Justify My War: Why Clinton Eyes Haiti’s Drug Trade and Ignores Guatemala’s
While Bill Clinton’s White House invokes Haitian drug trafficking as a key rationale for invasion, it is continuing the Bush administration policy of virtually ignoring…
Posts
The Horror: Rwanda, a history lesson
/in The New Republic/by Frank SmythFor most of the world, Rwanda’s dark spasm of violence seemed to come out of nowhere. It didn’t. Though the bloodiness of the killing fields is unprecedented, the country, at least in its post-colonial existence, has been subject to a number of massacres: some took place…
Rwanda’s French Connection
/in The Village Voice/by Frank Smyth“We have eight million people here,” an aid worker told me last June in Rwanda, “and all you Americans care about are those damn gorillas.” I was in Rwanda investigating weapons trafficking for the Human Rights Watch/Arms Project, but I couldn’t argue with the man, a Tutsi. Almost the only news reaching the West last […]
Why Hutu and Tutsi Are Killing Each Other: A Rwanda Primer
/in The Baltimore Sun/by Frank SmythRwanda’s Tutsi kings ruled over Hutu peasant farmers for three centuries. But in 1959, the Hutu finally overthrew the Tutsi monarchy. From then until President Juvenal Habyarimana’s death two weeks ago, Hutu have ruled the country. But today, Tutsi guerrillas of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) are fighting their way toward power. If the RPF […]
Box of Pain
/in The New Republic/by Frank SmythWhat does the Grateful Dead, America’s most popular live musical act, a band whose devoted following helped it sell 1.8 million concert tickets and gross $47 million last year, have to do with mandatory minimums? Quite a bit. Five years ago, no more than 100 Deadheads were believed to have been in jail. But today…
Official Sources, Western Diplomats and Other Voices from the Mission
/in Columbia Journalism Review/by Frank SmythOn the post-cold war era, ethnic rivalry may have replaced ideology as the most likely cause of conflict, but while all else changes one journalistic habit picked up during the past four decades will, in all likelihood, persist — the habit of relying heavily on the mission, as the U.S. embassy is known, for assessments and information. In an increasingly unfamiliar world, in fact, the temptation to do so will be even stronger…
Guatemalan Army Crushes Land Protest
/in The Christian Science Monitor/by Frank SmythSan Jorge la Laguna — Security forces have ignored the exhortations of Roman Catholic Church officials and other mediators in a local land dispute here and violently put down a two-week-old indigenous peasant occupation of disputed land. Mediators were still hoping to find a peaceful resolution when military riot police attacked on Saturday.