Watching this HBO original movie was like eating light at a buffet where you pick out a single dish from the many offered. This well-done film plucks one man’s story out of the totality of the 1994 Rwanda experience, and in the process tries to explain how this black holocaust started and why one part of a nation turned on another and massacred an estimated 800,000 men, women and children. In the Nazi era in Germany, and especially the Stalin era in the Soviet Union, there were those ordinary citizens who silently participated through “many forms of collaboration and compromise,” whereas in Rwanda, Hutu extremists and government personnel (including military) wielded machetes and fired guns on Tutsis and moderate Hutus – their brothers and sisters. “Sometimes in April” does a better job of exploring the inactivity of the west through several scenes of American political and military officials meeting, discussing and in the end doing nothing. This is a black mark on the Clinton foreign policy record. Similarly, another African nation, the Sudan, will be a black mark on the Bush foreign policy record unless action occurs immediately to end the current conflict. A UN peacekeeping force (proposed by a pending U.S. resolution) will be a useless gesture unless it takes on a peacemaking role to help end the conflict that has forced more than 2 million in the Darfur region of Sudan to flee their homes.
#258 (05-19)
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