From the archive: The UN's Rwanda failure

New Statesman​

16-07-2025

Photo by Gilles Peress / Magnum Photos
Ten days after the end of the Rwandan genocide, a New Statesman editorial condemned the failure of the international community to stop the tragedy.
'The Ghost of Somalia hovers over the whole Rwanda operation,' a top UN official told the New Statesman this week. The spectre certainly spooked the Clinton administration into making Rwanda the test case for its new policy of explicit abdication from any crisis that does not directly affect US interests.
On its first application the policy proved as financially ineffective as it is morally defective. The US has now committed $250m for relief in Rwanda: it could have saved most of that sum if it had not originally delayed authorisation of the peacekeeping force in Rwanda to save $35m. If that operation, UNAMIR II, had been promptly funded and equipped, perhaps the massacres could not have been completely prevented, but they could certainly have been curtailed. In the new world disorder, short-termism afflicts diplomacy as much as business. A statesman looks to the following day, only visionaries look as far as the following week. And in the case of France, even more than with British Tories, diplomacy is business, particularly where arms sales are concerned.
As Frank Smyth shows in this issue of the New Statesman, France was a major supplier of arms to the toppled Rwandan regime; it was still delivering equipment to the forces committing genocide a month after the slaughter started in April. By 22 June, France, which had not volunteered troops for UNAMIR, had extracted Security Council blessing for 'Operation Turquoise', its own 2,500-strong task force. Although it was embarrassingly obvious to other Security Council members that this was a blatant attempt to maintain after-sales service to the crumbling genocidal regime, no other country was able or prepared to offer troops, so UN approval was furtively granted, with five abstentions. One of those voting for was the Rwandan ambassador to the UN, on the Security Council under the Buggins'-turn principle operated by African countries. UN secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali strongly backed the French proposal. Somehow this is not too surprising. Paris was his major sponsor when he was first elected, and he recently announced his interest in a second term. His native Egypt was also a major supplier of arms to the Rwandan regime.
The catalogue of failure does not stop there. Radio Milles Collines played a key role in provoking the massacres and then stampeding the refugees across the border from behind the shelter of lines defended by the French. But, according to one diplomat, 'there's just an embarrassed silence in the Council when the question of doing something about the radio is raised'. Last week the French claimed that the fallen government's mobile transmitter is in Zaire, but that they have so far been unable to jam it. In similar vein, ten weeks after the Security Council decision to approve UNAMIR II, the force still has only 550 men out of the approved number of 5,500. Although UN officials say that there are more than enough offers of troops, mostly from African countries, they have no equipment. How many deaths could have been prevented if the French had agreed to equip them with the same alacrity with which they put in their own troops? Although the UN has plenty of excuses for its failings in the self-serving behaviour of its leading members, it is far from blameless itself, not least in the poor leadership shown by Boutros-Ghali. Even now, the military, diplomatic and relief efforts are working separately, and at times almost at loggerheads. It is clear that the whole situation would have benefited greatly from strong unitary control
But whose? The Rwandan Popular Front, now the government in Kigali, charges that the secretary-general's original special representative to Rwanda, Jacques-Roger Booh Booh, appointed last year, was hopelessly partisan towards the old regime. He was fired, but his replacement, Shaharyar Khan, although less partial, has no control over either the military or the relief operations. General Romeo Dallaire, the commander of the under-equipped UNAMIR force in Kigali, has no influence over the French troops in the south or the US military task force now assembling the relief effort in Zaire.
The welter of UN agencies and private relief agencies dealing with the refugee problem is officially being coordinated from Nairobi, where the UN Rwanda Emergency Office was set up, but, says one UN official, 'No one is in charge. Each agency expanded from where they were strongest.'
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The Security Council will soon set up yet another tribunal to consider charges of genocide. But, as in Bosnia, the world community is an accomplice through its inaction. It would be some comfort to think that lessons will be learnt from the horrors. The stupidity of the UN having to assemble, from scratch, troops and equipment for every single operation that it has to undertake should be apparent to all: the world desperately needs a standing rapid-intervention force dedicated to UN peace-keeping, using some of the (otherwise useless) forces left over from the cold war. It is equally obvious that the UN's decision-making procedures and its leadership need urgently to be renewed and reformed; and that the US, as the sole remaining superpower, must somehow be made to cease abdicating responsibility where its own material interests are not at stake
The likelihood, however, is that none of this will happen. Instead, as with Bosnia, the culpably negligent will hide from recrimination behind the cover of sterling humanitarian efforts – and, when the next Rwanda happens, the hand-wringing and buck-passing will start all over again.
[See also: From the archive: Enoch and after]
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