Exactly, mainstream media was very shallow with ground reporting of any depth ... Thanks for the movie tip: "Sometime in Spring" missed seeing it.
It seems the mainstream media failed, or more likely refused, to get to the depths of the Rwandan genocide. Movies like "Hotel Rwanda" and one I liked better, "Sometime in Spring" which showed more of the brutality, but neither of which got into the political causes at work underneath it all.
According to reports I have had for some time, both the US and France were involved stirring up the opposite sides of this tragedy. From a Global Research report from 1997, some key quotes from it:
"The militarization of Uganda was an integral part of US foreign policy. The build-up of the Ugandan UPDF Forces and of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) had been supported by the US and Britain. The buildup of the Ugandan external debt coincided chronologically with the Rwandan and Congolese civil wars. In fact, Uganda had no outstanding debt to the World Bank at the outset of its “economic recovery program”. By 1997, it owed almost 2 billion dollars solely to the World Bank."
"A similar process of financing military expenditure from the external debt had occurred in Rwanda under the Habyarimana government. In a cruel irony, both sides in the civil war were financed by the same donors institutions with the World Bank acting as a Watchdog."
"The focus of Rwandan-U.S. military discussion had shifted from human rights to how to combat an insurgency. At stake in these military operations were the extensive mining resources of Eastern and Southern Zaire including strategic reserves of cobalt — of crucial importance for the US defense industry....with several US and British mining companies including American Mineral Fields (AMF), a company headquartered in President Bill Clinton’s hometown of Hope, Arkansas."
"Rwanda was a brutal struggle for political power between the Hutu-led Habyarimana government supported by France and the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) backed financially and militarily by Washington. Ethnic rivalries were used deliberately in the pursuit of geopolitical objectives. Both the CIA and French intelligence were involved."
This discussion literally got me banned from a discussion on Linkedin about it. A gentleman, presumably a businessman, had posted about "opportunities" for business investment in Africa. I posted the above information, in addition to the Bush administration's creation of AFRICOM which I said appeared hardly "humanitarian," but rather opportunistic and exploitive. My comment sat in "review" for about a week. It was never published.
I wrote one of the participants in the discussion, a South African gentleman who kindly passed along my thoughts as he, too, was wondering why my comments were being disallowed. This incident spread to other discussions, and everything I attempted to post went to "review" and never saw the light of day.
I also found it interesting about Bill Clinton's recent remarks of his regrets he didn't send in US troops. According to Global Research, the CIA was already in there doing its covert destabilization operations, as noted above, while the French supported the "other side" and stirring up the hostilities that resulted in the deaths of a million or more Africans, not recalling the numbers reported.