"April 21" "A Rwandan human rights activist traveled to Washington." "She'd been smuggled out of Kigali after a harrowing ordeal." "Monique Mujawamariya came to tell American officials what was happening in her country and ask for stronger U.S. action." "MONIQUE MUJAWAMARIYA, Human Rights Activist:" "The first person who I met when I arrived in the United States was Anthony Lake, who at the time was national security adviser." "I will always remember him." "He was very pleased to see me." "ANTHONY LAKE:" "Well, I met with Monique and was moved and terrified for her by her story of barely escaping, hiding in the attack for a while and then getting out." "MONIQUE MUJAWAMARIYA:" "I think he was partly affected by what was happening in Rwanda." "But as a government official, he was not ready to take action." "He didn't want to." "ANTHONY LAKE:" "And it's not that I didn't care, it's that any caring wasn't translated into any focus, any attention really." "On something like this, it would have taken quite a push." "And there's no question in my mind that, in the end, the president would have had to push it." "MONIQUE MUJAWAMARIYA:" "A congressional official responsible for Africa gave me an explanation which was discouraging but also enlightening." "He said, "Listen, Monique, the United States has no friends." "The United States has interests." "And in the United States, there is no interest in Rwanda." "And we are not interested in sending young American Marines to bring them back in coffins." "We have no incentive."" "As Monique lobbied Washington, America and the entire U.N. Security Council voted to withdraw 90 percent of the peacekeepers in Rwanda." "This was the compromise Madeleine Albright had argued for." "At least a token force was allowed to remain." "MADELEINE ALBRIGHT:" "It was... it was a very difficult time, and the situation was unclear." "You know, in retrospect, it all looks very clear." "But when you were at the time, when it was unclear about what was happening in Rwanda, it was very clear that Congress was not supportive of additional peacekeepers, very clear that the Pentagon was not interested in getting deeply involved." "INTERVIEWER:" "What was your gut feeling about the effectiveness of that force that was being left behind?" "MADELEINE ALBRIGHT:" "Well, I think that my gut feeling was that it couldn't do what it had to do." "Maj. BRENT BEARDSLEY :" "It was like the world had disappeared out there." "The world just didn't care." "And it made no difference what you said or how you said it." "We could have packed up dead bodies, put them on-- flown to New York, walked into the Security Council and dumped them on the floor in front of the Security Council, and all that would have happened was we would have been charged for illegally using a U.N. aircraft." "They just didn't want to do anything." "Gen. ROMEO DALLAIRE:" ""Forget any idea that somebody's going to come and help you, Dallaire,"" ""or your forces, and that we're going to actually do something positive."" ""We're just going to continue the movement that the Belgians have started of withdrawing and withdrawing and pulling out."" "That scenario brought an enormous gloom because there's no cavalry coming over the hill." "General Dallaire was left in Kigali with only 450 ill-equipped troops from developing countries." "Now he faced the moral burden of bearing witness to a genocide without the means to stop it." "PHILIPPE GAILLARD:" "He was abandoned by his own organization." "This is terrible." "48 00:04:54,946 -- 00:04:59,096 To be abandoned by his own organization, it's terrible." "I was always supported." "It's a big difference, a huge difference." "We needed surgeons, nurses, and these kind of very specialized stuff, you know?" "It arrived to Rwanda within days." "It's very efficient, very short." "They came." "Some people had to be changed because some people got crazy." "But then you find other people who, yeah, are able to take risks and to... to do the very little things you can do, which are always miracles." "Do miracles." "That's... yeah, in such context, it's the only way to do something, I guess, yeah." "April 25" "CARL WILKENS: [home video] It's Monday, the 25th of April." "It's a rainy, cold day, the day before the beginning of the historic elections in South Africa, and rockets have just been flying over the house." "Carl Wilkens, the only American not to evacuate from Rwanda, hadn't left his home in nearly three weeks." "CARL WILKENS:" "And so when I went out, it was... it was wild." "There