am i the only one interested in rwanda?

[maighdlin]

the papers and online news have been bursting with super injunction talk. whilst im interested in it all to some extent, why the hell was there not more on the judgement made against the three generals responsible for the genocide in Rwanda? after years of trial they get imo a piddly sentence for being responsible for the death of 800,000 people, yet it was all barely mentioned underneath waves and waves of "news" about who some has been from BB shagged. went to talk about the judgement with DH yesterday he didn't even here of it. so three war criminals are convicted by an international court and given frankly insulting sentences yet the whole world is talking about bryan riggs.

please tell me i am not the only person who would rather hear about why 3 men only got 20 years for genocide rather than some footballer who couldn't keep it in his pants.

To be fair, not everything can make the news. Look at how much the situation in Libya is costing us ... police are constantly at the Libyan Embassy, or what is going on in Iraq or Afghanistan etc.

However, I did see a headline about the location of Jedward when Obama touches down in Ireland ....! Did not read anymore than that! Jedward and Obama should not be used in the same sentence!

No-one cared at the time (US, European Govts as it was regarded as internal conflict which it was (Hutus vs Tutsi) so why are they going to worry now? It's Africa and as long as the wealth comes out of there then all the bad stuff can get swept away.

I think people just get overloaded with bad stuff and so much 'bad stuff' seems to come out of Africa and after years and years of it, people feel what is the point - they can do nothing personally to change things.

people are just fed up reading or hearing of so much negativity. It wasn't always like this - most folk just went about their daily life with little knowledge of what was happening outside their village, never mind what is happening in another country they will never visit thousands of miles away.

i find it slightly odd too - but like the holocaust thread, 'we should all remember so it never happens again' but it does happen - all the time. :(

I caught the news about the conviction in Rwanda last week. Yes, it's appalling that newspapers are running a blatantly self-serving campaign so that they can publish and be damned about trivial things like footballers' private lives, knowing their circulation figures will rocket.... and dressing it up as some kind of holy crusade for freedom of speech.

Good news, I think that justice is being done in Rwanda, by Africans, even if it's not as heavy-handed as some would like.

You could also wonder why the fact that 8 million girls have been 'lost' in India is not bigger news. It's all to do with a culture of dowries. Report is on the BBC website

I read about the Rwandan trials (and ignored the injunction stories, although they are important in sense that rich people/companies shouldn't be able to buy a level of privacy unavailable to others. The details aren't important.)

There should be more discussion and, more importantly, action to prevent these things from happening again - clearly the lessons from Rwanda weren't learned, or else Darfur wouldn't have happened.

No about Rwanda, but I think this makes the point about not learning from tragedy very well: www.theonion.com/articles/lets-just-go-ahead-and-assume-weve-learned-the-les,20525/

No, you're completely right and well done, good show.

You're not the only one who thinks it's a piddly little sentence but what can we do?

I only found out about the genocide when my mum showed me the film, 'Hotel Rwanda' and I used it as a springboard for my dissertation. Not a lot of people know, or care about Rwanda these days and from what I can tell, nobody really gave a shit when it happened either.

I think one book that anyone who wants to learn about genocide should read is 'A Problem from Hell: America and the age of genocide'. It really opened my eyes to a lot of covering up by many countries.