disordinatone, anche sul PC, questo sistema e' piu'
sicuro di un copia e incolla su un file).
A proposito: non ho mai usato una "risposta a perdere" per conservarmi
un qualche spunto fornito da te. Perche' non mi dai una mano anche tu?
Saresti capace se solo volessi, prometto che ti darei un posto d'onore
nei ringraziamenti nel libro.


Per non perderli,
Devi settare il tuo newsreader in modo che non cancelli, nel caso li
avessi scaricati sul tuo computer e non li leggessi in linea, i messaggi
dopo che e' passato un certo tempo.
-Stefano

 The General and the Genocide
Un'altra chicca su questo argomento:
-------
During one of the 2000 Presidential debates, the moderator, Jim
Lehrer, raised the issue of Rwanda. "There was no U.S. intervention,"
he said. Then he asked George W. Bush, "Was that a mistake?" In a rare
show of solidarity with the Clinton White House, Bush answered, "I
think the Administration did the right thing in that case. I do. It
was a horrible situation. No one liked to see it on our-you know, on
our TV screens. But . . . they made the right decision not to send
U.S. troops into Rwanda."
In the run-up to the Iraq war, it appeared that Bush had changed his
mind. Speaking on Al Jazeera television, National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice dismissed the U.N.'s opposition to the invasion of
Iraq by reminding her interviewer, "The U.N. Security Council could
not act when in Rwanda there was a genocide that cost almost a million
lives. There was a very poignant statement by the President of Rwanda
recently when he said sometimes the Security Council is not right when
it does not act. President Bush believes that, too." And, lest the
mantle of the memory of Rwanda's dead be wasted on only Arab
audiences, the White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, struck the same
note: "From a moral point of view, as the world witnessed in Rwanda .
. . the U.N. Security Council will have failed to act once again." The
disingenuousness of these remarks lies, of course, in the fact that it
was the United States that prevented the Security Council from acting
during the Rwandan genocide, even though no American troops were ever
involved or required for the U.N. force there.
------------------------
Ovviamente, l'esperienza al governo ha cambiato George Bush di 180
gradi...
Eccetto che gli USA danno finanziamenti milionari
( 
http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/rights/articles/eav013102.shtml
)
basi militari ( 
http://www.uzland.uz/2003/april/30/06.htm
 )
(e ovviamente, foto-opportunita'
http://www.acutor.be/silt/index.php?id=127
 )
a un regime che scioglie nell'acido chi protesta
( 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,963497,00.html
)
GT

( 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,963497,00.html
 )
E qui il solito disinformatore del Torrieri ci mostrera' dove
nell'articolo che indica si parla di "scioglie nell'acido chi protesta"
*LOL*
-Stefano

 *LOL*
Effettivamente hai ragione:  I dissidenti vengono solamente bolliti
vivi.
Dall'articolo:
Independent human rights groups estimate that there are more than 600
politically motivated arrests a year in Uzbekistan, and 6,500
political prisoners, some tortured to death. According to a forensic
report commissioned by the British embassy, in August two prisoners
were even boiled to death.
GT

in August two prisoners were even boiled to death.
Ora ci citi dove afferma che erano "dissidenti"? :)
(ammesso che esista questo rapporto commissionato dall'ambasciata
inglese)
-Stefano