Bill Clinton: “I think we could have prevented a significant amount of it. You know, it takes--the thing about the Rwanda massacre that…”

“I think we could have prevented a significant amount of it. You know, it takes--the thing about the Rwanda massacre that was so stunning is it was done mostly with very primitive weapons, not modern mass-killing instruments, and yet it happened in a matter of just a few weeks, as you know. And I want to give time for others to ask their questions, but let me say I have thought about this a great deal, more than you might imagine. And we went to Kigali when we were in Africa, and we talked to a number of the survivors, including a woman who woke up to find her husband and six children all hatcheted to death, hacked to death. And she, by a miracle, lived and was devoting herself to the work of helping people like you put your lives back together. One of the things that made it, I think, more likely that we would act in Kosovo, and eventually in Bosnia, is that we had a mechanism through which we could act, where people could join together in a hurry, like with NATO. And one of the things that we are trying to do is to work with other African countries now on something called the Africa Crisis Response Initiative, where we send American soldiers to work with African countries to develop the ability to work with other militaries to try to head these kinds of things off and to do it in a hurry. I can only tell you that I will do my best to make sure that nothing like this happens again in Africa. I do not think the United States can take the position that we only care about these sorts of things if they happen in Europe. I don't feel that way. And I think that we will, next time, be far more likely to have the means to act in Africa than we had last time, in a quicker way. [An Internet questioner asked about the definition of human rights, and the First Lady pointed out that the United Nations had adopted a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Mr. Wiesel commented that human rights organizations had proliferated because people had lost confidence in the ability of government to ensure those rights. He then suggested that the worst violation of human rights was humiliation, such as by poverty, disease, or injustice.]”