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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   29964 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 1, 2024

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Indeed. I rather suspect that high levels of foreign interest in the conflict is why it continues to be unresolved. Other countries keep intervening politically to "promote peace", but that actually leads to the underlying issues never actually being sorted out.

The west stayed uninvolved in Rwanda, and while that was a horrible and protracted conflict with a shocking death toll, in the end Kagame and the Tutsis won, and it came to an end. Sometimes one side just needs to definitively win and one side needs to definitively lose for the fighting to stop.

The current situation in Sudan is awful, much worse than what is happening in Gaza. But I'm much more optimistic about that conflict being over ten years in the future than I am about Israel/Palestine.

Yes, it’s become almost impossible to solve the conflict due to outside meddling. Probably the best example of this is the creation of UNRWA, and the special Palestinian refugee status. As opposed to the UNHCR which aims to resettle refugees, UNRWA keeps them in perpetual refugee camps and decrees descendants of refugees to be refugees themselves - thus the Palestinian refugee problem will never be solved. This is by design.

Why would we support mass ethnic cleansing and a giant refugee crisis next to Europe?

They have every right to stay and it is best for the world if we don't get millions of refugees.

This happened in 1949, and is literally the reason that Palestinian stateless refugees number in the millions. By now they would have mostly died out.

I have bad news for you - there is already a giant refugee crisis next to Europe, hence the refugee camps.

Which is why we need to help them return and help the ones who are still there stay.

Return where? The lands they used to live in got conquered.

The nearest semi-stable company with conditions resembling the place that they took refuge from.

Or in Israel's case there's 2 million or so local Arabs who are largely prosperous compared to regional comparisons and aren't associated with Hamas. An Israeli Arab is generally healthier and wealthier than any other Arab aside from those privileged enough to have their hands in the till in Petrostates.

I'm pretty sure he means to send them back to the lands they used to live in and send the conquerors...somewhere.

The west stayed uninvolved in Rwanda,

This is not true, both France and the UN sent troops. UN troops didn't intervene militarily, but they did shelter thousands of people from the genocide.

As far as I understand, the UN (and the French peacekeepers in particular) were famously useless during the Rwandan Genocide, and their major contribution was in setting up refugee camps in DRC (then Zaire) for fleeing Hutu genocidaires after the Burundi invasion ended the genocide.

In other words, they did little to shelter people from the genocide, but mostly sheltered the people who had committed the genocide.

If that's wrong, I'd appreciate the fact-check. My opinion of the UN places them somewhere between people who talk in the theater and malaria, so I'd be delighted to find that they're not quite as contemptible as I had thought.

My opinion of the UN places them somewhere between people who talk in the theater and malaria,

It's lucky that they're so ineffective.

I don't think that's true but I'm not much of an expert. Certainly the UN sheltered many Tutsis in its mission's headquarters. Overall they did not do much though.

...The wiki article on the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda is tough reading.

The original UNAMIR mission was given a mandate under Chapter VI, meaning its role was exclusively to maintain a demilitarized zone and to negotiate peace after the earlier civil war. When the genocide began, the UN ignored the urgent requests of the force commander to expand its mandate (it waited 40 days before providing the go-ahead to "provide security" to refugees) but instead withdrew 90% of its local forces (drawing down from 2500 to 270) and ordered the remaining soldiers to prioritize the evacuation of foreign nationals.

UNAMIR also assisted with the evacuation of foreign nationals; a group of Belgian soldiers, who had been sheltering 2,000 Rwandans at the École Technique Officielle, were ordered to abandon their station to assist in the evacuation. After the Belgians left, Hutu militants entered and massacred everyone inside.

The protection of Tutsi refugees in Amahoro Stadium seems almost entirely incidental to the UN soldiers defending their own HQ.

On the other hand, the UN Security Council did authorize a French army (officially a 'multilateral force' with 2468 French soldiers and 32 Senegalese soldiers) to set up a 'safe zone' in SW Rwanda under the name Operation Turquoise. This military mission was officially intended to stop the bloodshed, but mainly served to delay the advancing RPF (Tutsi) army from ending the genocide in the 'safe zone', as well as providing supplies for the mass migration of Hutus into eastern Zaire, which set up the humanitarian crisis (and ongoing border conflict) that resulted in 'Africa's World War' a few years later.

At some point I really need to write up an effortpost about France and the Rwandan Genocide. Where the UN and US can be shamed as merely feckless, France was astonishingly brazen in their embrace of villainy. It takes a special kind of moral monster to sit next to Tutsi refugees fleeing a genocide as you evacuate the country, only to kick them out at a Hutu border checkpoint so you can watch them be butchered mere yards away from freedom. Appalling is far too weak a word.

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