Rwanda ‘Genocide’ on Proscribed List

The Clinton Administration has instructed its spokesmen not to describe the mass killings in Rwanda as “genocide” in order to avoid moral pressure to stop the bloodletting, the New York Times reported in Friday’s edition.

As many as 500,000 people are believed to have been slaughtered since early April in Rwanda--most of them members of the minority Tutsi tribe--by militias of the majority Hutus.

The paper said the Administration is unwilling to compare the massacres with notorious previous campaigns of genocide--such as the killing of as many as 1 million Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge.

To prevent such comparisons, the paper said the State Department and the National Security Council have drafted memos instructing spokesmen to say merely that “acts of genocide may have occurred.”