Part of the reason that the United Nations could not stop the extreme Rwandan murderers was that its members didn’t accurately perceive the threat, then the actuality of genocide. This may have been caused by the fact that the Hutu and the Tutsi had been involved in a civil war since 1990, and the killings were shrugged off as war casualties. The Rwandan Patriotic Front, or RPF, was a rebel army of exiled Tutsi, and were fighting against the Hutu government in place, run by President Habyarimana. Canadian Major General Romeo Dallaire was the commander of the United Nations’ peacekeeping force in Rwanda. This force was called the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda, or UNAMIR. The United Nations and General Dallaire both thought (at first) that the killings were politically motivated, not genocide. On April 6th, 1994, the day President Habyarimana’s plane was shot down and blamed on the RPF and Tutsi were blamed for this. However, Habyarimana’s successors, who went on to carry out the genocide that Habyarimana had helped to plan, had carefully hatched out a plot. First, they killed the moderate Hutu people who would oppose the killings and stood in their way. Then they went on to kill any and every Tutsi they could find. So the United Nations did have a small period of time in which they could claim to have been confused over whether or not it was a genocide occurring, if one ignores the warnings they had received earlier. But ignored warnings were not the only way in which the United Nations inappropriately viewed the situation in Rwanda. L.R. Melvern is an investigative journalist who researched the Rwandan genocide and interviewed many members of the United Nations, governments, spectators and victims. “True, there was a civil war, but preoccupation with that blinded most commentators, governments, the UN Secretariat and Security Council to the fact of the genocidal killing perpetrated by one of the parties to the civil war,” Melvern said. The member states of the United Nations had blurred views and attitudes towards the genocide. “Burundi had just blown up, and 50,000 had been killed in just a few days. So when the [presidential] plane went down, we actually expected around 50,000 plus dead. Can you imagine having that expectation?” stated Dallaire. The United Nations shouldn’t have been aiming for less than 50,000 dead. They should have been aiming for none. Even the Secretary General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, had said that, “Rwanda was considered a second-class operation; because it was a small country, we had been able to maintain a kind of status quo.” So does this mean that the 800,000 people being killed were second class? This is a violation of the Universal Charter of Human Rights that the United Nations itself created.
The limits imposed by the United Nations on the mission in Rwanda were partly to blame for its failure. A Chapter VI mission is meant to be a pacific settlement of disputes. In it, the United Nations (under Articles 33-38 of the Charter of the United Nations) may “recommend appropriate procedures or methods of adjustment” in a dispute. The decision to make UNAMIR a Chapter VI mission was acceptable before the genocide began, but the fact that it remained so until it was too late is not. The decision to leave the Rwandan massacres under this chapter seems ridiculous considering the fact that the preamble of the Charter of the United Nations states: “We the peoples of the United Nations determined… to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.” The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the United Nations’ definition of human rights. In it, “the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and… have pledged themselves to achieve… the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Furthermore, it clearly states under Article 3 that “everyone has the right to life” and in Article 28 that “Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized”. Therefore, the killings were violations of human rights, and the UN should have intervened in a manner that would prove the Charter of the United Nations true. It was a major mistake to create the mission under a Chapter VI mandate. Gerard Prunier, an Africa scholar and journalist, even defines UNAMIR as “the powerless UN ‘military’ force which watched the genocide without being allowed to lift a finger”. “I spent most of my time fighting the heavy mechanical UN system with all its stupidity… Seeing to the most immediate needs stopped us from seeing what was reserved for us in the future,” said General Dallaire. Instead of fighting against the leaders who were encouraging and demanding genocide, Dallaire had to fight his own people, the United Nations.
