Dear Lazyweb, please lecture me?
I've got a critical essay due on Rwanda's genocide of 1994, and I am searching for a narrower topic. The focus can be anything, as long as it relates to the overall thing above.
I'm thinking that, while there were lots of drivers instigating the Rwanda issue from within, I am actually a bit more interested in the stunning lack of world reaction and the more or less casual treatment the brutal wholesale slaughter received in the media.
I am not looking to excuse the lack of involvement from the first world, but I'd like to get the gap in which Rwanda fell into some sort of global context. I am hoping to find reasons that a little less facile than racism, and something beyond the fact that there was nothing Rwanda had or produced that was of interest to the world community.
I do vaguely remember that the period of 1989-1994 saw a lot of ethnic unrest, including quite a bit of 'ethnic cleansing' activity (I hate that term, fwiw). There were also recessions here in the US and Russia. Seems I also recall a lot of drawing inward by the global community in some sort of hope of protectionism.
The global peacekeeper the US had been during the forty or so years previous had hit hard times - the US military had gotten their noses bloodied in various conflicts - there was Black Hawk Down in Mogadishu, the ongoing ongoing ongoing Serbian, Kurd, and other eastern European conflicts, and I've forgotten how many other problems drawing attention throughout the world.
I guess what I am looking for is some fodder - examples of military ineffectiveness that fueled public sentiment to leave the crazies to themselves, frustration with specific economic drivers, or other public sentiment that may have driven an "Ah well, it's just those people over there. The killing is awful, but they need to sort their own selves out" attitudes.
Anyone got any 'think about this' things for me?