On March 25, ...... 1988 (20 years ago today), the 1st mass protest of the decade against the Soviet-backed regime in Czechoslovakia -- a protest known as the Candle Demonstration -- was held in Bratislava, today the capital city of the independent nation-state of Slovakia.
... 1998 (10 years ago today), at the airport in Kigali, Rwanda, U.S. President Bill Clinton spoke to survivors of the massacre that killed hundreds of thousands of Rwandans over a 90-day period in 1994 during which no other country intervened. Clinton said, in part:
Theinternational community, together with nations in Africa, must bear its share of responsibility for this tragedy, as well. We did not act quickly enough after the killing began. We should not have allowed the refugee camps to become safe haven for the killers. We did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name: genocide. ...
We owe to those who died and to those who survived who loved them, our every effort to increase our vigilance and strengthen our stand against those who would commit such atrocities in the future -- here or elsewhere.
