Rwanda is commemorating the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi where more than one million people were killed by their neighbors, friends and relatives.

It is not easy to comprehend how human beings turned so evil against others, committing a mass murder that constitutes a crime against humanity.

Bad politicians incited ordinary people to kill their kin, but the genocide ideology and killing of the Tutsi with impunity had been going on since the 1950s.

Never again remains a slogan

On December 9,1948, the Genocide Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations as an instrument of international law that codified for the first time the crime of genocide.

 

It signified the international community’s commitment to ‘never again’ after the atrocities committed during the Second World War.

 

The first lesson leant from the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda is that the International community’s commitment to ‘never again’ remains a slogan that is easily said than done.

Despite the “early warning” that genocide had been planned by the Habyarimana regime, the United Nations did not take action to put in place preventive mechanisms.

Instead, when the killings escalated, the UN withdrew its troops that were in the country on a peace keeping mission, leaving thousands of people who had run for protection in their compounds in the hands of the killers. These people were then brutally killed by government soldiers and hundreds of militiamen using guns, grenades, machetes, spears and many other crude instruments.

Inaction of the international community

On January 11, 1994—nearly three months before the genocide began Maj Gen Roméo Dallaire, the force commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR), dispatched an urgent cable to UN Headquarters in New York informing his superiors how a high ranking Rwanda government politician had informed him that he had been “ordered to register all Tutsi in Kigali,” and his suspicion was that the registration was meant for the extermination of the Tutsi.

The government official further informed Gen Dallaire that “in twenty minutes his personnel could kill up to 1,000 Tutsis.”

From the UN headquarters, the deputy UN undersecretary General for peacekeeping, Iqbal Riza, sent Gen Dallaire a signed fax directing him to raise his concerns to President Habyarimana, despite evidence that genocide plans were being prepared within the president’s inner circle.

At the height of the genocide, the pentagon deployed two dozen special forces and on their return to the US reported that they had seen, “so many bodies on the streets that you could walk from one body to the other without touching the ground.”  

Additionally, the CIA’s daily briefing for President Clinton, Vice President Gore, and other senior officials that detailed the killing in Rwanda clearly described the events as “genocide.”

Joyce Leader, then deputy U.S. chief of mission in Rwanda told her State Department colleagues that by 8:00 A.M. the morning after the plane crash, they knew what was happening, and that “there was systematic killing of the Tutsi.”  Leader further told her State Department colleagues that, “three kinds of killings were going on: casualties in war, politically motivated murder, and genocide.”

Although the evidence of a genocide taking place was overwhelming, the US administration and the UN took time debating whether the killing that took place could be classified as genocide. They tried to avoid mentioning the word ‘genocide’ because they wanted to protect themselves against blame for being bystanders when genocide was being committed.

In the long run, the evidence of genocide was overwhelming and they had no choice but to shamelessly accept the reality.

International media too, was missing to inform the world about the mass killings that were taking place in Rwanda.

Although some people argue that the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as first black president of South Africa diverted the attention of the world media that could have gone to Rwanda, the excuse is not convincing.

The New York Times, for example, published a story as early as April 10, 1994 quoting the medical coordinator of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Herve Le Guilouizic, describing what was happening in Rwanda. It said that “yesterday, we were talking about thousands of dead, today we can start with tens of thousands.”

The second lesson learnt by Rwanda from the genocide against the Tutsi is never to wait for the UN or rely on foreigners to solve the country’s domestic problems.

Rwanda was abandoned by the international community and the RPF and its military wing, RPA, took the responsibility to end the genocide against the Tutsi. Since then, the spirit of self-reliance has been a strong driving force in Rwanda’s reconstruction and transformation. 

The third lesson learnt is that the genocide against the Tutsi would have been prevented if the UN and the entire international community acted on the early warning signs that were available to them.

Unfortunately, 29 years later, the same inaction by the international community still prevails as seen in eastern DRC.