The response of the international community to the 1994 Genocide against Tutsi in Rwanda has been the subject of significant criticism. During a period of around 100 days, between 7 April and 15 July, an estimated 1,100,000 Rwandans, mostly Tutsi and moderate Hutu, were murdered by Interahamwe militias.
A United Nations peacekeeping force – UNAMIR – had been stationed in Rwanda since October 1993, but once the genocide began, the UN and the Belgian Government chose to withdraw troops rather than reinforce the contingent and deploy a larger force. The piecemeal peacekeeping force on the ground was both unable and unauthorised to make any attempt at stopping the violence, and their role was reduced to seeking a political agreement between the Rwandan Patriotic Front and the Interim Hutu Power government, as well as protecting selected havens for Tutsi who were seeking refuge, such as Amahoro Stadium and the Hôtel des Mille Collines. Critics blame the inaction of the UN in the face of genocide as responsible for much of the damage.
Background
Particularly since the era of Belgian colonialism, where previously fluid ethnic identities were crystallised through administrative selection and the institution of identity cards, divisions between the Hutu majority and the Tutsi minority had been the source of frequently violent political tensions. Shortly before independence, the Tutsi ruling class instituted by the Belgians was overthrown by the Hutu revolution in 1959. Over the following decades, multiple instances of ethnically-motivated pogroms and massacres took place, and as a result many Tutsi – over 300,000 – fled Rwanda to neighbouring countries.
In 1990, a group of 4,000 Rwandan exiles, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, advanced into Rwanda from Uganda, commencing the Rwandan Civil War. A peace agreement, the Arusha Accords, was signed in 1993, bringing most of the fighting to an end. The RPF were given positions in a Broad-Based Transitional Government (BBTG) and in the national army. To monitor the peace agreement, the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), a peacekeeping force, arrived in the country and the RPF were given a base in the national parliament building in Kigali, for use during the setting up of the BBTG.
On 6 April 1994, President Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down over Kigali, killing him, as well as the President of Burundi, Cyprien Ntaryamira. The event served as a catalyst for mass killings of Tutsi and moderate Hutu by the Interahamwe – militias supported by politicians and other key figures who were part of the Hutu Power movement.
The movement recruited and pressured Hutu civilians to arm themselves with machetes, clubs, blunt objects, and other weapons and encouraged them to rape, maim, and kill their Tutsi neighbors and to destroy or steal their property. The RPF restarted its offensive soon after Habyarimana's assassination. It rapidly seized control of the northern part of the country and captured Kigali about 100 days later in mid-July, bringing an end to the genocide. The overall death toll of the Genocide is disputed, but most scholars estimate between 500,000 and 800,000 Tutsi deaths, and up to 1.1 million overall deaths.
Early warnings Several warnings made to UN peacekeepers and international observers went unheeded. As Rwanda expert Alison Des Forges put it, in her report for Human Rights Watch, "the preparations for violence took place in full view of a U.N. peacekeeping force".
On 11 January 1994, General Roméo Dallaire, commander of UNAMIR, sent his "Genocide Fax" to UN Headquarters. The fax stated that Dallaire was in contact with "a top level trainer in the cadre of Interhamwe-armed [sic] militia of MRND." The informant—now known to be Mathieu Ngirumpatse's chauffeur, Kassim Turatsinze, a.k.a. "Jean-Pierre"—claimed to have been ordered to register all Tutsi in Kigali. According to the memo, Turatsinze suspected that a genocide against the Tutsis was being planned, and he said that "in 20 minutes his personnel could kill up to 1000 Tutsis".
Following this, Dallaire sent further warnings, and pleas for action from the Security Council, five times: January 22, February 3, February 15, February 27 and March 13. Dallaire's reports were widely ignored by key officials, and his requests for a broader interpretation of the mandate and for troop reinforcements were all rejected. His request to raid weapons caches, the locations of which had been revealed by his informant, was turned down by the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), which felt that Dallaire was exceeding his mandate and had to be kept "on a leash".
Officials from within the UN Secretariat have testified that there was a concerted effort to minimise reports of imminent tragedy in Rwanda by the office of Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Michael Barnett, who was a senior official at the UN at that time, has provided evidence that the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) failed to pass on to the Security Council information that could have bolstered a case for intervention. The January 11 fax, for instance, "was not delivered to the council members nor were its contents communicated" according to researchers at Human Rights Watch. According to Barnett, UN inaction stemmed from its desire not to get involved in a potentially-risky operation for public relations that could damage the prospects for future peace-building operations since 18 UN troops had recently been killed in Somalia, despite the capacity of UN troops to save thousands of lives. "For many at the UN", Barnett wrote, the moral compass pointed "away from and not toward Rwanda."
