A Countrys Disaster: Facing the Rwandan Genocide

Jeanett Fayed

Senior Division

Historical Paper

Paper length: 2,430 words

Back in December 1948, in response to the humanitarian atrocities of World War II, the

United Nations (UN) established an international law with the goal of protecting groups from
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being harmed as a result of their ethnicity. This law is called the Convention of Prevention and

Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.1 A common slogan which summarizes the aim of its

efforts is Never again. This law was supposed to prevent another Holocaust similar to the Nazi

Germany led tragedy of the 1940s. However the events and encounters in Rwanda in 1994

provided a devastating example that the global community is still susceptible to these tragedies.

The lack of the UN involvement in the Rwandan Genocide led to massive loss of lives and a

dispute between countries around the world; along with a monumental breach in human rights.

Within 100 days, 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered while the international community stood by

and watched.

In 1994, Rwanda, a small country located between the borders of Burundi and Uganda, had

tensions that were breaking out between the country's two major ethnicities: the Tutsis and the

Hutus. A civil war of sorts broke out when the President of Rwanda Juvnal Habyarimana and

the President of Burundi Cyprien Ntaryamira, were shot down in their airplane on April 6, 1994.

This triggered the first violent actions of a genocide that had been planned in great detail for

years. Of April 7, the mass killings of Tutsis by the Hutus began and this lasted for one hundred

days which will be forever marked as the Rwandan Genocide.

In the pre-colonial era in Rwanda, all the ethnicities lived together peacefully. The Tutsis

were cattle herders, the Hutus were the farmers, and the small minority group of the Twa, or

pygmies, were considered to be the hunter gatherers. This social circle provided a peaceful

environment for all of these different ethnic groups to coexist and even intermarry.

The seed of the problem that led to the carnage of the Rwandan Genocide was first

planted when Belgium colonized Rwanda in 1916. The Belgians declared that the Tutsis were the

1 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. UNAMIR. N.p.,
2001. Web. 15 Dec. 2015.

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superior group of the three, even though they only made up fifteen percent of the population. The

Belgians inserted Tutsis into many positions of power and they became the ones in second

command after European white people.

Even though the Hutus gained power in 1962, when Rwanda declared independence from

Belgium, the hatred was still there because of the previous prejudice system that was in place

against their ethnic group for so long. This continued throughout the years as the power between

the two ethnic groups flipped back and forth, which exploded into the Rwandan Genocide. But

this genocide was not the first predicament that involved violence between Hutus and Tutsis.

Back in 1959, King Kigeri V and tens of thousands of other Tutsis were forced into exile to

Uganda because of inter-ethnic violence. Another example occurred in 1988 when Tutsi rebels

formed in Burundi and carried out a vengeance attack on the Hutus, it is estimated that about

20,000 were killed and another 60,000 fled into hiding.

There is no amount of testaments that create the picture of how inhumane the Rwandan

Genocide was. The Hutus, in their opinion, were justified in their violence: It was justice. Philip

Gourevitch, the author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our

Families, went to Rwanda a few years after the genocide happened. Through his exploration of

all the horrible encounters of the Hutus and Tutsis and the exchange of new-founded thoughts

with old presumed prejudice ones, here points the very beginning as to how horrific the

predicament was:

The killers killed all day at Nyarubuye. At night they cut the Achilles tendons of survivors

and went off to feast behind the church, roasting cattle looted from their victims in big

fires, and drinking beer. (Bottled beer, banana beer--Rwandans may not drink more beer

than other Africans, but they drink prodigious quantities of it around the clock.) And, in

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 the morning, still drunk after whatever sleep they could find beneath the cries of their

prey, the killers at Nyarubuye went back and killed again. Day after day, minute to

minute, Tutsi by Tutsi: all across Rwanda, they worked like that. "It was a process,"

Sergeant Francis said. I can see that it happened, I can be told how, and after nearly three

years of looking around Rwanda and listening to Rwandans, I can tell you how, and I will.

