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800,000 Rwandans were massacred.

France was a close ally of the Hutu-led government prior to the massacres and has been accused of ignoring warning signs and training the militias who carried out the attacks.

Little was done internationally to stop the killings. The UN and Belgium had forces in Rwanda but the UN mission was not given a mandate to act. The Belgians and most UN peacekeepers pulled out." —The BBC


Even John Mearsheimer, a scholar of the now defunct but still predominant neorealist-International Relations theory, acknowledged this in 2002:

"Despite claims that American policy is infused with moralism, Somalia is the only instance during the past hundred years in which US soldiers were killed in action on a humanitarian mission’—and ‘in that case, the loss of a mere eighteen soldiers so traumatized American policymakers’ that ‘they refused to intervene in Rwanda in the spring of 1994’, although ‘stopping that genocide would have been relatively easy and would have had virtually no effect on the position of the United States in the balance of power. Yet nothing was done." The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 2002, p. 47 (hardback ed.)


  • The country was not important strategically for the U.S. and its allies. 
  • There was nothing for international capital to gain from. So, "humanitarian intervention" was not on the agenda.
  • Rwanda was not on "regime change" list.
  • We were busy "free marketing" and "democratising" Russia and eastern Europe. We were dizzy with euphoria and still celebrating the defeat of our major ideological enemy.
  • The Rwandans were not against "our values". The Hutu machetes were not used by "Jihadi Johns" against us.

5 million people have been killed in Congo during the last 20 years. "Humanitarian intervention" any one?

Similarly, according to a Havard researcher, there was a genocide in Myanmar. But we had awarded the president there a Peace Prize and the country was not strategically important.

There has been no genocide in Venezuela, but, paraphrasing Mike Pence, the leader of "the free world" cannot tolerate not having "freedom" in a neighbouring country. 

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