INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS-HUMN 512-U85-IA

The Role of the United Nations in the Humanitarian Intervention in the Rwandan Genocide

Humanitarian intervention is the act of using force against a country to either stop or prevent suffering in that country. The concept gained significant attention during the Rwandan Genocide, a tragic event that exposed both the strengths and weaknesses of global efforts to halt atrocities. The United Nations was actively participating in this period; actions that were taken, decisions made, and outcomes became areas of concern. The present research aims to study the UN’s degree of involvement in the Rwandan Genocide in the aspects of the organization’s response, the issues faced, and the effectiveness of the actions performed. By analyzing these aspects, the study aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the UN’s role and the lessons learned from this humanitarian crisis.

Before the genocide, Rwanda was characterized by deep-seated ethnic tensions between the Hutu and Tutsi populations. These tensions were, therefore, based on social, political, and economic friction that was deep in the society. In the colonial period, the Belgian administration worsened the situation and came up with laws that supported the Tutsi over the Hutu. This discrimination was in terms of education, employment, and social status, where the Tutsis were given better education, administrative jobs, and generally a better status in society than the jealousies of the Hutus (Goehrung, 2017). The Europeans formulated Hutu and Tutsi ethnic differentiation with the aim of ruling through division, which remained a cycle in Rwanda after gaining independence. Therefore, favoritism during history contributed to the everlasting hostility and competition between the two parties that led to upcoming clashes. These ethnic differences were worst through political interference and the use of ethnic propaganda that depicted Tutsis as enemies of the state (Roscigno, 2021). Hence, the anger at the core of the ethnic divide was already well-developed, and this is why the escalation in 1994 marked one of the most horrendous genocides of the modern epoch (Ludlow, 1999).

The assassination of President Juvénal Habyarimana on April 6, 1994, was the immediate trigger that ignited the Rwandan genocide. On April 6, 1994, as Habyarimana’s plane was landing in Kigali, it was shot down, and this remains, to this date, a mystery that led to catastrophe. The president’s absence awoke a political and social void, and the need of Hutus had an excuse to execute a well-thought-out plan of genocide. In the following hours, barriers were created, and the process of extermination of the Tutsi and moderate Hutu population started (Reydams, 2018). Its features included a higher incidence and severity of aggression due to the extermination of the Tutsi people as a whole by the radicals. Reports also have it that within the period of one hundred days, between 800,000 and 1,000,000 people were killed by machetes and other crude instruments. This horrible incident occurred when the international community remained silent, for the most part, to intervene even with close indications and several warnings of the worst that was to be committed in this genocide (Gilani et al., 2022). This was an influential ethnic and political hatred resulting in one of the worst genocides, as evidenced by the assassination of Habyarimana.

In response to escalating violence and to facilitate the peace agreement between the Rwandan government and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), the United Nations deployed the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) in October 1993. The main purpose of UNAMIR was to oversee the completeness of the Arusha Accords, which were the peace agreements that sought to resolve the Rwandese Civil War (Scherr, 2018). However, the mission was weak, mostly due to its small mandate, and which did not provide for actual peacekeeping or the protection of civilians in case of the resumption of the conflict. Moreover, UNAMIR lacked enough manpower, and most of what was available was insufficient to handle the problems, coupled with poor equipment and logistics. The limitations above undermined UNAMIR’s capacity to respond to the genocide as soon as it started in April 1994. The mission got early alerts and some reports about the mass killings in Darfur, but it could not intervene effectively mainly because it lacked the legal power and adequately equipped to do so (Vik, 2015). This incompleteness revealed the failure of international society to apply stronger intervention efforts in Rwanda (Genser, 2017).

