Tacitus has a powerfully moving tale explaining Rwanda's genocide. It's work safe and not very graphic but the last 4-5 paragraphs moved me so much I had to leave the computer for a few minutes and immerse myself in a computer text I'm slogging through. It's profoundly disturbing to understand that we lived through this. We could do something about it. We didn't do it because it was inconvenient.
Rwanda is apparently the Prussia of Africa, orderly, rule conscious, intensely interested in doing any job right. With such features, it possibly has one of the brightest futures in Africa. But it was so rule bound that even the victims of massacre wanted to do their job right. The only ones who didn't play their part are the white knights of the West. We did not come over the hill to save the day. It will always be our personal shame that we did not.
Posted by TMLutas at February 4, 2004 10:30 AM