If America’s role is to continue funding Ukrainian soldiers without genuinely wanting to negotiate peace, then all talks of peace are folly.
Anthony Blinken is uncomfortable at the podium as he delivers a lengthy speech at NATO while the Ukraine war continues and the West’s response continues to not only confuse the Ukrainian leader but also most people who are struggling to understand how the war has got to where it is today, with the latest massacres shocking the world.
What Blinken didn’t make a mention of was what happened on the same day in 1994, which was the start of the Rwandan genocide – a colossal failure of both the UN and NATO. Blinken spoke about the UN’s decision to suspend Russia from the U.S. Human Rights Council.
The Rwandan Genocide is important to remember as the similarities of the West’s activities in Ukraine today can be compared, in that giants in the UN and NATO like the U.S. remain as pusillanimous as ever towards actually fighting a real war for the rights and principles that they supposedly stand for.
In Rwanda, the CIA-backed English-speaking Tutsis entered the north of the country with a disinformation campaign which installed terror in the hearts of peasant Hutus who took to slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Tutsis with a common farmyard tool. There really isn’t an example of how information or disinformation can play such a decisive role in a war going one way or the other than Rwanda, which the West is entirely responsible for.
When the real killing started in great numbers, the Americans were nowhere to be seen. Clinton, after the PR disaster of Somalia just a few months earlier, pulled back from getting involved in Rwanda and the UN and NATO followed. The UN did have troops in Rwanda but the role of their soldiers is both polemic and ineffective.
On the evening of 6 April 1994, the aircraft carrying Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira, both Hutu, was shot down with surface-to-air missiles as their plane prepared to land in Kigali, Rwanda – sparking the Rwandan genocide.
The parallel with Ukraine is chilling. It’s often forgotten how Malaysian Airlines MH17 was shot down in 2014, which in many ways was a similar catalyst to the fighting in Ukraine reaching a point, where Russia decided to enter the country and take control on February 24th of this year.
The West blames Russia for the attack on the civilian airliner although the evidence is not entirely conclusive. The Rwandans themselves (the Tutsi-led government) concluded in 2010 that the missile which shot down the Rwandan president’s plane was almost certainly from the hardcore element of the Hutu army which believed the President had sold them out and brokered a peace, allowing Tutsis to return to Rwanda and make claims on land.
But on the 7th of April 2022, Anthony Blinken made no historical references as he announced even more sanctions against Russia in a war which America hopes will be dragged out for months, in the belief that this will have an impact on Putin, impacting his ability to remain firm when the negotiations start. It wasn’t only the anniversary of the Rwandan genocide which Blinken decide not to mention (probably not wanting to remind the press pack gathered there of both Bill Clinton’s huge erroneous foreign policy play which led to 800,000 dead), but he also chose not to mention Europe’s failure to stop buying Russian oil and gas, which in many ways means that these countries are actually funding Putin’s operation in Ukraine.
If EU countries can’t actually stop buying Russian oil, then the farce of this war will continue for month and perhaps even years to come. Equally, if America’s role is to continue funding Ukrainian soldiers without genuinely wanting to negotiate peace (as the truth is that Blinken and his colleagues believe that a long war is a winning strategy for them), then all talks of peace and negotiating for it are folly. America got the war that it wanted in Ukraine, which is bite-sized and doesn’t involve the threat to American lives which they have been preparing for since 2014 when their own guy overthrew Russia’s chosen leader. We really shouldn’t be surprised by anything other than Blinken’s ability, rather than Biden’s to “fuck things up”.