The Rwandan Genocide was a factor of failure of the UN force mainly because of poor implementation of crucial resolutions intended to maintain a cease and see. This paper has identified the major factors limiting the contributions of UNAMIR in Rwanda; the limited mandate and resources assigned to UNAMIR severely limited its ability to operate effectively. Although General Dallaire did warn and report the killings and the situation getting worse prior to the cut-off date, the international community, such as the UN Security Council, in particular, never provided the necessary measures to enhance the capacity of the mission (Ratsch, 2022). The mandate limited UNAMIR’s presence as observers who were not allowed to actively participate in any fighting other than to defend themselves. Thus, they could not stop the genocide that was going on at the time. This position and the absence of a solid charter rendered the UNAMIR a useless bystander unable to shield the population or address the genocidal campaigns sponsored by the Hutu militia. Nevertheless, thanks to the thematic and contextual neglect of peacekeeping forces, genocide continued uninterruptedly, claiming the lives of the Tutsis and moderate Hutus, ranging from 800000 to 1000000. Accordingly, this failure was not only indicative of the flaws in the UN’s peacekeeping missions but also brought to light the unenviable outcomes of failure to intervene in humanitarian emergencies and the need for reform on how such situations are dealt with (Ludlow, 1999).

Boutros Boutros-Ghali

During the Rwandan Genocide, the then UN Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, disappointingly performed greatly erratically. Papal mobilization of the UN during his regime incurred criticism due to the slow response of this body. Even Boutros-Ghali himself recognized the failure of the UN, saying organizational apathy, quick weakening of political willingness of the member states, and crippled bureaucratic structure as some of the major barriers. He actually knew the challenges that characterized the situation in Rwanda since he was the Egyptian minister for foreign affairs and involved in African politics before taking over the presidency, but he failed to offer good leadership, which entails correct decisions being made.

Kofi Annan

Kofi Annan, who was the Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations during the genocide, later became the UN Secretary-General. Annan was heavily criticized for his department’s inaction at the time when early warnings of an impending genocide hit his docket and intelligence reports. The peacekeeping office that was under Annan failed to respond with the levels of urgency and offerings that the messages from General Dallaire contained, which, in essence, communicated the planned extermination of Tutsis. This inaction was partly because of constraints placed on the peacekeepers’ actions and the over-arching politics involved.

General Romeo Dallaire

The head of the mission from Canada, General Roméo Dallaire, is one of the leads when it comes to exploring the position of the United Nations during the genocide. Dallaire’s urgent warnings to the UN about the planned genocide were largely ignored. Besides, he operated under a low level of authority and had limited power to influence the situation, especially in providing civilians with an adequate level of protection. The failure of the international community to prevent the genocide in Rwanda despite the provisions of this warning would later be articulated by Dallaire in his work, “Shake Hands with the Devil.”

Restrained Engagement and Delays

The United Nations’ engagement in Rwanda during the genocide was notably restrained, marked by significant delays and insufficient capabilities. This lack of appreciation by the global society as soon as the onset of the calamity was one of the reasons why the response was insufficient. Despite looting, rape, killings, warning, and actual reports of genocide from UNAMIR’s commander, Lieutenant General Romeo Dallaire, the world acted very slowly and inadequately. Bureaucracy within the UN framework and political instability among the member states limited the chances and opportunities to intervene on time and save many people (Ratsch, 2022). The bureaucracy of the UN, together with the absence of political will among some of the leading nations in the world, resulted in the fact that the right decisions and actions were constantly delayed or, worse still, diluted. The international organization primarily tasked with ensuring peace and security globally is the Security Council. At the same time, UNAMIR was denied a strong foundation to halt the genocide since it was provided with inadequate directives and lacked the necessary equipment. However, the mission was accorded a circumscribed mandate involving mostly the surveillance role, hence limiting its capabilities.

Furthermore, the UN had limited investigation capacity, and the methods of gathering and using intelligence were undermined by the UN’s limited resources and the cumbersome bureaucracy that was characteristic of the organization. This implied that as much as there was accumulating substantiation that a genocide was in the making or already underway, the UN did not readily maneuver into a response gear. Some of the influential factors that led to the failure of the members to support the intervention are as follows: social factors: most member states had political motives to support or source from the intervention because it would involve the use of the military and also cost a lot of money. The painful lesson from the earlier attempt to intervene in Somalia also had a strong bearing on the lack of renewed interest in another intricate conflict in Africa (Scherr, 2018). Due to these factors, in addition to the UN, which was marked by imperfection and such problems as delays and the lack of decisive actions aimed at preventing the catastrophe in Rwanda, it is possible to note a catastrophic failure in preventing or, at least, mitigating the genocide. The distant cautious approach and bureaucratic processes reveal the necessity for dramatic changes in the approach of the international community and the international humanitarian response to such a crisis and to prevent future similar crises, ensuring effective and efficient timely response to protect vulnerable people (Ludlow 1999; Genser 2017).

