Selections from the UN Panel’s Report on the Genocide in Rwanda
In 1994 a civil war erupted in Rwanda, and within months the war resulted in an estimated death toll of between 500,000 and 1 million Rwandans, mostly members of the Tutsi ethnic group. On December 15, 1999, an independent panel commissioned by United Nations (UN) secretary general Kofi Annan submitted a report on the UN's response to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. The report concluded that the UN and its member states could have stepped in and stopped the killing, but failed to do so.
Selections from the UN Panel's Report on the Genocide in Rwanda
Report of the Independent Inquiry into the Actions of the United Nations During the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda
Introduction
Approximately 800,000 people were killed during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. The systematic slaughter of men, women and children which took place over the course of about 100 days between April and July of 1994 will forever be remembered as one of the most abhorrent events of the twentieth century. Rwandans killed Rwandans, brutally decimating the Tutsi population of the country, but also targeting moderate Hutus. Appalling atrocities were committed, by militia and the armed forces, but also by civilians against other civilians.
The international community did not prevent the genocide, nor did it stop the killing once the genocide had begun. This failure has left deep wounds within Rwandan society, and in the relationship between Rwanda and the international community, in particular the United Nations. These are wounds which need to be healed, for the sake of the people of Rwanda and for the sake of the United Nations. Establishing the truth is necessary for Rwanda, for the United Nations and also for all those, wherever they may live, who are at risk of becoming victims of genocide in the future.
In seeking to establish the truth about the role of the United Nations during the genocide, the Independent Inquiry hopes to contribute to building renewed trust between Rwanda and the United Nations, to help efforts of reconciliation among the people of Rwanda, and to contribute to preventing similar tragedies from occurring ever again. The Inquiry has analyzed the role of the various actors and organs of the United Nations system. Each part of that system, in particular the Secretary-General, the Secretariat, the Security Council and the Member States of the organization, must assume and acknowledge their respective parts of the responsibility for the failure of the international community in Rwanda. Acknowledgement of responsibility must also be accompanied by a will for change: a commitment to ensure that catastrophes such as the genocide in Rwanda never occur anywhere in the future.
The failure by the United Nations to prevent, and subsequently, to stop the genocide in Rwanda was a failure by the United Nations system as a whole. The fundamental failure was the lack of resources and political commitment devoted to developments in Rwanda and to the United Nations presence there. There was a persistent lack of political will by Member States to act, or to act with enough assertiveness. This lack of political will affected the response by the Secretariat and decision-making by the Security Council, but was also evident in the recurrent difficulties to get the necessary troops for the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR). Finally, although UNAMIR suffered from a chronic lack of resources and political priority, it must also be said that serious mistakes were made with those resources which were at the disposal of the United Nations.
Conclusions
The Independent Inquiry finds that the response of the United Nations before and during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda failed in a number of fundamental respects. The responsibility for the failings of the United Nations to prevent and stop the genocide in Rwanda lies with a number of different actors, in particular the Secretary-General, the Secretariat, the Security Council, UNAMIR and the broader membership of the United Nations. This international responsibility is one which warrants a clear apology by the Organization [the UN] and by Member States concerned to the Rwandese people. As to the responsibility of those Rwandans who planned, incited and carried out the genocide against their countrymen, continued efforts must be made to bring them to justice—at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda [ICTR, established in 1994 to prosecute those responsible for the genocide] and nationally in Rwanda.
The overriding failure
The overriding failure in the response of the United Nations before and during the genocide in Rwanda can be summarized as a lack of resources and a lack of will to take on the commitment which would have been necessary to prevent or to stop the genocide. UNAMIR, the main component of the United Nations presence in Rwanda, was not planned, dimensioned, deployed or instructed in a way which provided for a proactive and assertive role in dealing with a peace process in serious trouble. The mission was smaller than the original recommendations from the field suggested. It was slow in being set up, and was beset by debilitating administrative difficulties. It lacked well-trained troops and functioning materiel. The mission's mandate was based on an analysis of the peace process which proved erroneous, and which was never corrected despite the significant warning signs that the original mandate had become inadequate. By the time the genocide started, the mission was not functioning as a cohesive whole: in the real hours and days of deepest crisis, consistent testimony points to a lack of political leadership, lack of military capacity, severe problems of command and control and lack of coordination and discipline.
A force numbering 2,500 should have been able to stop or at least limit massacres of the kind which began in Rwanda after the plane crash which killed the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi. However, the Inquiry has found that the fundamental capacity problems of UNAMIR led to the terrible and humiliating situation of a UN peacekeeping force almost paralyzed in the face of a wave of some of the worst brutality humankind has seen in this century.
Despite the failures of UNAMIR, it should be said that United Nations personnel within UNAMIR and in the programs and agencies also performed acts of courage in the face of the chaos that developed in Rwanda, and did save the lives of many civilians, political leaders and United Nations staff, sometimes at the risk of their own lives. In particular the peacekeepers who remained throughout the genocide, including the Force Commander and the contingents of Ghana and Tunisia, deserve recognition for their efforts to counteract some of the worst brutality humanity has seen under extremely difficult circumstances. The archives of the United Nations bear testimony to the multitude of requests, from within Rwanda, from Member States and from NGO's [nongovernmental organizations] asking for help to save persons at risk during the genocide. Statistics are difficult to find, but it may be worth quoting an internal list from UNAMIR's own archives which states that 3,904 displaced people had been moved by UNAMIR during the fighting in Kigali [the capital of Rwanda] between 27 May and 20 June 1994.