were horses roaming the streets, and there's no horses in Rwanda except at the Belgian Club, and someone, I guess, had let them out of their stalls." "And there were guys sitting at roadblocks in couches, you know?" "And they'd have an old shotgun across their lap, and they'd have, like, a monkey, you know, on a leash, some foreigner's pet who had fled." "Little kids were playing with all kinds of Western toys all over the city, little Rwandan kids who'd never seen these toys before, much less been able to touch them and play with them." "It was... it was a wild place out there." "Gromo Alex, a veteran U.N. aid worker, volunteered to come back to Rwanda and set up a humanitarian team in Kigali." "GROMO ALEX, U.N. Humanitarian Team, Kigali:" "Very few people get opportunities to be real heroes, so I wanted to be one of those... you know, one of those few." "INTERVIEWER:" "During the genocide, what was it like right here?" "GROMO ALEX:" "Very dead quiet, barriers on most of the... almost any road entering into the neighborhood was blocked off with tree stumps or logs or beer cases." "Each day, Gromo Alex delivered food to refugees at U.N. safe havens in the city and learned to navigate the Interahamwe roadblocks." "GROMO ALEX:" "We started as early as we could in the morning... not too early... and we tried to finish it as early in the afternoon as possible because at... by noon, they had been drinking and were intoxicated," "and they had either killed people and wanted to kill more or they hadn't killed and they wanted to kill." "Killing was like a drink, that if you... you took one drink, you wanted another one and you wanted another." "You wanted to become more and more intoxicated." "Sometimes people kill once, and then to lessen the impact of that murder on their psyches or on their conscience, they have to kill again, and then they kill again." "And then each... each murder drives you to kill again, not so much that you forget that you've killed before but that you've... you've killed and it just becomes part of you." "I mean, you've just got to kill and kill and kill." "Four weeks into the genocide, the Red Cross estimated 300,000 Rwandans had been killed." "May 3" "Pres." "BILL CLINTON:" "I think the conscience of the world has grieved for the slaughter in Rwanda." "But we also know from not only the Somalia experience but from what we read of the conflict between the Hutus and the Tutsis that there is a political and military element to this." "And so I think we can take the lessons we learned and perhaps do a better job there." "ANTHONY LAKE, Nat'l Security Advisor to Pres." "Clinton:" "I think the problem here for me, for the president, for most of us at senior levels was that it never became a serious issue." "We never came to grips with what, in retrospect, should have been a central issue of do we do much more to insist that the international community intervene and go out and find the troops that are necessary or even contemplate an American intervention itself." "That issue just never arose." "The administration left Rwanda to the bureaucrats and an inter-agency working group led by the deputy assistant secretary of state for Africa, Prudence Bushnell." "PRUDENCE BUSHNELL, Dpty Ass't Sec'y of State for Africa:" "I mean, what an extraordinary way to spend time." ""Bye, dear." "I'm going off to the office today to sit with my people and talk about, is there any way we can save human beings from being slaughtered when there are no resources, there's no peacekeeping."" "It was... these were conversations I'll never, ever forget." "Bushnell's hands were tied by the government's policy of non-intervention." "So when she called extremist Hutu leaders, she could threaten them only with words." "PRUDENCE BUSHNELL:" "I would set the alarm for 2:00 o'clock in the morning, and having these bizarre conversations in French." ""Hello, this is Prudence Bushnell." "Stop it!" "Stop killing people!"" "When she called General Kagame, the Tutsi rebel leader," "Bushnell's instructions were to demand that he halt his advance and negotiate with the extremists." "PRUDENCE BUSHNELL:" "He was always very dispassionate, but there was a burst in the middle of this conversation of a fair amount of passion when he said to me, "Madam, they're killing my people."" "And it wasn't part of my instructions to be empathetic, to... and yet it was... it really pulled at my heart because I knew they were killing his people." "Gen. PAUL KAGAME :" "And indeed, I talked to Pru Bushnell, and I hate remembering