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Subject: NYTimes.com Article: TV Review | 'Ghosts of Rwanda': Looking Back Across a Decade, With Bloody Regret
Date: Thu, 1 Apr 2004 20:12:15 -0500 (EST)
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TV Review | 'Ghosts of Rwanda': Looking Back Across a Decade, With Bloody Regret
April 1, 2004
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Consensus is in evidence in "Ghosts of Rwanda," an
enlightening two-hour "Frontline" chronicle of the Rwandan
genocide on PBS tonight. Ten years later, almost everyone
seems to regret that the United States didn't act to
prevent it.
Using sickening images of chopped bodies from the spring of
1994, as well as current interviews with morally riven
leaders, most prominently Lt. Gen. Rom�o A. Dallaire, now
retired, who was the commander of the United Nations troops
in Rwanda, this documentary aims to revisit the diffidence
about United States and United Nations intervention that
prevailed at the time.
Though the documentary's participants come up with a range
of motives for why the United States and the United Nations
held back, they supply few actual reasons, good or bad.
They don't cite ideology, political philosophy, military
strategy - anything that would make them sound as if
foreign policy was created with reference to principles,
even dubious or tendentious ones.
General Dallaire, a Canadian who had never seen combat
before Rwanda and who says he has turned to liquor and
self-mutilation to dull his guilt since, simply confesses
that he was "na�ve" in thinking that his forces could keep
peace between Hutus and Tutsis.
Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general who was
the head of the peacekeeping effort then, explains that he
rejected General Dallaire's early request to raid an arms
cache - believed to belong to Hutu extremists - because he
worried that the United Nations was being manipulated.
Michael Sheehan, who was the White House liaison on
Somalia, adds that the Clinton administration wanted to
avoid losing American soldiers in the name of African
peacekeeping, as it had in Mogadishu three months earlier.
That loss, he says, had been enormously criticized.
In place of any reasoned anti-interventionism, these
scattershot mental states - naivet�, skepticism, fear of
criticism - seems to have held the United States and the
international community back from meaningful intervention.
"Ghosts of Rwanda" eventually compels its participants to
confront their failure. And they oblige. Mr. Annan
describes the experience as traumatic. W. Anthony Lake,
President Bill Clinton's national security adviser, says,
"We should have done more." Madeleine K. Albright, then the
United States ambassador to the United Nations, says, "I
wish I had pushed for a large humanitarian intervention."
And Mr. Clinton himself says, "I'll always regret that
Rwandan thing."
If these statements sound a little hollow, it may be
because no one interviewed has experienced a reversal of
ideology. No one admits to having changed - or even held -
a position on peacekeeping or nation-building in Africa.
Perhaps those interviewed for "Ghosts of Rwanda" don't want
to say anything that might seem to commend or contradict
the United States' current involvement in Iraq. Perhaps
they do make decisions on the spur of the moment, or by the
polls. In any case, these apologists seem to believe it is
better to be seen as having bumbled along with no plan last
time than to state a plan and be taken to task for it in
the future.
FRONTLINE
Ghosts of Rwanda
On most PBS stations tonight (check local listings)
Directed, produced and written by Greg Barker; Mike
Robinson, executive producer for BBC's Panorama; Fergal
Keane, reporter for BBC; Darren Kemp, producer for BBC;
Michael Sullivan, executive producer for special projects
for Frontline. Produced by Frontline, BBC and Silverbridge
Productions.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/01/arts/television/01HEFF.html?ex=1081868335&ei=1&en=df8c9e768ef75f0e
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