Matthias Hamann’s Blog

About a year ago, I bought a SSD drive to get rid of the noise which my ThinkPad’s original hard drive constantly produced during file access. While the sound issue disappeared as expected, I now faced an even bigger problem. The MasterDrive’s random write performance was an absolute nightmare. Even in every-day-situations like opening several Internet Explorer tabs at the same time massive stuttering occurred, thereby making it impossible to use the computer for periods of 10 to 30 seconds. Moreover, copying large files to the SSD rendered the computer totally unusable until the process was finished. Given the fact that I paid almost 400 Euros for the drive, such a behavior was totally unacceptable and I even thought about using my old hard drive again.

In July, I was hoping to fix the stuttering issue by installing a new firmware upgrade, provided on Super Talent’s website. So I went through the arduous process of backing up my drive, upgrading the firmware and restoring the backup as the upgrade needs to format the whole SSD. But when I rebooted, several Windows programs still reported the old firmware version and the stuttering hadn’t vanished at all.

Therefore, I was rather skeptical when I found out last week that there was another firmware upgrade available. But as the constant stuttering was driving me nuts, I decided to give it one more try. I performed the above-mentioned procedure once again and … the stuttering was almost gone! Now I can even copy files and use my computer at the same time, which is something that I couldn’t dream of before the firmware upgrade. Except in rare conditions, the SSD now works like my old notebook hard drive, only a little faster and almost noiseless.

So to all of those out there who suffer from the same annoying stuttering issue of their SSD, I strongly advise to upgrade the drive’s firmware. In case of my MasterDrive OX the current version number is 090508s.

I just read a really interesting review about the previously mentioned book Shake Hands with the Devil by Roméo Dallaire, in which the critic states that he is sick of the former colonial powers being blamed for everything which goes wrong in Africa. He asks why everyone emphasizes the responsibility of the First World as if the African people were children and didn’t have any free will or moral sense themselves. The reviewer summarizes his criticism by demanding to hold “those who actually slaughter people” liable rather than the developed nations, whose “colonial politics can’t serve as an excuse forever”.

While it is very tempting to accept this position and forget about the African conflicts, saying “Phew! I knew that I am not responsible! After all, how could I be? I didn’t do anything.”, I am afraid the reviewer misses a crucial point in his reasoning. Let’s imagine you are witnessing a situation where someone tries to kill innocent women and children using a machete, inter alia, because your ancestors told his ancestors that they belong to a superior race, thereby seeking to consolidate their power. Is that your business after so many years have passed since those dark days of colonialism? Let’s go on to imagine that you are comparably rich as well as armed to the teeth because of some past period commonly known as the Cold War. Even if you are not directly responsible for the killer’s actions, how couldn’t you feel obliged to stop him? For example, shortly after the Rwandan Genocide had begun, heavily armed foreign troops (360 US marines landed in Burundi, 400 French paratroopers in Kigali, etc.) were transferred to the region – to evacuate foreigners and then get the hell out of there!

The reviewer of General Dallaire’s book is perfectly right when he points out the guilt of those who commit unspeakable crimes against humanity. But the conclusion he draws is utterly wrong as sometimes you can get your hands stained with blood even without taking them out of your pockets…

I am currently reading the book Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda by now-retired Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire of the Canadian Forces. It chronicles the fateful months of Dallaire’s tour as Force Commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) in 1993-1994, during which he witnessed the 1994 Rwandan Genocide.

Between April and June 1994, an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed in just 100 days, typically by using machetes and rifles. Most of the dead were Tutsi, who died by the hands of Hutu militias (the notorious Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi). The genocide began when Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down above Kigali airport on April 6, 1994. General Dallaire, who was put in charge of a United Nations peacekeeping force during this 1994 genocide, called for 5,000 soldiers to permit orderly elections and the return of the refugees. The soldiers were never supplied and the killing began.

UNAMIR was hampered from the outset by resistance from numerous members of the United Nations Security Council from becoming deeply involved first in the Arusha process and then the genocide. Only the former colonial power Belgium, which had originally introduced passports containing the owner’s ethnic background (Twa, Hutu or Tutsi) in 1933/34, asked for a strong UNAMIR mandate, but after the murder of the ten Belgian peacekeepers protecting the Prime Minister in early April, Belgium pulled out of the peacekeeping mission.

