Genocide In Rwanda 

     The article is from the Atlantic magazine. Within the readings, the author Samantha Powers conducts interviews with participates in the decision-making around the genocide in Rwanda. In the course of a hundred days in 1994 the Hutu government of Rwanda and its extremist allies very nearly succeeded in exterminating the country’s Tutsi minority. Some 800,000 Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu citizens were murdered; it was the most efficient killing spree of the twentieth century.

     

     In March of 1998, on a visit to Rwanda, President Clinton issued what would later be known as the "Clinton apology," which was actually a carefully hedged acknowledgment.

 

     Rwanda was a test for another man as well: Romeo Dallaire, then a major-general in the Canadian army who at the time of the genocide was the commander of the UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda. Whereas Belgian troops turned up well armed and ready to perform the tasks assigned to them, the poorer contingents showed up "bare-assed," in Dallaire's words, and demanded that the United Nations suit them up. "Since nobody else was offering to send troops, we had to take what we could get," he says. When Dallaire expressed concern, he was instructed by a senior UN official to lower his expectations. He recalls, "I was told, Listen, General, you are NATO-trained. This is not NATO. “

     

     Belgian Foreign Minister Willie Claes recalls trying to discuss Rwanda with his American counterpart and being told, "I have other responsibilities." The U.S. ambassador in Kigali, David Rawson remembers, "We were naive policy optimists", I suppose. The fact that negotiations can't work is almost not one of the options open to people who care about peace. One of the things I learned and should have already known is that once you launch a process, it takes on its own momentum. I had said, let’s try this, and then if it doesn't work, we can back away. Even after the Hutu government began exterminating Tutsi, U.S. diplomats focused most of their efforts on "re-establishing a cease-fire.” I told the people who were there that we were leaving, and the flag was coming down, and they would have to make their own choice about what to do. Nobody really asked us to take them with us.

     

     Instead of demanding a UN withdrawal, quibbling over costs, and coming forward (belatedly) with a plan better suited to caring for refugees than to stopping massacres. The U.S. officials could have worked to make UNAMIR a force to contend with. Senior officials could have spent U.S. political capital rallying troops from other nations and could have supplied strategic airlift and logistic support to a coalition that it had helped to create. In short, the United States could have led the world.