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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.
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Erika
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