What were the Hutus intention by killing the blue helmets?
Remember that at the end of 1993 in Somalia, 18 American Rangers on a peacekeeping mission in Mogadishu had been killed, and their bodies dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, televised around the world. And the Clinton administration, which had come into office talking about a brave new era of peacekeeping and global intervention and policing, lost its appetite for peacekeeping very fast. Well, the Rwandans who were planning a genocide, the Hutu extremists around the president, studied this sort of event very closely. They said, “Look, they come in here telling us what to do, these peacekeepers. They come in here with a good line of talk, but they don’t have the strength to fight, and they can’t stand body bags.” They studied this. It was in their newspapers. It was in their plans. And they said, “If we kill some of them, they’ll go away.” That was in the fax that was sent to U.N. headquarters. It was predicted that they were planning to kill some Belgians. And sure enough, on the
