IT IS FITTING that so many of us are commemorating the 13th anniversary of the genocide on the very day when the murder of more than 800,000 Rwandans over the ensuing 100 terrible days began.

If the international community is finally to cease reinterpreting our ‘never again’ pledges – made following the Holocaust, Armenia, the Ukrainian famine, Cambodia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda – as ‘again and again’ in new catastrophes such as Darfur, we must remember what happened to the Rwandan Tutsis and moderate Hutus, who were abandoned by the UN and the international community.

UN role

My first focus is the UN role in Rwanda and the source is the recently published book, The Best Intentions: Kofi Annan and the UN in an Era of American Power by James Traub.

When Annan, with little experience in peacekeeping, became the Under Secretary General for Peacekeeping in early 1993, a number of crises were already underway. In one of them, Bosnia, where UN peacekeepers proved unable to stop an unspeakable massacre at Srebrenica and the killing of 37 people in a Sarajevo market, only NATO bombing for two weeks without UN Security Council approval persuaded the Serbs to sign a draft peace agreement. Traub concludes correctly that the UN “intervened timidly and clumsily” in the Balkans and did not intervene at all in Rwanda.

Best Intentions describes what led to the catastrophe, and then focuses on the January 11, 1994 “most notorious cable in UN history” – from Romeo Dallaire, commander of the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), about hidden weapons, which some said could kill up to 1,000 Tutsis in 20 minutes. Annan soon signed the never-to-be-forgotten response, directing that Dallaire do nothing “until clear guidance is received from headquarters.”

The author is sympathetic to Annan overall. But Annan  makes himself look both foolish and weak when he attempts to convince Traub that his inaction in Rwanda can be justified by the almost simultaneous problems in Somalia.

Traub adds that the ultimate responsibility over what later happened in Rwanda was Secretary General Boutros-Ghali’s –  and that he, who “has never expressed remorse over any of the catastrophes that took place on his watch, blames the member states . . . And the key member states blame the Secretariat for failing to keep them informed. Where did the buck stop? Nowhere.”

 An independent inquiry into the UN’s role in Rwanda later concluded that Annan’s peacekeeping department erred in not bringing Dallaire’s cable to the Security Council’s attention. Even worse was its failure subsequently to press Rwandan President Habyarimana to take action against the militias. At the end of January, when Dallaire prepared a detailed plan to seize the illegal weapons, he received yet another cable from Annan, in effect telling him not to move. Dallaire later described this as “yet another body blow.”

 When the mass murders and rapes began April 7, immediately after President Habyarimana’s plane exploded from a missile hit, Dallaire was then told by Annan he was not to side with moderate Hutus in the hope of helping them to stop the genocidaires. Two days later, compounding this irresolution, Annan told him UNAMIR might have to withdraw from Rwanda.  The U.S. Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, was soon going along with the Belgium Foreign Minister’s  request for a complete withdrawal of UNAMIR     . . . Traub notes that the U.S. was by then fully aware that “the killing was systematic and widespread.” The U.S. ambassador to the UN, Madeline Albright, finally agreed to accept what she termed a “skeletal” force of 270 led by Dallaire to remain in Rwanda.

Traub writes: “By the end of April, estimates of deaths had reached as high as half a million, and the newspapers and airwaves were filled with accounts of unspeakable savagery, and yet the UN continued to behave as if Rwanda presented a conventional problem of political reconciliation . . . Boutros-Ghali did not use the word ‘genocide’ until early May . . .

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The slaughter only ended three months later when Paul Kagame and his Rwandese Patriotic Front soldiers finally took the capital city Kigali, declared a cease-fire and formed a new government without international or UN help.  

In short, the roles of the UN Security Council, the member governments, the Secretary General and Kofi Annan during the genocide were all but unforgivable to the Rwandan people and many others across the world.

Canada’s role

Shake Hands with the Devil by Romeo Dallaire was published in 2003 and is no doubt familiar to most of you. We can only wish every high school and university graduate in our country and everywhere else had to read it. Some days, one wonders if any of the governments dealing with the ongoing Darfur debacle – which has aptly been termed “Rwanda in slow motion” – even know the book exists.

The thesis of Dallaire’s book, of course, is that Rwandans and his small group of UNAMIR peacekeepers were abandoned by the UN and the international community, including the Canadian and other governments.

He writes that, almost 50 years to the day when his father and father-in-law “helped to liberate Europe – when the extermination camps were uncovered and when, in one voice, humanity said, ‘never again’ ­ –  we once again sat back and permitted this unspeakable horror to occur. We could not find the political will or the resources to stop it . . . It is my feeling that this recent catastrophe is being forgotten and its lessons submerged in ignorance and apathy. The genocide in Rwanda was a failure of humanity that could easily happen again.”

Asked if he can still believe in God, Canada’s national hero writes: “There is a God – because in Rwanda, I shook hands with the devil . . .           I know the devil exists – and therefore, I know there is a God.”

 Dallaire has said he thinks a few thousand well-trained peacemakers could have prevented the massacre in Rwanda. The new Chretien government in office in 1993 clearly failed Rwandans, UNAMIR and Dallaire by not sending a decent contingent of Canadian soldiers with him.

In the period from 1992 to 1994, the Canadian Tutsi communities in Montreal and Ottawa sought repeatedly to raise awareness with the Mulroney and Chretien governments about what was being prepared in Rwanda –  with no visible success. As a Member of Parliament, I recall visiting the Pearson building with some of them on two or three occasions.

We’d leave shaking our heads at the indifference and general ignorance about conditions in Rwanda among supposed specialists in the Foreign Affairs ministry. After Kagame formed a new government, I recall that one of his ministers had considerable difficulty in obtaining a visa to visit Canada.

Some Canadians tried to stop the genocide: Dallaire; his colleague, Major Brent Beardsley; Dr James Orbinski, who saved hundreds, maybe thousands of people working at the King Faisal hospital in Kigali throughout the genocide. We can also credit a brave and dedicated staff of Rwandan nationals at the Canadian mission in Kigali, and other mostly unknown persons.

I recall a Rwandan nun  telling me in 1997 that her life was spared by a mob coming to kill her, because of the bravery of a Canadian priest who persuaded them to leave.

Overall, however, we Canadians – and all UN member countries – have little to be proud of about our role in the Rwandan Tutsi Genocide.  

Will we make up for it with our actions as we face future crises?

May 2007