Rwanda

The UN convention on genocide has been on paper for sixty years, but never put into practice. In 2005, the UN adopted a new idea, the responsibility to protect (R2P). America Abroad traces the evolution and history of R2P and visits the Democratic Republic of the Congo where years of internal conflict and proxy wars brings questions about the limits of R2P and the international community's willingness and ability to protect civilians. 

Does the international community have a moral obligation to intervene more aggressively in Syria? We take a look back at past conflicts - Rwanda, Bosnia, Iraq and Libya - through the eyes of those who both analyzed and experienced these crises first-hand. We also hear from Syrian refugees in Lebanon on the question of Western intervention. 

Six decades after the world community vowed "never again" to repeat the horrors of the Holocaust, and 12 years after the genocide in Rwanda, the situation in the Darfur region of Sudan is being called "a genocide in slow motion." Over the past three years, more than 200,000 Sudanese have been killed and over two million have lost their homes. The crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan has reached a level of violence that has forced people to utter the word “genocide” once again.