Accessory to Murder? A British journalist examines the U.N.'s flawed mission in Rwanda.

Samantha Power
February 11, 2001
The New York Times

In April 9, 1994, three days into the genocide in Rwanda, Gen. Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian commander of 2,500 United Nations peacekeepers, watched as European troops descended upon Kigali Airport to begin evacuating their citizens. The new arrivals were cleanshaven, well fed and heavily armed, a marked contrast with the ragged, ill-equipped force that General Dallaire had battled his own headquarters to arm, shelter and feed.

Estimates of the number of dead in the capital were already approaching 10,000, and General Dallaire was overcome by the smell of rotting flesh and the feeling of utter impotence. He knew that without outside help his troops could not deter the machete-wielding, largely Hutu militiamen who appeared bent on exterminating moderate Hutu and ethnic Tutsi citizens. His forces were even running out of ammunition, fuel, water and food. General Dallaire had pleaded with the Security Council for troop reinforcements, supplies and the authority to protect civilians. None of these were forthcoming. The Rwandan people would become, in the words of Linda Melvern, a British journalist, ''a people betrayed.''

General Dallaire spent the next two weeks watching his last best hope for assistance from the West disappear over the horizon. The European evacuation forces swooped in and out, departing by April 13. Then, in the aftermath of the murder of 10 Belgian soldiers, the Belgian backbone of the multinational mission was yanked out. Finally, on April 21, with reports of some 100,000 Rwandans dead, the Security Council, in perhaps its most shameful hour, slashed the flimsy peacekeeping force further, leaving 450 troops to tackle tens of thousands of killers. ''An operation should begin with the objective and then consider how best to achieve it with minimal risk,'' General Dallaire later noted. ''Instead, our operation began with an evaluation of risk, and if there was risk, the objective was forgotten.''

As a result of the force reduction, peacekeepers often stranded Tutsi who had sought their protection, leaving them at the mercy of Hutu assailants who prowled nearby. All told, an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered in fewer than 100 days.

A vast array of international decisions, non-decisions and decisions not to decide ensured that the Rwandan people and the peacekeepers would be abandoned to their fates. Two international investigations of the disaster have already been completed. The current United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, who at the time of the genocide was the head of the United Nations' peacekeeping department, commissioned an independent inquiry in May 1999 that proved harshly critical. And last July, six years after the massacre, the Organization of African Unity issued a more polemical report, blaming the United States in particular and calling upon Security Council members to pay reparations to survivors of what it called ''the preventable genocide.''

Drawing on these reports, interviews with peacekeepers and previously unpublished records of private Security Council deliberations, Melvern offers a vivid picture of the role of Western nations in abetting, ignoring and allowing Rwanda's genocide. She singles out ''accomplices'' like France, which, with an eye to preserving its dominance in the region, provided the murderous Hutu regime with arms, money and even protection (allegations France has denied). And she documents the fatal lapses of the more remote bystanders, who, from their offices in New York, Washington, London, Brussels and Paris, failed Rwanda at every juncture. Melvern's workmanlike account is not as stirring as Philip Gourevitch's splendid ''We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families.'' But by capturing the cold, calculating debates at the United Nations, she has contributed a valuable behind-the-scenes version of the events that Gourevitch described so movingly on the ground.

In the months before the mass killings began, official Western ''Rwanda watchers'' ignored warnings that Hutu militias were mobilizing for extermination of the Tutsi minority. Annan's peacekeeping office flatly rejected General Dallaire's requests to seize weapons. And once the killing had begun, American and European policy makers insisted on withdrawing peacekeepers, refused to jam radio broadcasts inciting murder and issued only tepid and belated condemnations of the massacres. To defuse pressure to act, they also notoriously refrained from labeling the slaughter ''genocide.''

Stung by the loss in 1993 of 18 American soldiers in Somalia, and vocal Congressional pressure to steer clear of United Nations operations, the Clinton administration was the most adamant opponent of sending reinforcements. American policy makers insisted that the United Nations pinpoint its exit strategy precisely before it would vote to allow even other countries to deploy a rescue mission, and also complained about the cost of any expanded peacekeeping presence.

While Melvern offers an important account of the international response to the crisis, ''A People Betrayed'' only begins to tell the story of how and why the United Nations and its member states failed Rwanda. France, Belgium and the United Nations have at least been pressured into investigating their roles. But in the United States, while President Bill Clinton acknowledged on a visit to Rwanda in 1998 that the United States and the world community ''did not do as much as we could have and should have done to try to limit'' the killing, his administration rejected Congressional calls for an investigation into the American response and refused requests for high-level cooperation with the United Nations investigation. ''Accountability'' was a concept that the last administration rightly pursued for the perpetrators of genocide but wrongly evaded itself.

Many count the Rwandan genocide as one of the defining events of the post-cold-war world. It has become commonplace to hear international statesmen trumpet the importance of ''reforming peacekeeping.'' But if that effort stands any chance of success, Western leaders will have to do more than open their eyes after a genocide. They will have to commit troops and resources to risky missions, and open their classified files on past disasters.

Samantha Power, executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, is the author of ''The Quiet Americans,'' a forthcoming book on American responses to genocide.