The inadequacy of UNAMIR's mandate
…[T]he scope of the initial mandate of UNAMIR [was] an underlying factor in the failure of the mission to prevent or stop the genocide in Rwanda. The planning process failed to take into account remaining serious tensions which had not been solved in the agreements between the parties. The United Nations mission was predicated on the success of the peace process. There was no fall-back, no contingency planning for the eventuality that the peace process did not succeed.
[The “agreement between the parties” was the 1993 peace agreement, known as the Arusha agreement, between Rwanda's Hutu-led government and the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a rebel group.]
The implementation of the mandate
…[S]erious difficulties arose with respect to the implementation of UNAMIR's mandate. UNAMIR's mandate was cautious in its conception; it was to become equally so in its application on the ground. Headquarters consistently decided to apply the mandate in a manner which would preserve a neutral role of UNAMIR under a traditional peacekeeping mandate. This was the scope of action that was perceived to have support in the Security Council. Despite facing a deteriorating security situation which would have motivated a more assertive and preventive role for the United Nations, no steps were taken to adjust the mandate to the reality of the needs in Rwanda.
Failure to respond to the genocide
After the Presidential plane was shot down, the situation in Kigali quickly descended into chaos. Roadblocks were set up, massacres of Tutsi and opposition and moderate politicians began. Soon, the RPF broke out of its complex, and were strengthened by forces from outside the capital. In addition to the killings of civilians, fighting broke out between the Presidential Guards and the RPF. UNAMIR was faced with hundreds of calls for help, from politicians, staff members and others. Thousands of people sought refuge at sites where UNAMIR was present, including about 5,000 people who had gathered at the field hospital already by 8 April.
When the genocide began, the weaknesses of UNAMIR's mandate became devastatingly clear. The natural question is why a force numbering 2,500 could not stop the actions of the militia and … soldiers who began setting up roadblocks and killing politicians and Tutsi in the early hours after the crash. Could UNAMIR not have deterred, by its presence and a show of determination, the terrible sequence of violence that followed?
The correspondence between UNAMIR and Headquarters during the hours and days after the plane crash shows a force in disarray, with little intelligence about the true nature of what is happening and what political and military forces are at play, with no clear direction and with problems even communicating among its own contingents. The mission was under rules of engagement not to use force except in self defense. It had taken upon itself to protect politicians, but then in certain cases did not do so in the face of threats by the militia. Civilians were drawn to UNAMIR posts but the mission proved incapable of sustaining protection of them. The Force Commander found quite early on that he did not have the practical command of all his troops: for all practical purposes the Belgian peacekeepers came under the command of their national evacuation troops, and within days, the Bangladeshi contingent was no longer responding to orders from UNAMIR Headquarters. In short, the correspondence between Kigali and Headquarters, and the information provided to the Security Council in the early days of the genocide, show an operation prevented from performing its political mandate related to the Arusha agreement, incapable of protecting the civilian population or civilian United Nations staff and at risk itself. Furthermore, UNAMIR was sidelined in relation to the national evacuation operations conducted by France, Belgium, the United States and Italy. The responsibility for this situation must be shared between the leadership of UNAMIR, the Secretariat and troop contributing countries.
The lack of will to act in response to the crisis in Rwanda becomes all the more deplorable in the light of the reluctance by key members of the International Community to acknowledge that the mass murder being pursued in front of global media was a genocide. The fact that what was occurring in Rwanda was a genocide brought with it a key international obligation to act in order to stop the killing. The parties to the 1948 Convention [the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide] took upon themselves a responsibility to prevent and punish the crime of genocide. This is not a responsibility to be taken lightly. Although the main action required of the parties to the Convention is to enact national legislation to provide for jurisdiction against genocide, the Convention also explicitly opens the opportunity of bringing a situation to the Security Council. Arguably, in this context, the members of the Security Council have a particular responsibility, morally if not explicitly under the Convention, to react against a situation of genocide.
However, as the mass killings were being conducted in Rwanda in April and May 1994, and although television was broadcasting pictures of bloated corpses … there was a reluctance among key States to use the term genocide to describe what was happening.
The delay in identifying the events in Rwanda as a genocide was a failure by the Security Council.
Lack of analytical capacity
A key issue … is whether it should have been possible to predict a genocide in Rwanda. The Inquiry has received very different replies to this question, both from Rwandese and international actors whom it interviewed. As indicated above, early indications of the risk of genocide were contained in NGO and United Nations human rights reports of 1993. The Inquiry is of the view that these reports were not sufficiently taken into account in the planning for UNAMIR.
The lack of political will of Member States
Another reason for the main failure of the international community in Rwanda was the lack of political will to give UNAMIR the personnel and materiel resources the mission needed. Even after the Security Council decided to act to try and stop the killing, and reversed its decision to reduce UNAMIR, the problems that the Secretariat had faced since UNAMIR's inception in getting contributions of troops from Member States persisted.
The political will of Member States to send troops to peacekeeping operations is of course a key to the United Nations capacity to react to conflict…. [S]uch will must be mobilised equally in response to conflicts across the globe. It has been stated repeatedly during the course of the interviews conducted by the Inquiry that … Rwanda was not of strategic interest to third countries and that the international community exercised double standards when faced with the risk of a catastrophe there compared to action taken elsewhere.
Source: United Nations.
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