A lack of funds and supplies severely limited the amount of peacekeeping that could be accomplished in Rwanda. The peacekeeping mission sent to Rwanda was created to be as uninvolved as possible: few soldiers, as the United Nations member states apparently cared more for the risk of losing a few of their men than for the 800,000 lives being extinguished right under their noses. The cash flow to the mission was minimal, as were the weapons. The United Nations put more effort into making the mission as cheap as possible and minimizing the risks than they did into actually creating a peace where people were not murdered because of their ethnicity, something they could not help. Dallaire spent about seventy percent of his time battling logistics; time, which could’ve been spent saving lives. The mission was equipped with 300 hand-me-down vehicles from the Cambodia Mission, out of which only 80 were usable. He ran out of medical supplies in March, but UN headquarters claimed there was no cash for re-supply. Spare parts, batteries, ammunition-all could rarely be found or bought. Only Belgium, France, Bangladesh, and Nairobi out of all the member states sent in soldiers or supplies, so UNAMIR was severely under-funded.
Part of the excessive cautiousness which genocide leaders took advantage of was due to the memories of a recent peacekeeping attempt in Somalia, in which United States soldiers were killed. A 90 minute operation to capture the Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid ended up lasting seventeen hours, leaving eighteen Americans dead and eighty four wounded. They were ambushed by Somali men, woman and children with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades. The United Nations also was caught up in the Arusha Accords, which they had believed were a success. The Arusha Accords took thirteen months to negotiate, and was a peace agreement between the Rwandan government and the RPF. Both parties had agreed to create a broad-based traditional government until a democratically elected government was created, which should take no more than twenty-two months. The Accords also called for disarmament and demobilization. This was not done, as the Hutu Power groups actually purchased and flew in by the planeload over eighty-five tons guns, grenades, and other munitions. In addition, they imported 518,000 machetes that they then distributed to the Hutu population, one machete for every third adult male. In fact, the general consensus outside the United Nations was that the Rwandan government had simply agreed to the Accords with no intention of carrying them out. Gerard Prunier’s opinion was that “President Habyarimana had consented to sign the Arusha peace agreement not as a genuine gesture marking the turning-over of a new political leaf and the beginning of democratisation in Rwanda, but as a tactical move calculated to buy time, shore up the contradictions of the various segments of the opposition and look good in the eyes of the foreign donors.” But Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the Secretary General of the UN during the genocide, said that, “They were negotiating, they’d accepted the new peace project, so we were under the impression that everything would be solved easily.” His view proved to be very inaccurate.
A major reason, perhaps the best reason, for why the United Nations couldn’t stop the genocide, were the excessive amounts of ignored warnings. If they had been considered when they arrived months and even years before the genocide, would be much more useful then they are now in retrospect. Even in 1964, there was genocide occurring, and the Fabian Society of London (an intellectual group that discusses and publishes socialist ideas) noticed, and took the cause to heart. They published a pamphlet called Massacre in Rwanda, making a point that the Tutsi’s past conduct and attitudes didn’t call for annihilation as a people. When civil war between the Hutu and Tutsi broke out in 1990, there were increasing amounts of warnings, with correlating evidence that large-scale massacres could be in the near future. In January 1994, a Hutu informant high up in the Rwandan government contacted Dallaire and told him about the training of militias (the example he gave was that his men could kill 1,000 people in twenty minutes) and the arming of the Hutu population, as well as the arms caches throughout Rwanda. Dallaire sent a telegram back to New York with all of the aforementioned information, adding in that he was planning a raid on the weapons caches. New York wrote back that he was not to take any action, and “we wish to stress, however, that the overriding consideration is the need to avoid entering into a course of action that might lead to the use of force and unanticipated repercussions.” Dallaire’s warning had been firmly put down, and ignored. Another ignored warning (of sorts) was the black box retrieved from the plane Habyarimana was in when it was shot down. The box was retrieved by the Air Safety Office at UNAMIR, then sent to New York, where, instead of being opened (apparently a costly process), it was instead placed in a filing cabinet and not reported to superiors. This was not only a missed possibility of a prediction of what was to come and how to deter it.