the conversations I had with her because it always brings back those memories, that while for us, we were focusing on and seeing that" "hundreds of thousands of people are being killed, somebody was talking about something else that had nothing to do with saving the lives of these people who were being killed." "PRUDENCE BUSHNELL:" "The only effort I could make, as a human being, to sort of reach out a hand of humanity by saying, as I signed off, "General, I wish you peace."" "And that's the way I ended my conversations with him it was awful." "Excuse me." "It's really difficult." "Kigali" "As the outside world left Rwanda to its fate, one U.N. soldier in Kigali was taking matters into his own hands." "Captain Mbaye Diagne of Senegal was an unarmed U.N. observer, renowned for his ability to charm his way past the killers." "ALEX GROMO:" "He's tall, a tall guy." "And he had this smile, you know, a big, toothy smile." "Even in all this gore and hatred, as long as you can have that brief glimpse of, you know, a smile or something to laugh about that's good, you grab onto it." "And with Mbaye, I think that's what everybody did." "At all those checkpoints, they all knew him." "From the first hours of the genocide, Captain Mbaye had ignored orders to remain neutral." "He had rescued the children of Prime Minister Agathe, hiding them in a closet while their mother was being killed." "Based at the Hotel Mille Collines, a safe haven in the center of Kigali," "Captain Mbaye was part of a group of U.N. observers whose very presence was often enough to keep the killers at bay." "Gen. ROMEO DALLAIRE:" "These guys didn't move, this heart of observers, the gang that stayed at the Mille Collines -- there were seven or eight of them." "That particular group, on their own initiative, would go to places where people told there might be people hidden, and they would get them out and bring them to either the Mille Collines or another safe place that we had." "And Diagne was one of those leaders in that." "I mean, he was evident, courageous and risk-taking." "But even General Dallaire didn't realize the full extent of Captain Mbaye's secret rescue missions." "GROMO ALEX:" "We could see in this back room in the Amahoro Hotel, the headquarters, they had large groups of people that all of a sudden appeared and then the next day were gone." "We began to put together that Mbaye was bringing people from all over town to the headquarters and then evacuating them or having them picked up" "and taken to safety elsewhere." "MARK DOYLE, BBC World Service:" "I knew what Mbaye Diagne was doing." "I had a very, very strong suspicion... put it that way... of what he was doing." "And had I investigated, I could have found out, but I didn't want to find out." "I didn't want to say, "There is a Senegalese officer saving people in this town."" "You can imagine what the impact of that would have been." "He would have been killed." "While observers like Captain Mbaye were saving hundreds of lives," "General Dallaire had a plan to save tens of thousands by creating more safe havens like the few his troops were already protecting in Kigali." "MARK DOYLE:" "Dallaire had a plan, which was basically to secure football stadiums in every town around Rwanda." "Football stadiums were particularly defendable areas because they had large concrete stands." "And if you have 50 soldiers with guns on the top of those stands, you can stop people coming in to kill people, basically." "So it was..." "I think it was very doable, if there had been a much bigger U.N." "...not that much bigger, a few... a few thousand well-armed U.N. soldiers." "REPORTER:" "General, you do say that people are being killed, taken out of [unintelligible] What can the U.N. do about it?" "Gen. ROMEO DALLAIRE:" "Send me troops." "Will you... send troops?" "Well, what more do you want me to say?" "I'm waiting here." "So send me troops." "But the U.N. Security Council was skeptical." "MICHAEL SHEEHAN, Peacekeeping Advisor to Amb." "Albright:" "Yeah, we knew what Dallaire was saying." "But remember, the Belgians, which were the primary Western European force, had left." "And there weren't many other European forces that had real capacity raising their hand up in the air, volunteering to put battalions on the ground in Rwanda." "It just didn't exist." "American officials worried that U.N. troops would get embroiled in Rwanda's civil war because the Tutsi rebels of the Rwanda Patriotic Front made it clear they would oppose a robust U.N. force." "MICHAEL SHEEHAN :" "At