[joan]

"But the key point here is that instead of waiting for hundreds of thousands to die like in Rowanda we marched on to Serbia to avoid the public humliation the nations of the earth suffered in their handling of Rowanda(not to mention the govt's guilt)."

Oh come on, what embarrassment did other countries "suffer" over Rwanda? Clinton came, after the genocide, to make a little speech from his plane - the plane's engines were never turned off the whole time he was there, and he even was smiling much of the time (rather looked like smirking to me).

Another factor was that France was shipping heavy weapons to the Hutus (the ones who macheted and murdered around 800,000 Tutsi civilians in about 100 days) before and during the massacre. France was very close with the Hutu regime which openly made genocidal statements before the massacre. France even tried to rescue some of the Hutu criminals after the massacre in “Operation Turquoise”. Did France's actions show it to be "embarrassed"? No, it showed it to be complicit.

UN soldiers were in Rwanda before the massacre. They had people gather in schools, churches, hospitals, etc. guarded by the UN only to abandon them just as the Tutsis were concentrated at these places. The excuse for the UN to pull out was the murder of 10 Belgian soldiers – perhaps it was a sacrifice of the soldiers done in order to give the UN that excuse.

[bobi]

Hmmm on that note ...

The SAM that shot down the plane with the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi on board that triggered the massacre apparently came from ex-Iraqi US captured man portable Russian SAMs. An SA-18 I think.

The massacre had some foreign intelligence involved so I read. :)

[Almondjoy]

That's fair and I agree with you. But what happened behind the scenes is not how the public viewed it. Don't you remember how the genocide thing was all palyed up right before Kosovo? They even alluded to Rwanda and how we all screwed up there. You are thinking in terms of gov'ts and what they were thinking all the way through it. I'm not. I'm impliying that gov'ts marched on Kosovo because of world opinion on the matter. In fact the gov'ts were embarassed by Rwanda and felt pressed to push the matter in Kosovo because I don't think they could of allowed another Rwanda to happen. They suffered a black eye in public opinion if not from guilt as I stated.