The United Nations structure itself is also partly to blame. It is not efficient in coming to decisions, and there is inner turmoil. The UN hadn’t even sent Dallaire to Rwanda prepared. Major Beardsley, Dallaire’s executive assistant, said “We flew to Rwanda with a Michelin road map, a copy of the Arusha agreement, and that was it. We were under the impression that the situation was quite straightforward: There was one cohesive government side and one cohesive rebel side, and they had come together to sign the peace agreement and had then requested that we come in to help them implement it.”
Also, how odd that none of the United Nations officials at the headquarters in New York gave Dallaire the International Commission of Investigation reports of the malignancy in Rwanda by. One would think that the United Nations would brief their representation in Rwanda as fully as possible. Samantha Power, an expert on genocide, remarked that, “Diplomats are so conditioned to be diplomats that they consistently offer conventional responses in the face of unconventional horrors. The United Nations consists of diplomats who attempt to resolve every issue by talking it over, even when that simply will not work. In addition to this fault, the United Nations is set up as a faultily structured system. The Security Council is the highest political body of the UN, and is made up of many member states, as well as the Permanent Five. Any one country of the Permanent Five (U.S, Britain, France, China, and Russia) has the power to veto the entire rest of the United Nations system. In Rwanda’s case, the United States didn’t want to get involved, (the compassionate Clinton administration insisted that the UN “learn to say no” to chancy or costly missions) and therefore, UNAMIR was almost not created at all. Also, the United Nations doesn’t have any funds or soldiers of its own, only what its’ member states wish to contribute. The United States provides 30% of the United Nations’ budget, and since America didn’t get involved, neither did its funds. Even Kofi Annan, the current Secretary-General of the UN, says, “the United Nations and its members lacked the political will and resources to prevent or stop genocide”, admitting to two of the faults of the organization of which he is the head. And Boutros-Ghali pointed out that “U.N. internal politics were a factor in the failure to act.” To sum it up in the words of L.R. Melvern, “What happened in Rwanda showed that despite the creation of an organization set up to prevent a repetition of genocide – for the UN is central to this task – it failed to do so, even when the evidence was indisputable.”
Dallaire said, “Many fine words have been said by all, including the Security Council, [but] the tangible effort…has been totally, completely ineffective.” The peacekeeping mission in Rwanda was most definitely a failure, but not because of lack of effort or heart on behalf of the blue berets (U.N. peacekeepers) there. The reasons for the failure lie in the United Nations itself, and can be traced back to its headquarters. The decision to issue only a Chapter VI mandate, which was peacekeeping without military involvement or enforcement, stopped progress from being made. The supplies and funds donated were a bare minimum, the perception of the crisis was inaccurate; these facts, as well as the memories of the (brief, and supposed) success of the Arusha Accords and the failure to successfully handle other African crises such as Somalia caused the UN to hesitate and proceed with more caution than was necessary, and, as we see now, prudent.
WORKS CITED
• “The Few Who Stayed; Defying Genocide in Rwanda” American RadioWorks May 2, 2004. http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/rwanda/segb7.html
• “Leave None to Tell the Story” Human Rights Watch, April 28, 2004. http://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/rwanda/Geno1-3-01.htm
• Mamdani, Mahmood. When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton: Princeton University Press 2001
• Melvern, L.R. A People Betrayed; The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide. New York: ZedBooks Ltd 2000
• Power, Samantha. A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. New York: Basic Books 2002
• Prunier, Gerard. The Rwanda Crisis: History of A Genocide. New York: Columbia University Press 1995
• “Triumph of Evil” PBS Frontline: Ghosts of Rwanda, April 6, 2004. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ghosts/
• “U.N discovers ‘foul up’ in Rwanda Probe” CNN.com, April 8, 2004
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/africa/03/11/un.rwanda.probe.ap/index.html
• “United Nations” United Nations, June 1, 2004
http://www.un.org
• http://history1900s.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.reliefweb.int%2Flibrary%2Fnordic%2Findex.html
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