the time, the RPF was determined to take Kigali, take power back in Kigali, and they weren't interested in the U.N. coming back." "And they saw a U.N. force as being a force that would prop up the Hutu regime that was committing the very atrocities that were ongoing." "So the RPF was not interested in a U.N. force, and this was crucial to our decision making regarding whether a force would go in and whether it would go into Kigali." "The U.N. told Dallaire he would get no more troops." "And without a larger force, all he could do was to keep trying to negotiate a ceasefire between the Tutsi rebels and the Hutu government." "Gen. ROMEO DALLAIRE:" "I was also determined to continue to keep negotiations going because maybe it'll stop." "Maybe, with a ceasefire, you know, between the two belligerents, we might be able to stop the massacring." "When the ceasefire talks again went nowhere," "Dallaire asked to meet directly with the commanders of the death squads." "Gen. ROMEO DALLAIRE:" "I had to crack the nut of the militias, and so I asked Bagosora, I said, "Listen"," "Let me meet these guys." "Let me negotiate with them." "Inside a Kigali hotel, the leaders of the Interahamwe were waiting." "Gen. ROMEO DALLAIRE:" "And so when I arrived, Bagosora introduced them." "And... as I was looking at them and shaking their hands," "I noticed some blood spots still on them." "And all of a sudden, it didn't... they disappeared from being human." "All of a sudden, something happened that turned them into non-human things." "And I was not talking with humans," "I literally was talking with evil." "It even became a very difficult ethical problem." "Do I actually negotiate with the devil to save people, or do I wipe it out," "I shoot the bastards right there?" "I haven't answered that question yet." "The Interahamwe continued to threaten U.N. safe havens like St. Famille Church in Kigali." "The Tutsi refugees inside suspected the Hutu priest was helping the killers." "They appealed to Dallaire." "BONAVENTURE NIYIBIZI :" "There were, like, two Senegalese military who were coming from time to time." "And we said if they stay here permanently, we will be more or less protected because, you know, people did not want to kill and have... and being seen, especially by the international community, journalists and so on." "Dallaire placed the church under U.N. guard." "As elsewhere, sometimes all he had to offer was a couple of unarmed U.N. soldiers." "ALEX GROMO:" "Quite amazingly, these people, who were very brave, managed here and at the ICRC hospital to prevent armed people from coming in, saying, "Stop." "You're not allowed in here." "This is... this site is protected by the U.N."" "And you ask yourself, well, here's one guy with no gun, sitting on a wooden chair all day, and... or, you know, all night, you know, not sleeping, and he's able with no gun to convince people that they're not allowed in here to kill people." "I mean, there were some powerful, brave things that were being done by U.N. soldiers completely devoid of any support from New York." "Forget it." "I'm sorry." "Nothing came from those people." "PHILIPPE GAILLARD, Red Cross:" "Everybody knew every day, live, what was happening in this country." "You could follow that every day on TV, on radio." "Who moved?" "Nobody." "Yeah." "MARK DOYLE, BBC World Service:" "I spoke to the Red Cross representative and asked him how many people had been killed." "And Philippe said something along the lines of," ""In the first few weeks, I said that 100.000 people had been killed."" "A few weeks later, I said loud and clear that I think half a million people have been killed." "And now you're another journalist and you're asking me again, and I'm telling you I can't count anymore." "Half a million people have been killed, and I've stopped counting." "PHILIPPE GAILLARD:" "They cannot tell us or tell me that they didn't know." "They were told, every day, what was happening there." "So don't come back to me and tell me, "Sorry, we didn't know."" "No, no." "No, no." "No, no." "Everybody knew." "After the Holocaust, the world said "Never again"" "and adopted a U.N. convention requiring that future genocides be stopped." "When genocide happened in Rwanda, the United States, along with most other governments, simply avoided using the word." "April 28" "CHRISTINE SHELLY, State Department Spokeswoman:" "Well, as I think you know, the use of the term "genocide" has a very precise legal meaning, although it's not strictly a legal determination." "There are other