Derek's Personal Reflection

The Declaration of Human Rights obviously does not mean anything to certain people in the world. For example, the Rwandan Genocide showed us that rights could be stripped away from a race and be treated as inferior. The United Nations did not even step in until after the Genocide had ended after countless bloodshed. If there is no one to reinforce the Declaration of Human Rights, no one will follow them. They are ignored. This relates to the Holocaust because the same occured, genocide and attempted extermination of a certain race by a stronger nation. In Germany, the Nazis beleived that the Jews were responsible for their downfall in WWI and exacted revenge by almost erasing their entire population from the face of the earth. In Rwanda, the Hutus attacked the Tutsis in beleif that the Tutsis wanted to take over but were only trying to express their right as a Rwandan citizen. In both cases, the innocent were violently harassed.

The Rwandan Genocide denied this major principle of individuals. Individuals did not matter to Hutus militia groups. They killed and and pillaged the Tutsis not thinking of humanism. They were inferior, a lower class of life, and subhuman to them. The Hutus killed because of race and appearance. That is why they killed 800,000 to 1,000,000 people in the hundred day Rwandan Genocide.

I feel terrible and almost disgusted of what had happened in the Kingdom of Rwanda. The Hutus violence towards the Tutsis was extremely un-called for. The victims of the Genocide, mainly the Tutsis, were only expressing their opinion to live in the Rwanda Kingdom. I feel extremely bad for the victims. They were innocent. The victims did not deserve any discrimination or death. The perpetrators are forever guilty. They killed thousands in cold blood relentlessly. I cannot begin to imagine this. The leadership of this Genocide surprised me even more. The government had supported the militia group. I was dumbfounded at how the Government had not taken a more peaceful way to solve this. Instead, they listened to a militia who had no evidence that the Tutsis were going to take over their kingdom. They gave weapons and helped build training camps. The government supported the Genocide and mass killings. They should also be punished for not seeing anything wrong with what the Hutus had been doing. The Hutus should be severly punished for their unspeakable atrocity.

Yes the peacekeepers by the United Nations are acceptable to me. If two groups of people get into a fight and both equally hate each other, who will stop them if there is no winner? There will just be more endless killing until each side is completely dead. This is why we need someone to intervene if the situation gets out of control. The fighting will not stop unless someone steps in between to break it up. Even if the sovereign countries do not want the peacekeepers help, we can judge on how bad the situation is and decide if we should make and effort to bring peace.

I would support the United Nations to step into the United States if they had a legitimate reason. The only time they could step in is if we had broken the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. If there was a genocide inside the United States that we as a government could not control, I myself, would look for outside help such as the United Nations. This is why the world had created the United Nations in the first place. They must enter other countries in order to keep the peace if the country could not solve their problem or the country itself had broken human rights like Germany and the Holocaust.