The UN and its member states appeared largely detached from the realities on the ground. In the midst of the crisis, Dallaire was instructed to focus UNAMIR on only evacuating foreign nationals from Rwanda. The change in orders led Belgian peacekeepers to abandon a technical school filled with 2,000 refugees, while Hutu militants waited outside, drinking beer and chanting “Hutu Power.” After the Belgians left, the militants entered the school and massacred those inside, including hundreds of children. Four days later the Security Council voted to reduce UNAMIR from its authorized strength of 2,500 personnel to 260 men.

Following the withdrawal of the Belgian forces, Lt. General Roméo Dallaire consolidated his contingent of Canadian, Ghanaian, and Dutch soldiers in urban areas and focused on providing areas of “safe control”. His actions directly saved the lives of 20,000 Tutsis. The administrative head of UNAMIR, former Cameroonian foreign minister Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh, has been criticized for downplaying the significance of Dallaire’s reports and for holding close ties to the Hutu militant elite.

As the United Nations Operation in Somalia II (UNOSOM II), which is well-known for the Battle of Mogadishu in October 1993, portrayed in the movie Black Hawk Down (2001), led to news footage of dead US troops being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, the US government was reluctant to involve itself in the “local conflict” in Rwanda and refused to label the killings as “genocide”, a decision which then-President Bill Clinton later came to regret in a Frontline television interview. In the interview Clinton stated that he believes if he had sent 5,000 U.S. peacekeepers, more than 500,000 lives could have been saved.

The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) battalion of Tutsi rebels stationed in Kigali under the Arusha Accords came under attack immediately after the shooting down of the president’s plane. The battalion fought its way out of Kigali and joined up with RPF units in the north. The resulting civil war raged concurrently with the genocide for two months. The victory of the RPF rebels and overthrow of the Hutu regime ended the genocide in July 1994, 100 days after it started.

Approximately two million Hutus, participants in the genocide, and the bystanders, with anticipation of Tutsi retaliation, fled from Rwanda, to Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda, and for the most part Zaire. Thousands of them died in epidemics of diseases common to the squalor of refugee camps, such as cholera and dysentery. The United States staged the Operation Support Hope airlift from July to September 1994 to stabilize the situation in the camps. After the victory of the RPF, the size of UNAMIR (henceforth called UNAMIR 2) was increased to its full strength, remaining in Rwanda until March 8, 1996.

There is an outstanding Canadian documentary film called Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire (2004), which lets audiences revisit the siege of Rwanda through the eyes of General Dallaire and describes his attempts to prevent hell on earth. Thankfully, someone uploaded it to YouTube (click here to open the complete playlist):

Warning: This video contains disturbing footage from the Rwandan Genocide in 1994.

[Sources: Wikipedia, Shake Hands with the Devil (book and documentary film), et cetera.]

Most of you probably know the song “I Shot the Sheriff”, which was written and performed by Bob Marley and peaked at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 as a cover version by Eric Clapton. When my radio alarm clock woke me up this morning playing that song, I instantly asked myself a question which I have been asking myself so many times before: “If it was neither Bob Marley nor Eric Clapton, who shot the sheriff, then whodunit?” A quick search on the internet revealed that there are numerous speculations about the deputy being killed by Dick Cheney in a hunting accident. But why was Bob Marley a suspect then? Another possible suspect would be Lee Harvey Oswald, given the killing of the deputy occurred before 1963. This wouldn’t rule out Marley and Clapton as suspects because both were born in 1945. Depending on the location of the murder, it might also have been the deed of the infamous Zodiac Killer, who operated in Northern California in the late 1960s.

I sincerely hope that with the advent of DNA profiling the true killer will surface one day and be brought to justice!

While I was just contemplating on how to attract new readers to this blog, a lucky twist of fate produced a simple yet brilliant solution: PORN! Tonight, the widely respected German TV station ZDF broadcast a documentary called "Generation Porno" as part of their 37 Grad series. And as according to the Internet Pornography Statistics "25% of total search engine requests" are porn-related, this is obviously a great topic for one of my first posts. Now you might accuse me of choosing traffic over content. And you would be absolutely right. But as I mentioned the four magic letters P-O-R-N already four times in the last few lines, I can be sure that you will keep on reading this post anyhow, no matter how much its quality will deteriorate with each new sentence.

So what was this ominous documentary film all about? As the title suggests, it dealt with the influence of internet porn on contemporary adolescents. To give this young generation a face, the ZDF reporters chose four teenagers around the age of 14 whose IQ seemed to be in a neck-and-neck race with room temperature. This turned a serious topic into a chliché-ridden example of bad journalism, which was at best unintentionally funny. As it is already after midnight, I’ll leave it to you whether you want to watch the complete documentary on ZDF’s website or visit your favorite porn website instead…