factors in there, as well." "When... in looking at a situation to make a determination about that, before we begin to use that term, we have to know as much as possible about the facts of the situation and-- REPORTER:" "Just out of curiosity, given that so many people say that there is genocide under way or something that strongly resembles it, why wouldn't this convention be invoked?" "MADELEINE ALBRIGHT :" "Well, I think, as you know, this becomes a legal definitional thing, unfortunately, in terms of as horrendous as all these things are, there becomes a definitional question." "At the time, it..." "I have to make so clear to you that at the time, people just did not have the sense that this was happening in the proportions that it was." "And by the time that it happened, you couldn't do anything about it." "May 17" "Six weeks into the genocide, the Security Council finally changed course and authorized over 5,000 more peacekeepers for Rwanda, but none were immediately available." "KOFI ANNAN :" "The U.N. doesn't have any troops." "We borrow them from governments." "And I recall on the Rwanda thing, we approached about 80 governments, trying to get offers of troops." "And they wouldn't give them to us." "Washington promised logistical support." "But as bodies flowed out of Rwanda down the rivers of Central Africa," "State Department officials struggled to get the Pentagon to act." "TONY MARLEY, State Department Military Advisor:" "At one point, I had recommended that in response to the hate propaganda radio, known as Radio Mille Collines, that the U.S. could use military radio jamming equipment to block those radio transmissions, to take them off the air, effectively." "One lawyer from the Pentagon made the argument that would be contrary to the U.S. constitutional protection of freedom of the press, freedom of speech." "GEORGE MOOSE :" "Truly atrocious that we weren't able to do something because of some some legal nicety about international radio conventions." "And then the APC thing, as sort of emblematic, symptomatic." "Washington had agreed to send 40 armored personnel carriers to the United Nations peacekeepers, but they would take three months to arrive." "GEORGE MOOSE:" "Well, because we spent so much time wrangling about who was going to pay for them, who was going to pay for refurbishing them, who was going to transport them, who was going to pay for the transport," "who was going to pay for the training of the Ghanaians so that they could use them." "I mean, and again, it's sort of bureaucracy at its very worst and but we couldn't... at our level, you know, there was... we couldn't break through that." "Somebody else would have had to intervene to say," ""This is nonsense." "Get on with it." "Do it."" "The bureaucratic paralysis emerged from the administration's decision not to intervene." "Seven weeks into the genocide, President Clinton restated his policy that the U.S. would intervene in a humanitarian crisis only if it were in America's national interest." "May 25" "Pres." "BILL CLINTON:" "The end of the superpower standoff lifted the lid from a cauldron of long-simmering hatreds." "Now the entire global terrain is bloody with such conflicts, from Rwanda to Georgia." "Whether we get involved in any of the world's ethnic conflicts in the end must depend on the cumulative weight of the American interests at stake." "The one American to stay in Kigali when the embassy closed probably saved more lives during the genocide than the entire U.S. government." "Carl Wilkens discovered the Interahamwe had surrounded an orphanage." "CARL WILKENS, Aid Worker, Adventist Church:" "One day, as we brought a load of water to them, this counselor, local counselor from the area comes ripping in in his... in his little stolen Mercedes station wagon." "And I... as he got out of his car, I looked around, and here, surrounding the orphanage, just materializing, is, like, about 50 militia guys... camo jackets or camo pants, but all of them with machine guns." "And I said to my Rwandan colleague, who was driving the truck," "I said, "Siphon as slow as you can." "We've got to make this last." "I don't know what we're going to do, but it seems like they're not coming while we're here."" "While his colleague stayed at the orphanage," "Wilkens went to the local government headquarters looking for help." "CARL WILKENS:" "And a young secretary I'd become friends with, he says, "The prime minister's here." And I'm, like," ""So what's that mean?" And he's, like," ""Ask him." And I'm, like," ""Ask