Instead, the international community resorted to focusing on democratic channels to prevent a crisis from unfolding in Rwanda, and devoted its efforts to the implementation of the Arusha Accords and the creation and maintenance of a transitional government. Only Belgium took an active interest in expanding the mandate of UNAMIR - thanks in large part to their concerns over their large contingent of troops stationed as part of the mission. Even they, Des Forges writes, "failed to invest the energy needed to make the other powers respond". Throughout diplomatic exchanges in this period, French diplomats were supportive of the Rwandan regime, and continued to provide military support to their army, even while they were certainly aware of the preparations for massacres.
International response After first failing to heed the warnings of organised mass killings, there is an overwhelming consensus that the international community then failed to recognise that genocide was occurring, delayed and equivocated over the use of the term "genocide", and finally, once the fact that genocide was occurring was beyond any doubt, failed to take any meaningful action to stop the killings.
United Nations
Since the deployment of UNAMIR, the UN Secretariat, the DPKO, and the Security Council had strictly limited the mandate of the peacekeepers and ensured that it was interpreted as narrowly as possible, in order to avoid any confrontations between peacekeepers and Rwandans. The shooting down of the Presidential plane and the explosion of violence that followed it did not change this approach - hours after the plane went down, General Dallaire pled with DPKO in New York, imploring them to "Give me the means and I can do more" - to which he was told "nobody in New York was interested".
Among the first people killed in the Genocide, early on the morning of 7 April, were ten Belgian members of the 2nd Commando Battalion, the Paracommando Regiment operating as part of UNAMIR and protecting then-Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana. These troops were murdered after handing over their weapons to Rwandan government troops. They were advised to do so by their battalion commander who was unclear on the legal issues with authorising them to defend themselves, even though they had already been under fire for approximately two hours.
UN Peacekeepers felt mostly paralyzed by directives from New York. Neutrality was emphasised, with the risk of military retaliation - particularly after the Somalia experience - at the forefront of the minds of diplomats and UN staff alike. Some soldiers "believed that there were virtually no circumstances in which they could legitimately fire their weapons". The Guardian stated that viewing a woman "being hauled along the road by a young man with a machete", ...none of the troops moved. 'It's not our mandate,' said one, leaning against his jeep as he watched the condemned woman, the driving rain splashing at his blue United Nations badge. The 3,000 foreign troops now in Rwanda are no more than spectators to the savagery which aid workers say has seen the massacre of 15,000 people. The scale of the massacres was quickly evident to troops on the ground. "Within five days" of the downing of Habyarimana's plane, "Dallaire clearly understood that Hutu extremists were carrying out ethnic cleansing in Kigali and elsewhere" wrote Michael Barnett. Dallaire lobbied for an immediate expansion of UNAMIR to halt these killings, requesting 5,000 troops, and the clarification of the mandate to enable peacekeepers to take action to stop the killings of civilians.
Yet there was no appetite in New York, or in any major capitals, for such an intervention. A key turning point came on 12 April, when the Belgian government, one of the largest troop contributors to UNAMIR announced that it was withdrawing its troops. Belgium had previously supported Dallaire's calls for reinforcements. Having initially argued for reinforcements, upon realising the fruitlessness of these requests, Belgium favoured a complete withdrawal of UNAMIR, and lobbied for this in the UN. Dallaire protested, arguing that the force should be strengthened and given a new mandate to protect the thousands of refugees it was protecting, but the UN Security Council refused, telling Dallaire that UNAMIR would be effectively withdrawn unless the belligerents agreed to a ceasefire by early May. According to Philip Gourevitch, the United States, having recently suffered losses in the UN mission in Somalia, was particularly keen to "get out of Rwanda" and "leave it to its fate". Outside of the permanent members, New Zealand, which held the rotating presidency of the UN Security Council, was the lone voice supporting reinforcement, and in late April, persuaded the council to postpone UNAMIR's withdrawal, despite continuing reluctance from the United States and United Kingdom.
On 21 April, the Security Council voted to cut UNAMIR's troop contingent from 2,500 to a nominal 250 troops - with the principal aim of facilitating negotiations between the interim government and the RPF.
UNAMIR II For the next six weeks, approximately, UNAMIR coordinated peace talks between the Hutu government and the RPF to little avail. Eventually, on 17 May 1994, the UN agreed to reinforcement, that would deliver nearly 5,500 troops and much needed personnel carriers and other equipment to former UNAMIR, now known as UNAMIR II. The new soldiers did not start arriving until June, and following the end of the genocide in July, the role of UNAMIR II was largely confined to maintaining security and stability. UNAMIR withdrew from Rwanda in 1996, following the withdrawal of support by the RPF-led government.
UNAMIR II and subsequent resolutions were still unclear on the right to use force in stopping the genocide. In one of Dallaire's parting cables, he said that "the [UN] force has been prevented from having a modicum of self-respect and effectiveness on the ground". Unfortunately, in the face of the mayhem in Rwanda and this diplomatic watering down of UNAMIR's mandate, many UN member states delayed contributing personnel for some time, until the main wave of killings ceased.
Belgium