So Rwandan history is dangerous. Like all of history, it is a record of successive struggles for power, and to a very large extent power consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality - even, as is so often the case, when that story is written in their blood.

Hutu power had presided over one of the most outrageous crimes in a century of seemingly relentless mass political murder, and the only way to get away with it was to continue to play the victim.

It bothered them [humanitarian aide workers] that the camp leaders might be war criminals, not refugees in any conventional sense of the word, but fugitives.

If, in the face of genocide, governments fear placing their soldiers at risk, he said, "then don't send soldiers, send Boy Scouts" - which is basically what the world did in the refugee camps [in Zaire].

created an assortment of new political front organizations, whose operatives were not known to have distinguished themselves in the genocide and could be presented to the world as 'clean

I saw a group of museum staffers arriving for work. On their maroon blazers, several wore the lapel buttons that sold for a dollar each in the museum shop, inscribed with the slogans "Remember" and "Never Again" ... the victims of future exterminations could now die knowing that a shrine already existed in Washington where their suffering might be commemorated

The Press and many members of Congress [in America] were sufficiently revolted by the administration's shameless evasions on Rwanda ... Meanwhile, the armored personnel carriers for an all-African intervention force sat on a runway in Germany

the humanitarian workers [in refugee camps in Goma} were treated rather like the service staff at a seedy mafia-occupied hotel: they were there to provide-food, medicine, housewares, an aura of respectability

The West's post-Holocaust pledge that genocide would never again be tolerated proved to be hollow