Lots of things in the news about Tsunami deaths - Tsunami Death Toll Soars Past 117,000
BANDA ACEH, Indonesia - Pilots dropped food to Indonesian villagers stranded among bloating corpses Thursday, while police in a devastated provincial capital stripped looters of their clothing and forced them to sit on the street as a warning to others. The death toll topped 117,000, and officials warned that 5 million people lack clean water, shelter, food, sanitation and medicine.
Okay, as bad as nature did to the human race last weekend, here are some sobering numbers for you to put things into perspective:
In "Ghosts of Rwanda," airing April 1, 2004, at 9 P.M. on PBS (check local listings), FRONTLINE® and the BBC mark the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide — a state-sponsored, 100-day massacre in which some 800,000 Rwandans were methodically hunted down and murdered by Hutu extremists as the United States and international community refused to intervene. Through interviews with key government officials, diplomats, survivors of the slaughter and even some of the genocide's perpetrators, the two-hour documentary offers groundbreaking, eyewitness accounts of the genocide.
Out of a 1970 population of probably near 7,100,000 Cambodia probably lost slightly less than 4,000,000 people to war, rebellion, man-made famine, genocide, politicide, and mass murder. The vast majority, almost 3,300,000 men, women, and children (including 35,000 foreigners), were murdered within the years 1970 to 1980 by successive governments and guerrilla groups. Most of these, a likely near 2,400,000, were murdered by the communist Khmer Rouge.
Seems no matter how much of a hit nature can put on our asses, it’s no match for the horrors we can visit upon ourselves — the remarkable thing is that when moments like these happen, instead of their being an outcry and loads of support being offered up to the savaged populations, we generally keep mum.
Kind of makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
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