But the horror of it--the idiocy, the waste, the sheer wrongness--remains

uncircumscribable;2

In this upcoming eyewitness survivor story (her name is Adeline) it once again shows that there

was a huge human rights breach within the treatment of Tutsis and that this was not another

African civil war like the Somali government had. This was a well planned and executed mission

that occurred within one year of the Somali Civil War:

The killers mocked us saying: Aha, it is the girls. Lets go and liberate them. We must

give them something to celebrate. They took us and another girl who was carrying a

baby, to a nearby hill. We passed a roadblock where we saw that people were being

killed. Right in front of us people were forced to squat on the floor and were then

macheted or killed with a masu. A big truck was on standby where the bodies were

piled on and taken away.When they were tired of killing, the men came to us and ordered

us to take off our clothes. They each in turn raped us. One man pleaded with the others to

leave my 14 years old sister alone, saying she was only a kid. The other men laughed and

said, that we were all going to be killed anyway. That we would have to chose between

rape or a cruel death. They raped my 14 year old sister. I stopped feeling my pain. I

2 Gourevitch, Philip. We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our
Families: Stories from Rwanda. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998. Print.

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 wanted to protect her, but I couldnt. After raping us they gave us food to eat by the

roadside.3

There are other eyewitness accounts much like the one above that only cover the tip-of-

the iceberg as to how cruel the Interhamwe, a group of young Hutu militias, and the Hutu

extremists were within the genocide. It is thought nothing can be worse than to be wrongly

killed, but to be abused and treated like pests and to watch everyone you love die inhumanely

challenges the socially constructed idea that being killed is the worst thing possible and brings

brutality to another level.

Back in December in 1993, Monique Mujawamariya, who is a major civil rights activist

within her home country Rwanda, was invited to the White House to celebrate the forty-fifth

anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She was given an award for speaking

up about the discrimination and hate speech against the Tutsis in her countrys government. At

this meeting everyone believed that the United States (U.S.) along with the UN would intervene

and stop the violence at the time that was soon to escalate into the genocide. Everyone believed

that the international community would intervene but due to recent political turmoil at the time in

Somalia, many countries were left resistant to taking further action.

In the early 1990s the people of Somalia entered into a civil war and overthrew the Barre

government of Somalia. On December 3, 1992 the UN passed United Nations Security Council

Resolution 794.4 This resolution was the exchange of peacekeeping soldiers to Somalia led by

the United States. Not even a year later in October 1993, a U.S. helicopter was shot down and 18

3 Adeline. Interview by N/A. Outreach Programme on the Rwandan Genocide and the United
Nations. Survivors Fund, 2009. Web. 24 Feb. 2016.
<http://www.un.org/en/preventgenocide/rwanda/education/survivortestimonies.shtml>.
4United States. Foreign Broadcast Information Service. (1992). Foreign media reaction to
Somali "Operation Restore Hope.". Washington, DC: Foreign Broadcast Information Service.

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U.S. rangers were killed by Somali warlords. This led to the United States being a very hesitant

non-involved country when the Rwandan Genocide started because at the time President Clinton

believed the situation was similar to the Somali Civil War. However, it turned out not to be

similar to the Somali Civil War: the Rwandan Genocide would see greater brutality with less

foreign involvement.

On April 7, 1994 gunshots were fired and machetes were being used to slaughter Tutsis

and any non-moderate Hutu who would not support the cause of annihilating the Tutsis. Hate

propaganda was being played on every radio station in the country. Within the four months that

this was happening, Rwanda became the third largest importer of weapons in Africa.5

Some people within the U.S. (which is one of the UNs and worlds superpowers) had the intent

of trying to help prevent the Rwandan genocide. But the U.S. didnt intervene as much as they

could have because, the people working in the White House at the time were skeptical to

intervene within Rwanda. They were skeptical because the Somali Civil War situation did not

work out well in the long run. The White House staff with whom I spoke were concerned that

the US not become involved in Rwanda because of the major failure of peacekeeping in Somalia

in October 1993.6

But as more and more timed passed with the situations becoming more and more

disastrous in Somalia, the U.S. government and the UN quickly decided to not intervene in the

genocide taking place in Rwanda. The U.S. did not want to step into another African civil war

(which they assumed was going on in Rwanda) and the UN was trying to avert another failed

rescue mission. The recent history of intervention in Somalia led to the world not wanting to

participate in saving peoples lives in Rwanda. In addition, the 18 United States rangers who
5 Melvern, Linda. A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda's Genocide. Cape Town:
NAEP, 2000. Print.
6 Shattuck, John H. F. Email. 21 Jan. 2016

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were killed by the Somali warlords during the infamous Battle of Mogadishu which inspired the

Michael Bowen book and later Ridley Scott film Black Hawk Down. These events happened

incidentally two days before the vote was due whether or not the United Nations would provide

peacekeepers to Rwanda. This unfortunate timing affected the UNs delegates and sadly

influenced the nations to vote no on intervening in Rwanda.

