The central actors responsible for allowing Hutu extremists to perpetrate the 1994 genocide in Rwanda are well known: the United Nations Security Council, the UN Secretariat, the governments of France, the USA, Belgium and Britain, and the Roman Catholic Church. As a consequence of their acts of commission and omission, some 800,000 Tutsi and thousands of moderate Hutu were murdered in a period of 100 days. Reviewing the events of those days, I found myself thinking not once but repeatedly: It’s almost impossible to believe that this actually happened. The following is a selection of some of those events.

Repeatedly over the months prior to and during the genocide, the UN Military Commander in Rwanda pleaded with the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations in New York to expand his very limited mandate. The only time his request was ever approved was in the days immediately after the Rwandan president’s plane was shot down, triggering the genocide. UNAMIR was then authorized to exceed its narrow mandate exclusively for the purpose of helping to evacuate foreign nationals, mainly westerners, from the country. Never was this flexibility granted to protect Rwandans.

From the beginning of the genocide to its end, excluding NGOs and individuals no government or organization formally described events in Rwanda as a genocide.

From beginning to end, all governments and official bodies continued to recognize the genocidaire government as the legitimate government of Rwanda.

The months of the genocide happened to coincide with Rwanda’s turn to fill one of the temporary seats on the Security Council. Throughout those 3 months, the representative of the government executing the genocide continued to take that seat, including during discussions on Rwanda.

Almost all official bodies remained neutral as between the genocidaires and the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the mostly Tutsi rebels in the civil war that was being fought at the same time as the genocide. As if they were morally equivalent groups, both the genocidaires and those fighting to end the genocide were called upon by the UN, the Organization of African Unity and others to cease fighting. Had the RPF agreed, the scale of the genocide would have been even greater.

Only days after the genocide began, 2500 Tutsi as well as Hutu opposition politicians crowded into a Kigali school known as ETO; at least 400 of them were children. They were seeking the protection of Belgian UN troops against menacing genocidaire militia and soldiers outside the compound. In the midst of the stand-off, the Belgian soldiers were ordered to depart. They did so abruptly, making no arrangements whatever for the protection of those they were safeguarding. As they moved out, the killers moved in. When the afternoon was over, all 2500 civilians had been murdered.

When 10 Belgian soldiers were killed by Rwandan government troops, Belgium withdrew all its troops from the UN mission. So that Belgium would not alone be blamed for scuttling UNAMIR, its government then strenuously lobbied the UN to disband the mission in its entirety.

Two weeks after the crisis had begun, with information about the magnitude of the genocide increasing by the day, the Security Council did come very close to withdrawing UNAMIR altogether. Instead, led by the USA and the United Kingdom, it voted to reduce the mission from 2500 to 270.

9.

After the deaths of 18 American soldiers in Somalia in October 1993, the United States decided to participate in no more UN military missions. The administration further decided that no significant UN missions were to be allowed at all, even if American troops would not be involved. Thanks mostly to the delaying tactics of the US, after 100 days of the genocide not a single reinforcement of UN troops or military supplies had reached Rwanda. While the Security Council failed to re-supply UNAMIR, the International Committee of the Red Cross managed to re-supply its medical teams in Rwanda.

Bill Clinton later apologized for not doing more to stop the genocide, claiming he had not been aware of the real situation. That was a lie.

French officials were senior advisers to both the Rwandan government and military in the years leading to the genocide, with unparalleled influence on both. Virtually until the moment the genocide began, they gave unconditional support to the Hutu elite. Throughout the 100 days and long after, French officials and officers remained hostile to the “anglo-saxon” RPF, whose victory ended the genocide. To this day the French have never acknowledged their role nor apologized for it.

After 6 weeks of genocide, France, which offered no troops to UNAMIR, suddenly decided to intervene in Rwanda. In Operation Turquoise, the French forces created a safe haven in the south-west of the country, which provided sanctuary not only to fortunate Tutsi but also to many leading Rwandan government and military officials as well as large numbers of soldiers and militia---the very Hutu Power militants , in other words, who had organized and carried out the genocide. Not one single person was arrested or handed over for crimes against humanity. All were allowed to escape across the border into then-Zaire, often still armed. Wholly unrepentant, these genocidaires were soon launching murderous excursions back into Rwanda, beginning a cycle that led, quite foreseeably, to the subsequent bloody conflict that still destabilizes Central Africa.

The Roman Catholic Church in Rwanda was the largest and most influential in the country, with intimate ties to the government at all levels. It never denounced the government’s explicit ethnic foundations, never denounced its increasing use of violence against Tutsi, never denounced or even named the genocide, never apologized for the many clergy who aided and abetted the genocidaires, and to this day has never apologized for its overall role. The Pope has never apologized on behalf of the Church as a whole.

George Bush, during the contest for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, was asked by a TV interviewer what he would do as president if, “God forbid, another Rwanda” should take place. He replied: “We should not send our troops to stop ethnic cleansing and genocide outside our own strategic interest. I would not send US troops into Rwanda.”

The new RPF government inherited a debt of close to $1 billion, some of it incurred by the previous government in genocide preparations---expanding its army and militias and buying arms. During the genocide, these new soldiers and militias used their new weapons to exterminate the Tutsi. After the genocide, the new government was left with the obligation to repay in full the country’s debt to its western lenders.

16.

To this day, Rwanda has never received reparations remotely commensurate with the damage that the “international community” was responsible for allowing.

So far as is known, not a single person in any government or in the UN has ever been fired or held accountable for failing to intervene in the genocide. In fact, the opposite is true: Some careers flourished in the aftermath. We can consider this the globalization of impunity.

Despite the unanimity of every major study since undertaken, the testimonies of survivors, and the first-hand accounts of UN, Red Cross and MSF staff in Rwanda at the time, denial of the genocide persists. Deniers include Hutu Power advocates, many of them still active in western countries, as well as lawyers and investigators working for Hutu clients at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Denying the Rwandan genocide is the equivalent of denying the Holocaust.

Gerald Caplan is the author of “Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide,” the report of the International Panel of Eminent Personalities appointed by the Organization of African Unity to investigate the Rwandan Genocide.