Channels, Fall 2016

Channels • 2016 • Volume 1 • Number 1 Page 9 Qa’ida document captured in Afghanistan in 2001, a correspondent had written that “[America] fears getting bogged down in a real war that would reveal its psychological collapse at the level of personnel and leadership. Since Vietnam, America has been seeking easy battles that are completely guaranteed.” 24 For a century, the United States had been the premier global military power, yet in both Vietnam and Somalia, leadership failings and psychological losses caused the nation’s leaders to develop a fear of any significant involvement. The United States wanted to view the events in Somalia as a short ordeal, refusing to commit a large enough force to accomplish the mission and failing to examine it as the time-consuming, nation-building project it was. This eventually resulted in the failed state the world sees today. Even worse, this change in policy and the American mindset remained when the last U.S. troops pulled out of Somalia, and it continued to affect involvement decisions for years, most significantly in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur. Rwanda Rwanda was the site of an ethnic cleansing: the largest U.N. defined genocide since the massacre of the Jews in WWII. The Rwandan Genocide was a mass slaughter of Tutsi and moderate Hutu in Rwanda by members of the Hutu majority. From April 7 through mid- July 1994, an estimated eight-hundred thousand to one million Rwandans were killed, constituting as much as seventy percent of the Tutsi and twenty percent of Rwanda's total population. 25 Members of the political elite within the country planned the genocide. They received strong support from the Rwandan army, the National Police (gendarmerie), government-backed militias including the Interahamwe, the Impuzamugambi, and the Hutu civilian population, all from which they garnered their combatants. The genocide occurred during the ongoing Rwandan Civil War, a conflict beginning in 1990 between the Hutu-led government and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). The RPF was mainly composed of Tutsi refugees whose families had fled to Uganda following earlier waves of Hutu violence. Pressure from the international community, however, resulted in a ceasefire in 1993 while the groups planned the Arusha Accords: an agreement that would create a power-sharing government with the RPF. Many Hutu, including several of the political elites within the country, viewed it as conceding to enemy demands. The RPF military campaign also intensified support for the "Hutu Power" ideology. This portrayed the RPF, mainly comprised of Tutsi, as an alien force intent on reinstating the Tutsi 24 Benjamin Runkle, “The Lost Lessons of 'Black Hawk Down',” War on the Rocks, 2013, accessed January 20, 2016, http://warontherocks.com/2013/10/the-lost-lessons-of-black-hawk-down/ . 25 “Genocide In Rwanda,” United Human Rights Council, accessed March 23, 2016, http://www.unitedhumanrights.org/genocide/genocide_in_rwanda.htm .