Rwanda, the United Nations, France, and Weak Intervention

The role of the United Nations and the international community has been largely scrutinized for its lack of a robust foreign armed intervention to prevent the Rwandan genocide over a 100-day period in 1994. Despite the United Nations deploying an observer mission followed by international peacekeepers, the United Nations failed the responsibility to protect Tutsi and Hutu moderate’s lives from Hutu extremist militias, the Presidential Guard and the Forces Armées Rwandaises (FAR) [Rwandan Armed Forces]. The United Nations was deployed to uphold the Arusha Accords to bring an end to the Rwandan civil war by monitoring and securing conditions for the installation of a broad-based transitional government comprising power-sharing between Hutu and Tutsi, repatriation of Tutsi refugees, and fairer ethnic integration into the Hutu-dominated armed forces. However, the United Nations failed with these efforts to promote a less disharmonious state of affairs because of the reporting system within the United Nations, namely, communication from the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), the Secretariat, and the Security Council. During the genocide, the United Nations peacekeeping force shrank in size and major powers started evacuating their nationals and withdrawing from Rwanda. At the same time, France supported Hutu and when the Tutsi rebels started closing in the capital, Kigali, with permissible violence to rebut the genocide, Paris deployed Opération Turquoise to assist fleeing Hutu, including génocidaires, to east Zaire via a demilitarized zone. A more discordant state of affairs occurred in Zaire, marking the First Congo War. With international support, post-war Rwanda engaged in victor’s justice by solely arresting and prosecuting Hutu within an internationally sponsored territorial war crimes tribunal. Finally, Paul Kagame has extended his terms in office to move toward fragmented and exclusionary politics that could result in another ethnically polarized conflict.