I’ve been reading a lot of articles lately like this one, about people working toward achieving forgiveness and reconciliation between the victims of the 1994 Rwanda genocide, and those who participated in it (who are getting out of prison around this time, and returning to their former communities):
In 1994, the poorer Hutu ethnic majority committed genocide against the wealthier Tutsi ethnic minority, killing almost 1 million people. Since 2005, 50,000 of the killers have been released from prison, and now killers and victims are coming face to face once again.
“It’s unprecedented,” Hinson says. Nine months after her initial trip to Rwanda, Hinson packed up her camera equipment and a crew of four film students with a task she now admits was overwhelming: to tell the story of forgiveness and reconciliation through the victim and the perpetrator.
Yeah, it’s unprecedented – unprecedentedly awful. Here’s this idiot again:
“I had to ask myself again and again, would I forgive? Would I reconcile with somebody who killed my family? And I don’t know that answer,” she says.
Don’t you? I know my answer – fuck no, I wouldn’t reconcile with them! I would consider it a massive, superhuman accomplishment if I could keep myself from killing them. These poor people – having lived through a genocide, they now have to live alongside the perpetrators, and endure morons coming over and urging them all to sit down and talk with each other, as if they are nursery school children who’ve gotten into a spat.
Meanwhile, here’s a much better reaction to genocide:
South Carolina has become the 25th state to adopt a targeted Sudan divestment law that prohibits investing in companies that contribute to genocide in Sudan.
Good job, South Carolina. I hope the other 25 states follow suit.
And over at the G8 convention:
Higher prices are taking a particularly heavy toll on the world’s poor. A World Bank study issued last week said up to 105 million people could drop below the poverty line due to the leap in food prices, including 30 million in Africa. . . .To help cushion the blow, officials said the G8 would unveil a series of measures to help Africa, especially its farmers, and would affirm its commitment to double aid to the world’s poorest continent to $25 billion a year by 2010.
Measures are being unveiled and commitments are being affirmed. Hang in there, world’s poor…
While the government’s response to the violence–which included declaring a state of emergency, shutting down media outlets, and deploying troops into the streets–was far from ideal, there are reasons to remain optimistic. For one, the violence appears not to be caused by any inherent flaws in Mongolia’s system, but rather by the unfortunate confluence of economic frustrations and cheap vodka.
Before Samantha Power called Hillary Clinton a monster, she wrote pretty much the book on genocide, which I’ve been forever meaning to get around to reading. Here’s what she says should be done about Zimbabwe:
To start, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon should appoint his predecessor, Kofi Annan, fresh from brokering a power-sharing deal for Kenya, as the U.N.’s envoy to Zimbabwe. One by one, those African and Western leaders who claim to be disgusted with Mugabe should announce that they bilaterally recognize the validity of the March 29 first-round election results, which showed the opposition winning 48% to 43%, though the margin was almost surely larger. The countries which do would make up the new “March 29 bloc” within the U.N. and would declare Morgan Tsvangirai the new President of Zimbabwe. They would then announce that Mugabe and the 130 leading cronies who have already been sanctioned by the West will not be permitted entry to their airports.
Tsvangirai and his senior aides should do as South Africa’s African National Congress did throughout the 1960s and ’70s: set up a government-in-exile and appoint ambassadors abroad–including to the U.N. That ambassador should be given forums for rebutting the ludicrous claims of the Zimbabwean and South African regimes.
And here’s Robert Dreyfuss responding in The Nation:
I’d say that Africans’ fears of civil war (and close-to-genocidal bloodletting that could follow) are realistic. And it’s by no means clear that Russia, China, and other world powers who are suspicious of US and Western efforts to topple regimes they don’t like would go along with Samantha Power’s plan. So her plan to carve up the world into “March 29″ countries and “June 27″ countries is a recipe for disaster, and it could result in creating animosity, division, and bloc vs. bloc rivalries that could undermine the possibility of diplomatic solutions for the war in Iraq, the showdown over Iran’s nuclear program, the North Korea issue, and others.
Whoa, whoa! Hear that? Refusing to recognize Mugabe would ruin the world.
On a lighter note, Bush and his team massively insulted PM Berlusconi at the G8 summit yesterday:
The White House had to profusely apologize to Silvio Berlusconi yesterday after it handed out a biography of the Italian prime minister that described him as “a political dilettante who gained high office only through use of his considerable influence on the national media.” The WP’s Al Kamen notes that the administration even managed to offend “all of Italy” by describing Berlusconi as “one of the most controversial leaders in the history of a country known for governmental corruption and vice.” How did this happen? A cut-and-paste problem, of course. Turns out the bio was copied directly from a Web site and, apparently, the White House doesn’t proofread.