him?" You know, it's, like, that's the stupidest thing you could imagine, to ask this guy, who's obviously orchestrating the genocide, a key player." "And yet I had no other options." "And door opens, everybody snaps to attention, and here comes Kambanda and his group, little entourage." "And they're coming down the hall, and I'm... you know, I'm... and I stand up and I put my hand out and I said," ""Mr. Prime Minister, I'm Carl Wilkens." "The director of ADRA."" "And he stops and he looks at me, and then he takes my hand and shakes it." "And he said, "Yeah, I've heard about you and your work." "How is it?"" "And I said, "Well, honestly, sir it's not very good right now." "The orphans at Gisimba are surrounded, and I think there's going to be a massacre, if there hasn't been already."" "Just tell him, you know?" "And he turns around, talks to some of his aides or whatever." "He says, "We're aware of the situation, and those orphans are going to be safe."" ""I'll see to it."" "The orphans were saved." "Years later, Prime Minister Kambanda would be convicted of genocide by a U.N. tribunal." "CARL WILKENS:" "You know, the genocide is so complicated." "I was in so many positions that could have been interpreted as compromising or even collaborating with the enemy, huh?" "You know, who's going to believe someone who goes to court and says," ""Well, actually, I asked Kambanda to help me save some Tutsis"?" "Huh?" "Who's going to believe that?" "The stuff in the genocide just turns... and that's why, you know, the thing about this is, is we got to recognize in each one of us" "there's such a potential for good and there's such a potential for evil." "By late May, the extremists were running out of Tutsis to kill." "They threatened to storm the U.N. sanctuary at the Hotel Mille Collines." "Captain Mbaye Diagne of Senegal led 600 Tutsis to a safer part of town." "MARK DOYLE :" "And the militia attacked the convoys." "And I saw individual soldiers, including Captain Mbaye Diagne, actually kicking people off because they didn't have guns." "The U.N. soldiers didn't have guns." "They were actually kicking people off and saying, "You can't come up here." "These people... we're saving these people."" "A few days later, Captain Mbaye was driving from the hotel back to U.N. headquarters." "He stopped at this bridge, a final checkpoint." "ALEX GROMO:" "A mortar had landed behind his car and shrapnel came through the back window and in the back of his head and apparently killed him instantly." "They're calling around for a body bag, and there's no body bags, not a body bag." "There's nothing left." "There's nothing." "And you wonder, you know, [unintelligible] at this time, we're starting to put it together and we're saying, you know" ""Here's a-- here's a guy who gave his ultimate, did everything, and we don't even have a body bag," you know, nothing to, you know, show him some respect." "We had some UNICEF plastic sheeting and we had some tape." "You know, we're folding him up and, you know, the creases aren't right, you know, because his feet are so damn big, you know?" "And you don't want that for him." "You want it to be like, you know, just laid out perfectly so that, you know, when people look at him, you know, they... they know that he was something great. [weeps]" "No one knows how many lives Captain Mbaye Diagne personally saved, at least 100, perhaps 1,000." "SENEGALESE OFFICER :" "Captain Mbaye Diagne is one of the best officers in my army." "And the job he done here, none of... none of us did it." "MARK DOYLE:" "I remember bursting into tears with a colleague of his, a Senegalese captain." "And the captain said to me," ""You're a journalist." "I'm a soldier." "Now you've got to tell the world what Mbaye Diagne did." "You've got to tell the people that he saved lots of lives." "Even while the U.N. was shamefully pulling out its troops, you know, he was saving people's lives and" ""please tell the world."" "Gen. ROMEO DALLAIRE:" "We carried the stretcher into the Hercules aircraft." "It was a very, very low point, very low point, such an incredibly courageous individual, amongst others" "who were strong and courageous." "But he seemed to be untouchable." "Nyarubuye" "As the civil war in Rwanda was drawing to a close, the BBC's Fergal Keane was traveling with the advancing Tutsi rebels." "One evening in late May, they approached the church at Nyarubuye where more than 5,000 Tutsis had sought refuge." "408 00:38:03,008 -- 00:38:04,063 FERGAL KEANE:" "And we got out of the car." "And