Here’s a film about the Rwandan genocide that pulls no punches, unlike Hotel Rwanda. 

Filmed in the actual school where 2500 Tutsis had found asylum under the protection of Belgian UN peacekeepers, it lays bare the moral cowardice of the UN and the Clinton administration.

Near the end, the filmmakers include a clip of State Department spokesperson Prudence Bushnell torturing the definition of genocide (if the US acknowledged the genocide, we were compelled to intervene) at a news conference.

They don’t show what happened after Bushnell finished:

After she left the podium, Michael McCurry, the department spokesman, took her place and criticized foreign governments for preventing the screening of the Steven Spielberg film Schindler’s List. “This film movingly portrays … the twentieth century’s most horrible catastrophe,” he said. “And it shows that even in the midst of genocide, one individual can make a difference.”

I wish it had gone one bit further and shown Bill Clinton making his pit-stop apology in Kigali a few years after 800,000 Tutsis were macheted to death over 100 days.

Making eye contact and shaking his head, he explained, “It may seem strange to you here, especially the many of you who lost members of your family, but all over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate [pause] the depth [pause] and the speed [pause] with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror.”  

That was a blatant lie. Bush is blamed for the deaths of American military and Iraqi civilians. He is blamed for ruining our international reputation.

But whose respect do we covet? The Belgian peacekeepers who abandoned the Tutsis to their doom? The French who rode to the rescue of the white Europeans and kicked the Africans off their trucks?

Clinton was popular in Europe because it takes a coward to love a coward. Bush may not have gotten everything right in Iraq (no war leader ever does) but our motives were righteous.

Note: The film has an alternate title, Shooting Dogs. The Belgians were not allowed to fire their guns unless shot at, which meant they couldn’t fire upon mobs hacking Tutsis to death with machetes right outside their gates. But when wild dogs came to feast upon the remains, they shot them.