Kettles of buzzards, kites, and crows boiled while we slept

It has been over a month now since I saw Hotel Rwanda, and Rwanda is still on my mind. I just can't shake the unsettling knowledge that a genocide was planned, orchestrated and executed a mere 11 years ago while the Western world's leaders did nothing but watch, wring their hands a bit and use what little mental energy they chose to dedicate to the matter to manufacture absurd justifications for failing to act and imaginary obstacles to halting the slaughter.

800,000 dead in 100 days.

8,000 a day systematically slaughtered, primarily with machetes.

333 an hour murdered without regard for their age, gender, or social status.

That's almost 6 persons every single minute of every day for over three months being killed in an organized and deliberate fashion. With machetes, not machine guns. The world could have stopped it. An armed force smaller the the NYPD could have saved hundreds of thousands.

Yet we did nothing. We barely even noticed. I guess your land has to have a bit of crude underneath its soil to make you worth saving in this world.

Here's a vivid passage from the book "We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families" by Philip Gourevitch:

Manase told me that he was surprised when he heard that "only a million people" were killed in Rwanda. "Look at how many died just here, and how many were eaten by birds," he said. It was true that the dead of the genocide had been a great boon to Rwanda's birds, but the birds had also been helpful to the living. Just as birds of prey and carrion will form a front in the air before
the advancing wall of a forest fire to feast on the parade of animals fleeing the inferno, so in Rwanda during the months of extermination the kettles of buzzards, kites, and crows that boiled over the massacre sites marked a national map against the sky, flaggin the "no-go" zones for people like Samuel and Manase who took to the bush to survive.