in front of the church, there were some bodies on the ground." "You find yourself walking along and you're stepping around and stepping over bodies." "And then we walked down this path through the church compound." "It was heavily overgrown, heavily overgrown." "And we went down further until we came to this kind of open courtyard area, where the bodies were stacked in against the walls." "And it started to get dark." "And then we went into the church and there was no light in the church itself." "You're walking around in the dark." "And you-- suddenly, the light points here and you see a kid's body, and you know it's a kid because he's wearing his khaki school uniform." "And he's lying there and his head's been bludgeoned away." "And down in another corner there's a man, his body lying there." "As we're coming out, we hear noises, noises from other rooms." "And I got very, very scared." "And one of the drivers with us, a Ugandan, said, "Don't worry." "It's only rats." Rats." "And we left." "And I just remember looking up at the church itself, and there's this white statue of Christ standing with his arms open." "And as you look down from him, there's the remains of a human body underneath." "And I was... you know, I was raised as a Catholic, and I kind of drifted away, big-time, from religion." "But I really..." "I prayed so hard." "I said, "Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name." "Give us thy kingdom come."" "I needed to believe in something." "I think going to Nyarubuye, seeing what had happened there a few weeks earlier and coming face to face with the human capacity for evil on a scale I just hadn't imagined... you can imagine it in your mind," "but until you experience it and smell it, until you walk there, in that, that changes you." "But I don't welcome the fact that I was changed." "We've heard that there were survivors." "And we got to the mayor's offices, offices that had been used by the man accused of leading the genocide." "And we walked in, and sitting on the ground were this woman and, I think, two children." "And one of the children, she looked in the most terrible state." "She... we could see that her hand was black, been hacked away." "And there was a wound on the back of her head, as well." "The nurse was trying to dress the wounds, and she just-- this child looked..." "I looked at that kid and I said, "She's not going to make it." You know, "There's no way."" "The kid's name was Valentina." "VALENTINA IRIBAGIZA, Tutsi Schoolgirl:" "I felt a lot of pain, a lot of pain, because my fingers had been chopped off." "And my head had been cut." "I was very sad because my family was all dead." "I didn't think I was going to survive." "June 10" "CHRISTINE SHELLY :" "We have every reason to believe that acts of genocide have occurred." "REPORTER:" "How many acts of genocide does it take to make genocide?" "CHRISTINE SHELLY:" "Allen, that's just not a question that I'm in a position to answer." "REPORTER:" "Is it true that the... that you have specific guidance not to use the word "genocide" in isolation, but always to preface it with this... with these words "acts of"?" "CHRISTINE SHELLY:" "I have guidance which... which... to which I... which I try to use as best as I can." "I'm not..." "I have... there are formulations that we are using that we are trying to be consistent in our use of." "I don't have an absolute categorical prescription against something, but I have the definitions, I have a phraseology which..." "GEORGE MOOSE :" "It is ludicrous, in retrospect," "that the discussion was about how might we be viewed if we declared that there is genocide and then we are not in a position or not ready or willing or able to do anything about it." "The fact of the matter is, it was there, and the fact that we didn't say so was already tarnishing our credibility and our capacity to do something about it, so..." "But I think..." "I mean, as I've said, I think that's probably one of the most shameful passages in this... in this whole exercise, was our... the length of time and the amount of tortured discussion it took us to actually come to that determination." "The Rwandan genocide came to an end in July, 1994." "It had lasted 100 days and ended only when the Tutsi rebels won the civil war." "Hutu extremists had killed over 800,000 people as the world stood by." "CARL WILKENS:" "When I'd lay down at night in the hallway there, there was a hope that something's going to happen, you know?" "Something's gotta happen." "This thing didn't end in a couple