No Regrets, Even About Genocide

Lesson Learned?

After the Rwandan genocide, it was clear that the United States, the United Nations and others were tragically and unforgivably wrong not to intervene.

Bush seemed to get a hint of that yesterday, explaining at his joint news conference with the Rwandan president that "one of the lessons of the genocide in Rwanda was to take some of the early warnings signs seriously."

But then he went on: "Secondly, a clear lesson I learned in the museum was that outside forces that tend to divide people up inside their country are unbelievably counterproductive. In other words, people came from other countries -- I guess you'd call them colonialists -- and they pitted one group of people against another. And an early warning sign was -- and it's hard to have seen it, I readily admit, but I'm talking earlier than 1994, and earlier than the '90s -- was the fact that it become a habit to divide people based upon -- you know, in this case, whether they were Tutsi or Hutu, which eventually led to exploitation."

As a result, he said: "I would tell my successor that the United States can play a very constructive role. I would urge the President not to feel like U.S. solutions should be imposed upon African leaders. I would urge the President to treat our -- the leaders in Africa as partners. In other words, don't come to the continent feeling guilty about anything. Come to the continent feeling confident that with some help, people can solve their problems."

It was an obvious attempt to defend his decision not to send U.S. troops into Darfur -- but it's a perversion of the lesson of Rwanda.

The lesson of Rwanda is the need to act.

AIDS in Africa

Craig Timberg writes in The Washington Post: "Five years after President Bush vowed to 'turn the tide against AIDS' in Africa, he is traveling across a continent where the government's $15 billion investment has extended the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and eased the sense of certain doom once experienced by millions of others.

"But in the worst-hit areas, clustered mainly on Africa's southern tip, the tide has decidedly not turned. The epidemic continues to spread at a torrid pace that shows little sign of easing, with people contracting HIV much faster than sick ones can be put on crucial antiretroviral drugs, research shows.

"Bush's initiative, the President's Emergency Program for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, has not found a way to prevent a significant number of the estimated 1.7 million new cases of HIV each year in Africa. Nearly half of today's 15-year-olds in South Africa, one of the biggest beneficiaries of the program, will contract the virus in their lifetimes at current infection rates, estimates show.

"'They've turned the treatment tide in a fundamental way,' said Francois Venter, president of the Southern African HIV Clinicians Society, who works on several programs that receive PEPFAR funding, referring to administration officials. 'In terms of prevention, they haven't. . . . It's quite clear that [South Africa's] prevention programs have failed completely.' . . .

"Studies have shown that family planning could avert far more infections than antiretroviral drugs because many women, especially those with HIV, want fewer children. Critics say [that restrictions on family planning advice], along with PEPFAR's emphasis on untested abstinence programs, exists mainly to win support from conservative congressional Republicans, undermining the full potential of a program that the White House bills as one of the biggest humanitarian ventures in history."

Columbia University Africa expert Josh Ruxin writes for NiemanWatchdog.org that Bush has allowed ideology to triumph over science: "Under the current policy, as much as one third of the money allocated to HIV prevention goes to abstinence-only campaigns. For many, the lack of information about sex and how to prevent HIV/AIDS, coupled with little or no access to condoms only increases the risk of transmitting HIV/AIDS.