A new report reveals who was behind the assassination which led to genocide. But it leaves France with many questions to answer

Linda Melvern - guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 10 January 2012

The wreckage of the plane that was shot down killing Rwanda's president Juvénal Habyarimana in 1994. Photograph: AP/Jean Marc Boujou

Few events have been the subject of as many rumours and lies as the assassination on 6 April 1994 of Rwanda's President Juvénal Habyarimana. We may never know the identity of the assassins who fired the two missiles that blew his jet apart as it came in to land at Kigali International Airport; yet this one key event signalled the targeted elimination of Rwanda's political opposition, and triggered the genocide of the Tutsi people.

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Bailing out of Oblivion In August 1949, in a converted gyroscope factory in northwest Long Island, the first United Nations conference on the environment took place. A temporary UN headquarters, the factory was located at Lake Success bordering the city borough of Queens.  Gathered together that August were 706 experts from 48 countries -- agriculturalists, economists, geologists, and ecologists -- from universities, scientific associations, and from private industry. They were tasked to produce the evidence and the solutions to one of the world’s most intractable problems – known then as “the improvident use of the world’s natural resources”. The 1949 UN Scientific Conference on the Conservation and Utilization of Resources was a milestone. And yet today no one talks of it. Instead, history records that the involvement of the UN in the environmental cause began in 1972 in Stockholm at the Conference of the Human Environment. The 1949 conference was not even a footnote.

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Events in Rwanda in 1994 mark a landmark in the history of modern genocide. Up to one million people were killed in a planned public and political campaign. In the face of indisputable evidence, the Security Council of the United Nations failed to respond.

In this classic of investigative journalism, Linda Melvern tells the compelling story of what happened.

She holds governments to account, showing how individuals could have prevented what was happening and didn't do so. The book also reveals the unrecognised heroism of those who stayed on during the genocide, volunteer peacekeepers and those who ran emergency medical care.

Fifteen years on, this new edition examines the ongoing impact of the 1948 Genocide Convention and the shock waves Rwanda caused around the world. Based on fresh interviews with key players and newly-released documents, A People Betrayed is a shocking indictment of the way Rwanda is and was forgotten and how today it is remembered in the West.

A People Betrayed contains a full narrative account of how the genocide unfolded.

It describes its scale, speed and intensity. The combination of revelations about the complicity of western nations, the failure to intervene, and the suppression of information about what was actually happening, is a shocking indictment, not just of the UN Security Council, but even more so of governments and individual who could have prevented what was happening but chose not to do so.

The United Nations, which fifty years ago resolved that genocide never happened again, not only failed to prevent it happening in Rwanda, but, as this book shows, international funds intended to help the Rwandan economy actually helped to create the conditions that made the genocide possible.