What exactly is the US alarmed about? That TDF/TPLF finally puts an end to #TigrayGenocide committed by US ally Abiy Ahmed in #Ethiopia? When has the US and the West ever done something to stop genocide? Some history that doesn't square well 🧵1/8
https://twitter.com/SecBlinken/status/1455056375726419975
Remember that the Rwandan genocide was not stopped by external intervention. Western troops pulled out! The Rwandan genocide also didn't just magically stop. The only reason the slaughter ended was because of the military victory by the Rwandan Patriotic Front: Tutsi rebels! 2/8
Most likely that's still better than in Bosnia, where Western troops handed civilians to their murderers of the Serbian Army in Srebrenica. Ok, you might think that's a bit harsh because how about the Holocaust after all? Surely, the US & its allies liberated Nazi Germany. 3/8
Yes, they did so together with the Soviets, who liberated Auschwitz. But let's be clear: no one would have ever intervened in the Holocaust if Hitler hadn't started WW2. The end of the Holocaust was a bi-product of Allied victory, not motivation. Small but important detail 4/8
But how about Kosovo, Libya and the so-called R2P? R2P was ever only evoked by UNSC in the contexts of Libya & Côte d'Ivoire in 2011. Civilians suffered horrendous violence in all these cases, but neither case was a genocide. All they had in common was Western self-interest. 5/8
The only successful external interventions that were explicitly motivated to stop genocide, which come to my mind fwiw, have a very different thing in common: they've been led by non-Western states at the height of Third Worldism, when a more just world seemed possible. 6/8
These included India's intervention to stop mass atrocities in East Pakistan as part of Bangladesh's liberation war in 1971, Tanzania's intervention in Idi Amin's Uganda under Julius Nyerere in 1978/9 & Vietnam's ousting of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in 1978. 7/8
Western states decried all these interventions for threatening international order & stability. It's bewildering how the world has ever looked to US/Western leadership to stop mass atrocities. It doesn't square with historical record only with liberal self-delusion. 8/8
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