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To many, genocide had always meant the gas chambers. Yet in Rwanda the world discovered that the machete could also be an instrument of ethnic cleansing. In 1994 an estimated 1 million people in the country were killed over the course of 100 days. The people killed were Tutsi, a minority ethnic group that had traditionally ruled the country, while the perpetrators were Hutu, the majority ethnic group with a history of being oppressed by the Tutsi. As the UN and other countries struggled to reconcile the moral obligation to intervene in a genocide with their fear of putting their own troops in harms way, a UN peacekeeping force was in the nation, under-equipped and lacking manpower. Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, the man in charge of the mission, tried to take action to stop the conflict before it happened but was ultimately unsuccessful due to the unwillingness of the international community to intervene.

In 1990 the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a Tutsi rebel group, invaded Rwanda from Uganda. Their goal was to overthrow the Hutu led government. Many Hutus disliked the Tutsi because of the oppressive Tutsi rule for centuries before the 1959 revolution in which the Hutu took power. The invasion reinforced a feeling that the Tutsi were foreign invaders, not native to Rwanda, coming to take over the Hutu homeland. By 1993 a cease-fire was declared.

Hutu President Juvénal Habyarimana was killed when his plane was shot down on April 6, 1994. This event prompted the mass-killings of both Tutsis and Hutu moderates by Hutu extremists. It is still disputed as to who was responsible for the attack. Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana took power afterwards but was assassinated the next day by the Rwandan Armed Forces. Ten Belgian soldiers were killed in the attack on the Prime Minister. 

On January 11, 1994, months before the genocide, Lt. Gen. Dallaire received Intel on weapons caches and Hutu plans for Tutsi extermination. He immediately made plans to raid the caches, notified the Military Adviser to the Secretary-General of his plan, and went to sleep thinking that he had finally done something right for the country. He awoke to find a message form the UN informing him that raiding the caches was over-stepping his bounds as a peacekeeper and ordering him to instead notify President Habyarimana of what he had found.

After the Prime Minister was killed, Dallaire estimated that 5,000 well-equipped UN soldiers would wield enough leverage to put a stop to the killings. The UN did not send the 2,000 soldiers he needed largely due to US opposition. In fact they reduced his force to 270 troops as the Belgians and Europeans withdrew. Dallaire has been quoted saying that he found the Belgian withdrawal “inexcusable.”

As the violence escalated, Dallaire found himself hampered by resistance from Security Council members who did not want the UN to become involved. Instead Dallaire was given orders to focus evacuating foreigners from the country. This change in orders resulted in the reallocation of troops defending the Don Bosco Technical School, containing almost 2,000 refugees, from a mob of Hutus outside. After the soldiers left everyone in the school was slaughtered.

Dallaire did what he could with his 270 men, using them to provide safe zones in urban areas. His actions are directly credited with saving the lives of 32,000 people. Peacekeepers were able to save hundreds of lives simply by guarding the places refugees were hiding. Some drove Tutsis through the Interhamwe roadblocks. One Senegal peacekeeper is credited with saving almost 1,000 people by doing this alone.

The US was largely responsible for Dallaire’s difficulty, lobbying for the full withdrawal of all UN troops. They also refused to use the word “genocide” when referring to the event, opting for “ethnic conflict” or even “internal struggles.” Media reports on the conflict depicted it as a civil war, with the Tutsi RPF and Hutu RAF battling for control rather than a massacre of Tutsi by Hutu civilian militia.

The genocide ended when the RPF gained complete control of the country from the Hutu government. By July 1994 they controlled the capital Kigali. The bastion of resistance from the government forces was in the north in Ruhengeri. On July 13, Ruhengeri was captured and the Tutsi rebels took control, ending the Hutu regime.

Many Hutus feared a violent reaction from the Tutsi. Most fled into surrounding countries, such as Zaire. In 1996 the new Rwandan government waged a proxy war in Zaire through the rebel group called the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of the Congo. The AFDL cleared the boarder of refugee camps and followed the Hutu that fled toward the capital.  The AFDL overthrew the government and established the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

In November of 1994, just a few months after the genocide, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda was established. The purpose of the ICTR was to try and convict those responsible for the genocide. The majority of the trials are done but about twenty are still in progress or waiting to happen. 16 of those charged have been sentenced to life in prison including Jean-Paul Akayesu, a former mayor who supervised the killings of Tutsi in his town, and Georges Rutaganda, vice President of the Iterahamwe who had a racist radio show in which he actively encouraged Hutu to kill their Tutsi neighbors.

Romeo Dallaire was forever changed by his experiences in Rwanda. He suffers for posttraumatic stress disorder and tried to commit suicide in 2000. He is an outspoken supporter for intervention writing several policy reports on the best ways to bring about the will to take action to prevent mass deaths.

The genocide in Rwanda caused the death of hundreds of thousands of people and forever changed the course of history in Africa. Had the International Community been more willing to assist there might have been a different outcome. Instead Dallaire was left unable to do much to deter the killings and was forced to accept that the UN had failed the Rwandan people. As a million people lie dead and at least a million more are displaced and psychologically damaged from rape and torture the UN has accepted that they could have done more to prevent the genocide. But to many, including Dallaire, this is not enough. The UN needs to learn from its mistakes and become more willing to intervene and give their ground troops a better chance to stop atrocities if genocide is to be stopped.

Citations

"Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda." Human Rights Watch. Human Rights Watch, 1 4 2004. Web. 22 May 2011.

<http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/1999/Rwanda>

Rene Lemarchand “Diconecting the Threads: Rwanda and the Holocaust Reconsidered.” Idea Journal, Vol. 7, No. 1, Mar 29, 2002.

R. Dallaire, “Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda,” (Knopf Canada, 2003)

L. Melvern, “A People Betrayed: The role of the West in Rwanda's Genocide” (Zed Books: London, 2000)