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Around 800,000 1 people were killed in Rwanda between 6 April 1994, when President Juvenal Habyarimana was assassinated, and 18 July 1994, when the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) declared victory and formed a new government. Some 10,000–50,000 Hutu supporters of opposition parties were targeted, but the vast majority of those killed were civilians from the minority Tutsi community. The perpetrators
which offered misleading explanations of why conflict had broken out in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and which apparently justified inaction rather than intervention. At the same time, it is also claimed that greater attention to the suffering of victims of human rights abuses or humanitarian crises offered the possibility of a new role for journalists in pricking the conscience of the West and encouraging
The first major post-Cold War conflict, the 1991 Gulf war, indicated how much had already changed. Saddam Hussein had enjoyed Western support in Iraq's war against Iran in the 1980s, but was abruptly cast as the 'new Hitler' after his invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. This book is about how the media have interpreted conflict and international intervention in the years after the Cold War. By comparing press coverage of a number of different wars and crises, it seeks to establish which have been the dominant themes in explaining the post-Cold War international order and to discover how far the patterns established prior to the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks have subsequently changed. The key concern is with the legitimacy of Western intervention: the aim is to investigate the extent to which Western military action is represented in news reporting as justifiable and necessary. The book presents a study that looks at UK press coverage of six conflicts and the international response to them: two instances of 'humanitarian military intervention' (Somalia and Kosovo); two cases in which the international community was criticised for not intervening (Bosnia and Rwanda); and two post-9/11 interventions (Afghanistan and Iraq). There were a number of overlapping UN and US interventions in Somalia in the early 1990s. Operation Restore Hope was the first major instance of post-Cold War humanitarian military intervention, following the precedent set by the establishment of 'safe havens' for Iraqi Kurds and other minorities at the end of the 1991 Gulf war.
: ‘international military intervention in Somalia and Bosnia was primarily aimed at protecting aid givers, rather than the populace in the area’. His main target of criticism is the international community’s failure to intervene to prevent or halt genocide in Rwanda in 1994. The mistake of the ‘humanitarian international’, he argues, was ‘to introduce and elevate the principle of neutrality’ (1997: 192), by
terrorism’ with a broader humanitarian, moral purpose. His October 2001 speech to the Labour Party conference, for example, set the Afghan war in the context of 1990s human rights interventions, when he pointed to successes in Kosovo and elsewhere, and also claimed that ‘if Rwanda happened again today … we would have a moral duty to act’. For Blair, the response to 9/11 showed ‘the power of community, which
underpinning the atrocities. The film then ends pessimistically as Quayle, powerless to stop the corporations which are working with the protection of the British and Kenyan governments, virtually commits suicide while his accounts of what is going on in Kenya are smuggled to his wife’s cousin who melodramatically reads them out at Justin’s funeral, symbolically communicating the truth to the West. Shooting Dogs deals with the genocide of ethnic Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, centring on a school run by a British expatriates Christopher (John Hurt), who is a priest and headmaster
cannot be recognised because it would violate the UN Charter’s prohibition of the use of force. The 1990s witnessed unprecedented levels of such ‘humanitarian interventions’: for example, the safe haven for the Kurds of Northern Iraq (1991), Somalia (1992–93), Bosnia (1992–95), the intervention of the Economic Community of West African States in Liberia (1990–96), the US-led intervention in Haiti (1994), French-led forces in Rwanda (1994), NATO’s intervention in Serbia and Kosovo (1999), this last highly controversial as it occurred without legal authorisation by the
Johnny Cash (Walk the Line). Docudramas have continued to revisit events from recent history – often employing the rubric of an his- Introduction to the second edition 5 torical anniversary. In 2005, ten years after the Rwandan genocide, there was Terry George’s Hotel Rwanda; Raoul Peck’s Sometimes in April; Michael Caton-Jones’s Shooting Dogs; and Nick Hughes’s 100 Days. In 2006 the historical sore of 9/11 was picked at in Paul Greengrass’s Flight 93 and Oliver Stone’s World Trade Centre. The more distant past, too, has been mined for its suggestive parallels with
’: Unless we want to see the same old story played out once more, we have to act. The alternative is to sit through the Oscars of 2020, watching Steven Spielberg pick up Best Picture for Jovanovic’s List: Slaughter in Kosovo – adding that benighted place to the roll-call of Cambodia, Rwanda and all the other theatres of hate where we shamed ourselves by doing
argument recalled earlier debates about humanitarian military intervention: if the UN was unable or unwilling to act decisively, a ‘coalition of the willing’ was justified in enforcing the will of the ‘international community’. ‘Remember Rwanda or Kosovo, said Bush, when ‘The UN didn’t do its job’ ( Guardian , 17 March). In reporting these comments, the Guardians Nicholas Watt described Bush as