days, like we thought it did." "It didn't end in a week or two, like we thought it would." "Somebody's gonna do something." "By the time the genocide was over," "I was so angry," "at America," "America the beautiful, America the brave." "I was angry with our government." "I was angry with people who could do something, even the simplest things and they didn't." "As the years passed, world leaders, who did little as genocide happened on their watch, came to places like Nyarubuye on pilgrimages of contrition." "ANTHONY LAKE :" "At what point did I start saying to myself, "We should have done more"?" "When did that start coming to me?" "Honestly, it didn't start happening probably until I went to Rwanda, saw the bodies." "It was worse than anything I had seen in Vietnam." "And after that," "I began understanding, or at least asking myself whether we-- whether we couldn't have done more." "January 1996" "MADELEINE ALBRIGHT:" "I think going to Rwanda was one of the biggest shocks for me." "I went to this-- this church on a lake, and then there was a mass grave." "And there was a small skeleton that they had managed to excavate, which was about the size of my grandchild at that time." "And it just-- and you could see the machete mark on the skull." "I wish that I had pushed for a large humanitarian intervention." "People would have thought I was crazy." "It would never have happened." "But I would have felt better about my own role in this." "May 1998" "KOFI ANNAN:" "It was a very painful and traumatic experience for me personally, and I think in some way, for the United Nations." "It's not something that you forget." "If we were to be confronted with a new Rwanda, is the world ready to do it?" "Will the world move in to stop it?" "And my answer is, I really don't know." "I wish I can say yes, but I am not convinced that we will see the kind of political will and the action required to stop it." "Eventually, President Clinton himself came to Rwanda." "March 1998" "Pres." "BILL CLINTON:" "I have come today to pay the respects of my nation to all who suffered and all who perished in the Rwandan genocide." "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 the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror." "In his remarks, which were billed as an apology," "Clinton did say the U.S. had made mistakes, but he never actually said he was sorry." "He met with survivors and heard the human consequences of his policy of non-intervention, and then he left. STUDENT:" "Mr. President, the lack of intervention in Rwanda... can you tell us why the U.S. didn't intervene?" "Pres." "BILL CLINTON:" "I think that the people that were bringing these decisions to me felt that the Congress was still reeling from what had happened in Somalia, and by the time they finally... you know, I sort of started focusing on this and seeing the news reports coming out of it," "it was too late to do anything about it." "And I feel terrible about it because I think we could have sent 5,000, 10,000 troops there and saved a couple hundred thousand lives." "I think we could have saved about half of them." "But I'll always regret that Rwandan thing." "I will always feel terrible about it." "Gen. ROMEO DALLAIRE:" "I came back with... and still live with this enormous guilt." "You know, I became... fell... started falling into these depressions, and it's like a spiral." "And so I'd find Scotch, mostly, and I'd just drink myself... and drink, and then I'd, you know, cut myself or try to jump off things because the pain of killing yourself is nothing" "compared to the pain of living with this." "I was the commander." "My mission failed and hundreds of thousands of people died." "And that..." "I can't find any solace in statements like, "I did my best."" "A commander can't use that as a reference in any operation." "He succeeds or he fails, and then he stands by and to be accused of and to be held accountable for." "And my mission failed, and that's that." "PHILIPPE GAILLARD :" "And I don't feel guilty." "I never felt guilty." "Dallaire felt guilty all the time." "And I think this is the reason why he is still deeply wounded, while my scars are... are OK." "Yeah." "And when we came back from Rwanda with my wife... we were deliberate... deliberately, we had no... no children." "And it was so evident for her, for me, that after this experience," "we both wanted to create life." "I mean," "I have never explained to my son that he was" "a product of a genocide." "It's not easy to explain." "Yes." "Yeah." "Nothing else, Greg."