Which brings us to an extremely ironic moment, where the U.S. had promised that there

would never be another Somalia. This quote below derived from the book Freedom on Fire by

John Shattuck points that the U.S. had the intentions and means that they were not going to let

another turmoil war happen in another country.

We passed my old friend John Podesta, who was then in charge of the presidents

scheduling and later became his chief of staff. Podesta flashed a grin and a quick

greeting which reminded me of our conversation several days earlier, when John

had given a three-word summary of the administration's foreign policy

preoccupation at the end of 1993 No more Somalias;7

Even though the UN sent 2,500 peacekeeping soldiers on May 18 of 1994 (all of which

were provided by Belgium), were under the orders not to apply any kind of force except in self-

defense. Resistance to attempts by forceful means to prevent the Force from discharging its

duties under the mandate of UNAMIR. Other U.N. lives, or persons under their protection

against direct attack when other lives are in mortal danger.8 But the Belgians were reluctant to

do their jobs which led to more people dying. Not long after their involvement, 10 Belgian

peacekeepers were killed by Hutu extremists.

7 Shattuck, John H. F. Freedom on Fire: Human Rights Wars and America's Response.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003. Print.

8 Frontline PBS. "Interviews - Iqbal Riza | The Triumph Of Evil | FRONTLINE | PBS." PBS:
Public Broadcasting Service. WGBH educational foundation, n.d. Web. 17 Feb. 2016.

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 When General Dallaire, who was in command of UN forces, was serving in Rwanda in

1994, he had pushed for more action approval in the mandates while they were stationed in

Rwanda. However, the U.N. had to say no since these were Belgian soldiers, Belgium had made

their mandate to pull soldiers out so the soldiers had little interactions within the genocide. We

are given a specific mandate by the Security Council. These troops are not our troops. We have

to borrow them from governments, who give them in the context of that mandate, for the tasks to

be performed in that mandate.9

In the explanation above that was extracted by an interview done by PBS, this says that

the countries within the UN have the power as to what can or cannot happen with the soldiers

that are being provided. It is up to the international community that makes up the UN to

intervene and make things happen, and that therefore the international community is at fault for

not exchanging the correct interactions and encountering the predicament.

According to John Shattuck, a major human rights activist whom was interviewed, who

also served as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, under

President Clinton, he believes that there should have been more peacekeeping soldiers and giving

them the mandate to use force. I believe, and advocated at the time, that sending more UN

peacekeepers and giving them a mandate to use force could have stopped the genocide and

prevented it from spreading throughout the country.10

While the U.N. was trying to receive more soldiers and more interactive mandates the

entire western civilization was ignoring the Rwandan genocide because they knew how bad the

operation went when trying to limit violence in Somalia.

9 Frontline PBS. "Interviews - Iqbal Riza | The Triumph Of Evil | FRONTLINE | PBS." PBS:
Public Broadcasting Service. WGBH educational foundation, n.d. Web. 17 Feb. 2016. N.p.
10Shattuck, John H. F. Email. 21 Jan. 2016

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 Major international leaders were ready to collaborate on the common goal of evacuating

their own citizens and expatriate employees, but they refused any joint intervention to save

Rwandan lives. Instead they focused on issues of immediate importance for their own countries:

Belgium on extricating its peacekeepers with a minimum of dishonor; the U.S. on avoiding

committing resources to a crisis remote from U.S. concerns; and France on protecting its client

and its zone of Francophone influence. Meanwhile most staff at the U.N. were fixed on averting

another failure in peacekeeping operations, even at the cost of Rwandan lives.11

There were several precautions of international laws in place long before the Rwandan

genocide in 1994. Take the Convention of Prevention an international law that went into effect in

1948 almost 50 years before the genocide in 1994 which constitutes that under international law

that if there is a genocide of a race, ethnicity, religion, or orientation that the humans of that

group are protected and that there will be international intervention.