Comparative Analysis with Other Operations

There is an apparent inconsistency when examining the United Nations’ response to the Rwandan Genocide alongside other humanitarian interventions like that in Kosovo. This intervention, arising from the humanitarian crisis and ethnic cleansing committed by Serbian forces on the Kosovar Albanians, was characterized by NATO’s aerial bombardment and rapid deployment of peacekeeping forces. While the operations in Kosovo ended with decisive and coordinated actions, the operations in Rwanda were hesitant and under-resourced.

Several factors contribute to this disparity. Political considerations heavily influenced the international community’s willingness to intervene. The crisis in Kosovo happened in Europe, which was closer to the NATO jurisdiction and threatened the stability of that region; thus, the Western powers were more willing to offer commitment (Ratsch, 2022). On the other hand, Rwanda, an African nation of marginal geo-strategic importance to the major players, did not ruffle similar concerns. This hesitance to act in Rwanda was further exacerbated by Somalia, a humanitarian mission, which in the previous years had turned into a nadir for the United States and any other country that had partaken in the campaign in Africa (Lang, 2016). The variability in the UN’s approach to humanitarian intervention also reflects the influence of member states and their readiness to commit resources. However, NATO brought the military capacity and the political will, thus making it possible to improve the response in Kosovo. However, the UNAMIR’s mission in Rwanda was plagued with a weakly defined mandate, a lack of enough equipment, and no backing from key member states. They shed ample light on the strategies that the UN gives itself in the struggle for humanitarian intervention that, more often than not, are paralyzed by inconsistent policies shaped by the UN’s largest members.

Such comparison shows the appropriateness of having a set of more standard and humane norms that dictate the ways and means of handling humanitarian disasters, suggesting that every action in this respect should be motivated not by a desire to gain political advantage but by the sheer need to save human lives. The evaluation of the strategies undertaken in Rwanda and Kosovo should serve as a means to develop subsequent plans with adequate resources at the elementary level of utilization, which, in turn, requires a consistent international commitment to include actions that can be taken to stop atrocities in case they happen (Evans, 2015).

Ambiguities in International Law

The law regulating the intervention by humanitarian organizations was not very clear at the time of the Rwandan Genocide, which hampered the United Nations in its course of operation. The element of that uncertainty was the principle of state sovereignty, which formed the basis of international relations and frequently clashed with humanity as a reason for intervention and prevention of mass genocides. UN charter has main principles such as state sovereignty and refraining from intervening in internal affairs despite their conflicts with the legal and ethical perspective of the UN on dealing with gross human rights violations occurring within the territory of a state (Power, 2013). The concept of sovereignty is intended to protect states from external aggression and uphold their autonomy. However, in the circumstances of the Rwandan Genocide, this principle was in opposition to the elementary need to halt the systematic extermination of the Tutsi people. There were no principles in the existing international law on how sovereignty can be pre-empted to allow for humanitarian intervention. This lack of a well-defined legal basis made it difficult for the UN to justify and execute decisive actions to halt the genocide.

The ambiguity was further compounded by differing interpretations of international law among UN member states. While some delegations wanted the organization to stick to non-intervention principles, others wanted an open interpretation that aimed at the promotion of human rights (Krüger, 2021). This division lessened the chances of a central and coherent, moreover timely, response (Lachica, 2020). Also, the lack of a proper decentralized command structure, the UN’s institutional weaknesses, and the lack of a clear mandate for its peacekeeping forces made it worse and severely restricted or placed any potential intervention between strict boundaries. It became apparent that the Rwandan Genocide proved that the international community had to devise a better and more certain legal strategy for humanitarian intervention. This, in subsequent years, bored the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine intended to balance sovereignty and the need to prevent human rights abuses. Nevertheless, at the time of the genocide, no such framework was in place for the UN that would help it to understand the legal and moral dilemma of intervention, which embodies the UN’s lack of policy in the Rwandan genocide, resulting in one of the worst humanitarian crises of the 20th century (Evans, 2015; Lang, 2016).

