Revealed Secret Cables Point to US Reluctance at Onset of Genocide

Today, I continue my 100 day series remembering the twentieth anniversary of Rwandan genocide. Please join me in prayer for those lives lost and impacted in this tragedy. #NeverAgain. LMH

From the New York Times:

On April 12, 1994, six days after a plane carrying Rwanda’s president was shot down, setting off a wave of killings, Madeleine K. Albright, the American ambassador to the United Nations at the time, sent a cable to the State Department proposing that the United States take the lead in pushing to withdraw most of the United Nations peacekeeping force operating there.

Ms. Albright’s tersely worded cable, recently declassified, starkly captures the reluctance of the United States to respond to the deepening crisis in Rwanda. When most of the United Nations force was withdrawn shortly afterward, leaving the violence almost completely unchecked, the crisis rapidly escalated into one of history’s most grimly efficient genocides, with some 800,000 people killed in less than 100 days.

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