Tower of Babble: How the United Nations Has Fueled Global Chaos by Dore Gold

Author:Dore Gold [Gold, Dore]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2004-11-09T05:00:00+00:00

GENOCIDE

On April 6, 1994, President Habyarimana, the Hutu president of Rwanda who had signed the Arusha Accords, was killed when his plane was shot down near Kigali. (Burundi’s president also died in the crash.) This began the genocide. The Rwandan army and the extremist Hutu militia immediately began mass killings of Tutsis and even some moderate Hutus. Thousands were butchered the first day. On April 7, Rwandan troops surrounded a Belgian peacekeeping contingent of ten soldiers that was protecting the Rwandan prime minister and her five children. The Rwandan soldiers demanded that the Belgians surrender their weapons, and on orders from their commanding officer at headquarters, the Belgian soldiers disarmed. The Rwandans then took the Belgians to their military base and tortured, killed, and mutilated them.20 Meanwhile, the Rwandan troops caught the prime minister trying to escape her home and murdered her. By April 10, the International Red Cross would estimate that tens of thousands of Rwandans had already been murdered.

The situation had almost instantly escalated out of control. Still, the UN did not change its position. The Belgian government, which as the former colonial power had an intimate understanding of Rwanda’s internal dynamics, had been pushing the UN for months to stop its policy of passivity toward the Hutu militias. Now that its soldiers had been massacred, the Belgian cabinet decided that it would withdraw its peacekeeping contingent—the strongest in the UN force—unless the UN reinforced UNAMIR and broadened the force’s mandate to take offensive action.21 Separately, Dallaire pushed for a similar change in policy; he wanted UN headquarters to expand UNAMIR to 5,000 soldiers and give it a more forceful mandate. But in response, Kofi Annan’s Department of Peacekeeping Operations instructed Dallaire, “You should make every effort not to compromise your impartiality or to act beyond your mandate [emphasis added].”22 Thousands upon thousands of Rwandans were being slaughtered, but the UN was focusing only on “impartiality.”

The problem was not that troops were unavailable; it was a failure of political will. In testimony before the Belgian Senate inquiry on Rwanda, Belgium’s foreign minister, Willie Claes, would argue that his government had considered military intervention but that “Paris said a firm no.” Little help came from Washington either. According to Dallaire, if the UN had galvanized the Western powers to join a military intervention to stop the genocide, enough troops would have been available. Although he had requested 5,000 troops, he said that UNAMIR, combined with the 900 elite Belgian and French troops who eventually joined a special “evacuation force,” along with the 300 U.S. Marines who were in neighboring Burundi, would have constituted a strong army that “could have easily stopped the massacres.”23

The Western powers did consider creating an “evacuation force,” however. This force would focus exclusively on evacuating foreign refugees from Rwanda.

Instead the UN told Dallaire simply to focus on evacuating foreigners from Rwanda. Dallaire told officers that he had received orders from UN headquarters in New York that no Rwandans were to be rescued: “Orders from New York: no locals.

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