We've had similar problems with the Eugenics Wars being a huge event in the mid 90s, and yet also having VOY depict a 1996 that was pretty contemporary for story reasons. Sometimes the writing is simply inconsistent.
I remember reading that the Eugenics Wars were largely concentrated in North Africa, Southern Europe, Balkans area.
The US was largely unaffected by what was happening with the Eugenics War.
IRL, the world was a mess around the 1990's after the fall of the USSR (1988-1991):
During 1990-1991, the US/NATO was involved in the Gulf War when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait along with the after math & peace keeping patrols after the fact when the US/NATO smashed Saddam Hussein's military.
Around that time, Bill Clinton had the US/NATO focused on the Yugoslav Wars & taking down Slobodan Milošević, starting around 1995 with Air Strikes. Before then, the world was sitting on the sidelines as the Yugoslav Wars was going on.
In between 1991 and 1995, the US failed to intervene in Rwanda to save lives:
During that time, Bill Clinton as PotUS
failed to stop the genocide in Rwanda and nearly a million ethnic Tutsis were exterminated by Hutu Extremists
Clinton’s envoys in Rwanda were clear-eyed about the nature of what was unfolding in the hours and days following the April 6, 1994, shoot-down of a plane carrying Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana and his Burundian counterpart, according to the review’s transcript. That set the stage for the mass slaughter of nearly a million ethnic Tutsi Rwandans, and some moderate Hutus, by extremists among the country’s majority-Hutu population.
As the killing began, terrified Rwandans fled their homes for safety, to the grounds of U.S. Ambassador David Rawson’s residence. At one stage, a small child seeking protection in the ambassador’s backyard was shot and killed, Leader recalled.
Failure up the diplomatic chain prevented the US from reacting sooner.
On March 25, 1998, President Bill Clinton expressed regret for failing to halt genocide in Rwanda, saying that he didn’t “fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which [Rwandans] were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror.”
But U.S. officials in Rwanda had been warned more than a year before the 1994 slaughter began that Hutu extremists were contemplating the extermination of ethnic Tutsis, according to a review panel’s newly released transcript and declassified State Department documents obtained by Foreign Policy from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
An August 1992 diplomatic cable to Washington, written by Joyce Leader, the U.S. Embassy’s deputy chief of mission in Kigali, cited warnings that Hutu extremists with links to Rwanda’s ruling party were believed to be advocating the extermination of ethnic Tutsis. On the morning the killing began in April 1994, there was little doubt about what was happening in Rwanda.
“We had a very good sense of what was taking place,” Leader told an unprecedented 2014 gathering of former Rwandan officials and international policymakers who managed the response to the world’s worst mass murder since the Holocaust.
“It was clear that a systematic killing of Tutsi was taking place in neighborhoods.”
Senior ethnic Hutu officials who favored reconciling with Tutsi rebels refused to join forces with the extremists carrying out the genocide and were also hunted down and murdered, she said.
Leader’s cable was part of the discussion of a three-day review last year sponsored by the Holocaust Museum’s Center for the Prevention of Genocide and The Hague Institute for Global Justice. A transcript of the review’s findings — which runs more than 240 pages long, plus a 32-page executive summary — was provided to FP ahead of its public release at 11am on Monday, April 6, the 21st anniversary of the start of the Rwandan genocide
Given all the crazy stuff that was happening world wide in the 1990's, I wouldn't be surprised if the Eugenics Wars, which was supposedly mostly a secret war, out of mass media's eyes, was largely forgotten for quite a while or known to very few people.
