PBS FRONTLINE: GHOSTS OF RWANDA 2 OF 8

PBS FRONTLINE: GHOSTS OF RWANDA PART 2 OF 8

"For me, the failure of Rwanda is ten times greater than the failure of Yugoslavia," former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali tells FRONTLINE. "Because in Yugoslavia the international community was interested, was involved.

In Rwanda nobody was interested. So we have to fight two problems. The tragedy as such and the indifference of the international community."

In addition to dramatic accounts of events on the ground in Rwanda -- including the frenzied evacuation of all U.S. citizens and foreign nationals even as Rwandan citizens begged in vain for protection from the murdering mobs -- "Ghosts of Rwanda" follows the "high politics" of Washington, New York, and Europe, examining how an internal policy debate that placed national interest above humanitarian responsibilities prevented officials from responding to the Rwandan crisis.

According to Anthony Lake, President Clinton's national security adviser, there was little discussion at his level about Rwanda. "I asked some of the people from the Defense Intelligence Agency, `So what's going on? Who's killing who? I haven't seen much about this.' And they couldn't tell me," Lake recalls. "I should have reached out and said `Tell me more.' And I didn't. [I was] concentrating mostly at the time on Bosnia and Haiti."

The film also reveals in detail how the Rwandan Hutu extremists not only secretly planned and executed a detailed plan for genocide, but also calibrated their actions to ensure that the West would not intervene.

Today, many in the West still question how they could have intervened in a crisis about which they had little understanding. "This was also a lesson that I learned profoundly as a diplomat," Ambassador Prudence Bushnell, principal deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs for the Clinton administration, tells FRONTLINE.