We look

back on these events as isolated nightmares, and we

promise ourselves not to allow such atrocity to again

walk across the Earth's stage. When the Serbs began

killing off ethnic Albanians, American forces quickly

moved in and crushed the threat of genocide. Yet what

about the rest of the world? CNN broadcasts daily

detailed information about the ethnic cleansing in

Kosovo, and as a nation we are shocked and outraged that

a modern government is still capable of such brutality.

Therefore, we send in NATO to crush Milosevic and his

murderous campaign against ethnic Albanians. Yet, where

is NATO in Rwanda?

For the

past five years, Rwanda has been the scene of the worst

and most brutal genocide the world has seen since the

Holocaust. Rwanda is composed mostly of two groups, the

Hutu and the Tutsi. The Tutsi make up a little under 20

percent of Rwanda's population, and are hated by the

Tutsi, much like the Jews in Germany during the 1930s.

In 1994,

Rwanda's longtime Hutu dictator Juvenal Habyarimana was

assassinated, and his military men who came to power

immediately blamed the Tutsi. Only hours after

Habyarimana's death, Hutu soldiers, police, and even

citizens began indiscriminately killing their Tutsi

neighbors.

In 1994

alone over 1 million Tutsi's where killed because of who

they where. There have been horror stories of doctors

killing patients, and even schoolteachers killing pupils.

Even the countries surrounding Rwanda ignored the

killings, at least until the rivers downstream from Rwanda began to dam with

bodies. Millions have died in Rwanda, but why is there no

sense of urgency or duty towards the Tutsi?

How can we

ignore millions of Africans being murdered? We yield all

of our political and military forces to aid Kosovo, while

over 200 times more people have been killed off in

Rwanda? The answer is chillingly simple. U.S.

peacekeepers do not act for the benefit of humanity, or

to oppress political evil. Their sole concern is

protecting the U.S. pocket book. It is easy to ignore the

well-being of a people who are not tied to you

financially, and even easier when they are not tied to

you culturally.

Ever since

Somalia, the U.S. has taken a "hands-off"

approach to Africa. Madeleine Albright has consistently

ducked the emergency in Rwanda, and has tiptoed around

the word "genocide" in order to keep America's

hands clean from the dirt of Africa. The death toll

leaped from tens of thousands, to hundreds of thousands,

and then to the millions range, yet our hands stayed

clean. We continue to support the French, who shamelessly

feed the Hutu power with weapons and money. They give the

Hutu guns, which are immediately then pointed at the

Tutsi.

If the U.S.

is to be the peacekeeper and force of good, which it

claims to be, it must not wear the cloth of race and

finance cloaked around its eyes. We must not lend all of

our support to a people because they look and live like

us, and at the same time ignore the deaths of people who

do not.

understand that it is better to help few than help none,

and it is also true that the U.S. cannot solve all of the

problems of the world. Yet the American people must not

sit back and allow their news to be filtered by the

media, who gives us endless details about a sexual

encounter in the Oval Office, yet not a word about

millions being murdered half a the world away. We must

demand the truth, uncensored and unfiltered. We cannot

sit back any longer and be shocked by the slaughter of

millions 60 years ago, while we allow it to happen today.

Christopher

Armstrong

Fayette ([email protected] )

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