Tag: Genocide

Agence France-Presse had these hopeful words:

Amid the chaos, a mediating team led by Kofi Annan, which has been in Kenya for a week, said it would launch formal dialogue between President Mwai Kibaki and his opposition rival Raila Odinga at 4:00 p.m. (1300 GMT) in Nairobi.

If Annan’s mission fails, however, it might be time for the international community to step in. With force. Because this was the real story, in that story:

The slaying of a Kenyan opposition lawmaker sparked riots Tuesday across the east African nation already reeling from weeks of deadly clashes set off by disputed elections.

Police fired tear gas and hundreds took to the streets of opposition strongholds in western Kenya and Nairobi’s slums to protest the murder of opposition MP Mugabe Were from Nairobi’s Embakasai constituency.

Heavily-armed police patrolled two recent western Rift Valley flashpoints of violence, the lakeside towns of Nakuru and Naivasha, where scores have died in gruesome attacks in recent days, pushing the overall death toll since the December 27 election to more than 900.

Plumes of smoke rose from Naivasha’s slums and machete-wielding youths burned houses and roamed the streets, an AFP correspondent said.

The machetes should chill the blood of anyone who remembers the genocide in Rwanda. Both sides have charged the other with committing or approaching genocide, Genocide Watch has called a Stage 6 alert, and the United Nations Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide is sending staff. It does not get more serious.

Sister Ortiz

“I intend to speak the truth to you tonight. It’s not pleasant, and certainly for me…It’s very painful. However, it is my hope, my prayer, that by being here tonight, I can open the door, provide you with a tiny glimpse of the tortured and of our moral and Christian responsibilities, to not only oppose, but to prevent torture.”

“We’ve gathered here to mark the opening of this Holocaust Museum. We do so to help ensure that the Holocaust will remain ever a sharp thorn in every national memory, but especially in the memory of the United States, which has such unique responsibilities at this moment in history. We do so to redeem in some small measure the deaths of millions whom our nations did not, or would not, or could not save.”

~ President Bill Clinton, Remarks at the Dedication of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, April 21, 1993

“All of the people in this room and people in this country have a vital role to play. Everyone ought to raise their voice. We ought to continue to demand that the genocide in Sudan be stopped.”

~President George W. Bush, Remarks at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, April 18, 2007

Christopher Columbus:

The Christian Crusades had ended in 1291, the Black Death had been deliberately blamed on innocent Jews who said what their Christian torturers forced them to, that they poisoned water wells, causing the Black Death. Of course, the real cause was in the stomachs of fleas, not planetary alignment, earthquakes, or God’s Judgment. Nonetheless, the extermination of European Jews began in 1348 again, along with a key notorious origin of Manifest Destiny.