The UN's role in the genocide:
The biggest question about the Rwandan Genocide of 1994 is why the international community did not intervene in order to save lives despite knowing that the genocide had already begun. In the early 1990s there were already clear signs that the new Hutu regime would inflict large scale genocide. For example, in 1993, Adama Dieng, who was at that time the special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, wrote about acts of genocide that were taking place in Rwanda. In addition, on January 11 1994 (3 years before the genocide started),General Romeo Dallaire, then a commander of the UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR), warned that the extremist militia (ie. Interahamwe) had stated their plan of killing a thousand Tutsis every twenty minutes (Murigande, “Lessons Learned from the 1994 Rwanda Genocide”, 5). In response to this threat, Dallaire had also requested permission from the UN headquarters to launch a preemptive attack to disrupt the plan. However, Kofi Annan (then the UN Secretary and Head of UN peacekeeping) did not pass on this warning and Dellaire’s plan was denied. Instead, the UN (through the UN Security Council Resolution 912 of April 21, 1994) reduced its troops present in Rwanda from 2,500 to 270 after the death of 10 Belgian soldiers. In his book, Shake Hands with the Devil, Dellaire blames the permanent members of the Security Council (with particular emphasis on the United States and France) for inaction and the continuation of the genocide (Berdal, “The United Nations, Peacebuilding, and the Genocide in Rwanda”, 119).Overall, it was clear that the UN had failed to prevent and slow down the genocide and the United Nations Security Council has accepted responsibility for this failure.
Below: An interesting documentary on the Rwandan Genocide