The international community was only concerned for their own selves and turned a blind

eye away from this tragedy. The world turned a blind eye from 800,000 people who were

plundered and hacked to death with dull machetes. The world ignored the women who were

violently raped and murdered in the genocide. And they ignored the children who begged their

perpetrators to let them live in their last moments. But especially the world turned away from the

survivors who still to this day have to live on a daily basis without their families and re-live the

pain all the time. All because the United States didnt want to send over more soldiers to a

disaster zone, then the western countries followed suit. The United Nations was trying to avert

another failed rescue mission. Everyone in the world except for the people in Rwanda were

bystanders who did nothing.

11 Ignoring Genocide (HRW Report - Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda, March
1999)." Human Rights Watch. N.p., 26 June 2015. Web. 18 Feb. 2016.

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 Long after the Rwandan Genocide ended; President Clinton did an apology speech

himself when he visited the nation in 1998. We did not act quickly enough after the killing

began. We should not have allowed the refugee camps to become safe haven for the killers. We

did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name: genocide. 12 This speech by

President Clinton shows that the entire world realized that intervention and action should have

happened but by the time they recognized that, it was too late.

The UN failed all the Tutsis and the people who were fighting against the genocide. They

did not live up to their promises. They saw warnings signs and had daily contact with the

peacekeepers who were telling the level of brutality in Rwanda at the time. Yet France, England,

U.S., almost all the countries of the world did nothing. As a result of that inaction, millions of

people are horrifically affected. 800,000 of those millions are dead. The rest are survivors who

struggle with it emotionally, mentally, and physically.

12 Clinton, Bill. "Apology Rwandan Speech." Rwanda. 25 Mar. 1998. Speech.

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 Annotated Bibliography

Primary Sources

Interviews

Adeline. Interview by N/A. Outreach Programme on the Rwandan Genocide and the United

Nations. Survivors Fund, 2009. Web. 24 Feb. 2016.

<http://www.un.org/en/preventgenocide/rwanda/education/survivortestimonies.shtml>.

this interview was conducted by survivors fund and Adeline was 19 years old when the Rwandan

Genocide happened this testimony really depicts how vicious this event was.

Shattuck, John H. F. Email. 21 Jan. 2016

This interview provides a great insight as to what the administrations in the United States were

discussing and deciding at the time. And being a world renowned human rights activists he could

tell me if the US truly did try or that they concluded it wasnt worth to try and save Rwanda.

Speeches:

Clinton, Bill. "Apology Rwandan Speech." Rwanda. 25 Mar. 1998. Speech.

Government Sources:

Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime

of Genocide.

UNAMIR. N.p., 2001. Web. 15 Dec. 2015.

<http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/missions/past/unamirS.htm>.

This international law points out that the UN should have protected the Tutsis when the

genocide had broken out. But they didnt, instead they just sent soldiers who couldnt

intervene. And by learning from this, it proves that when a country isnt large or important

enough, you cant count on other countries.

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Books:

Shattuck, John H. F. Freedom on Fire: Human Rights Wars and America's Response. Cambridge:

Harvard UP, 2003. Print.

Even though this book was written in 2001 7 years after the genocide the author was a part of the

Clinton administration and he talks about his own experiences at the time the genocide

happened.

Secondary Sources:

Books

"Genocide." World of Criminal Justice, Gale. Ed. Shirelle Phelps. Farmington: Gale, 2002.

Credo Reference. Web. 20 Nov. 2015.

This is great for referencing and comparing to other genocides and why the Rwandan genocide
should have been recognized back in 1994. Including that the tutsis should have been protected
under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide international
law.
Stanton, Gregory. "Could The Rwandan Genocide Have Been Prevented?."

Journal Of Genocide Research 6.2 (2004): 211-228. Academic Search

Premier. Web. 20 Nov. 2015.

This book does a great overview as to what the UN did and might have done. It also includes the

early warnings signs that pretty much everyone ignored, along with the 8 stages of genocide. But

my favorite section of the book is would UNAMIR intervention have saved more lives?.

Valentino, Benjamin A.. Still Standing By: Why America and the International Community Fail

to Prevent Genocide and Mass Killing. Perspectives on Politics 1.3 (2003): 565578. Web

This book helps with my research because since the US is such a major influence of the UN. It

will point that the even the biggest power world leaders that are huge on freedom didnt even

intervene. Which leads that the genocide couldve been stopped, but no one cared enough.

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Mirzoeff, Nicholas. "Invisible Again: Rwanda Representation After Genocide. African Arts =

Arts D'afrique / African Studies Center, University of California Los Angeles. N.p., 2005). Print.

This book does a strong job about how the never again genocide act was ignored and failed in

its basic premise that it would prevent another genocide in the world. It also talks about the fact

that the anarchy that was going on in Rwanda was invisible to the rest of the world, that it was

hard to get recognition.

Gourevitch, Philip. We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families:

Stories from Rwanda. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998. Print.

This book if filled with raw emotion and explains the horrible conditions that the tutsis were left

in and that the UN was to partially blame for this. By using quotes from this book, it will invoke

a powerful message. That people would absolutely have to read about.

Melvern, Linda. A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda's Genocide. Cape Town:

NAEP, 2000. Print.

This book does a awesome job pointing out the flaws of the UN within the rwandan genocide

and also incorporating heart-breaking stories of survival. That the UN should now be held more

accountable about preventing and stopping mass genocides.

Jones, Bruce D. Peacemaking in Rwanda: The Dynamics of Failure. Boulder: Lynne Rienner

Publishers, 2001. Print.

This book is great at telling the inner workings of the politics between the interahamwe and the

tutsis along with the international government. How the US National Intelligence Officer

assigned to monitor developments later acknowledged was to locate Rwanda on an atlas.

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Websites

Morgan, Sally, John Steward, and Dave Fullerton. "The Role of the West in the Rwandan

Genocide."A

Close-up Look at the Rwandan Genocide. Ideas and Events That Are Shaping Rwanda's History

and Its People. Vanishing Point P/L, 29 Apr. 2012. Web. 15 Dec. 2015.

This is an amazing website because it is solely dedicated to the rwandan genocide and is a

reliable source. It has many stories of actual survivors that I can research and decide if I want to

use them. which is a major advantage

The Rwandan Genocide." United to End Genocide. N.p., 9 Mar. 2012. Web. 15 Dec. 2015.

<http://endgenocide.org/learn/past-genocides/the-rwandan-genocide/>.

This website has an overview and some detail about the rwandan genocide. The nice thing about

it is it can give me an idea about how to give an ligt overview on explaining the rwandan

genocide if I have to. In addition to that there is other information on other genocides that I can

compare with.

Newspapers

Lauria, Joe. "World News: U.S. Says it Failed to Stop Rwanda Killings." Wall Street Journal,

Eastern edition ed.Apr 08 2009.

This is also another good reference about how one of the biggest powerhouses in the world failed

to stop the genocide within rwanda, And how it is horrible that the US just didn't care enough to

intervene.

RUBIN, ALISSA J., and MAA BAUME. "Claims of French Complicity in Rwandas Genocide

Rekindle Mutual Resentment." NY Times n.d. A6. Print.

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This news article makes a strong point about the accusations of Frances involvement in the

genocide. If these rumors were true it would help me out, because France is also a big

powerhouse in the UN and that could be another reason as to why the UN didnt intervene.

Power, Samantha. "Bystanders To Stop Genocide." The Atlantic Sept. 2001: n. pag. Web. 15 Dec.

2015. <Power, Samantha. "Bystanders to Genocide." The Atlantic n.d. n. pag. Web. 15 Dec.

2015. >.

This newspaper article is great at questioning the flaws that the US stated as to why they didnt

do more, and that everyone was a bystander who did nothing for this now repeating history of

heinous war crime.

Encyclopedia:

"Role of the International Community in the Rwandan Genocide." Wikipedia, the Free

Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc, n.d. Web. 15 Dec. 2015.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role_of_the_international_community_in_the_Rwandan_Genoci

de>.

Wikipedia does a great job of overall explaining the faults and pros of the international

community within the genocide. How Belgium was the only country to provide the peacekeeping

troops in Rwanda. Or how France hardly helped at all and might even be involved with the

killings.

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