Moral Justification and Ethical Dilemmas

Humanitarian intervention is frequently justified on moral grounds, driven by the imperative to stop brutality and protect human rights. In the context of the Rwandan Genocide, the moral argument for intervention was compelling: the communities of nations had it in them to stop this holocaust of innocents. Nevertheless, this moral justification was not universal since another important principle had to be adhered to, namely the sovereignty principle that opposes external involvement in a nation’s affairs (Ramsden, 2016). This tension raised some of the most severe ethical problems for the international society while trying to determine how to respond to the genocide occurring in Rwanda. The principle of state sovereignty is foundational to international law and diplomacy, ensuring that states can govern without external coercion. In some of these areas, sovereignty can become a constraining force to humanitarian intervention, especially when the human rights abuses in a specific country, like in the case of genocide, are extreme. Surprisingly, no society’s tragedy amplified this conflict as much as the Rwanda genocide did. On the one hand, there was a moral imperative that required intervention and prevention of continued genocide of the Tutsis and moderate Hutus. However, there were certain doubts concerning the legal actions of such intervention and further outcomes.

One major ethical dilemma was the risk of exacerbating the conflict. Unfortunately, humanitarian interventions could often cause some unanticipated outcomes, such as exacerbation of the conflict or worsening of the situation in the area. Rwanda was considered as a country where this was likely to occur as any form of intervention was thought to spark a more ferocious battle or even spill over to the neighboring countries. Also, there was a realistic danger of interference forces becoming objects of attack, thus complicating the mission and, quite possibly, contributing to higher losses. Another dilemma involved the allocation of international resources and attention (Power, 2013). Given the numerous crises that take place in different parts of the world, the decision as to which to engage tends to be informed by political and strategic factors, albeit at the cost of ethics. Rwanda’s response from the international community shocked intellectuals as the international community failed to provide adequate assistance partly due to such considerations, which testify to the fact that ethical imperatives are not always easy to follow in practical terms (Ludlow, 1999). The Rwandan Genocide underscored the need for a more coherent and ethically informed framework for humanitarian intervention. In the subsequent years, the notion of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) was built precisely to try to solve similar questions about when and how the international community must intervene in cases of mass atrocities and how it is possible to preserve state sovereignty and protect the victims at the same time.

Arguments Against Intervention

The critiques concerning humanitarian intervention hold the view that such actions result in undesirable outcomes like escalated violence and insecurity. These issues were especially present during the Rwandan Genocide because the commitment to not prolong the conflict and fuel more killing led the UN to be cautious. Silence observed in this case was due to an understanding of realistic factors at play in Rwanda, with any extra military force leading to further exacerbation of the situation (Weiss, 2018). One primary argument against intervention is the risk of escalating violence. As much as intervening with foreign military forces might have been desirable when facing a genocide as pronounced as the Rwandan one, this option might have only led to increased resistance by the Hutu fanatics, who would have escalated the killing spree against the Tutsi people even further. This risk was not hypothetical since, in the past, organizations’ interventions in other parts of the world sometimes resulted in an escalation of conflict rather than settlement (Tusan, 2015). The first reason is that forces under the UN might get themselves involved as targets for oppressive regimes and thus be bogged down and incur more losses in the process.

Another argument focuses on the potential for long-term instability. Action can upset an established status quo and upset an equilibrium that simply remains unstable and invites large-scale fighting. In Rwanda, there was an alarm that any intervention in that sensitive politics with the dominance of ethnic clashes could trigger very terrible events that could affect the entire region. The precedent of the failed attempt in Somalia in 1993, which was an all-around fiasco for the United States and other donors, was heavily on the minds of policymakers, which contributed to their prudence. Furthermore, critics point to the principle of state sovereignty, arguing that external intervention undermines a nation’s right to self-determination. This point of view is somehow skeptical and states that even in circumstances of the unprecedented violation of human rights, the international power should not interfere in internal matters and overthrow the authority of states for fear of the opposite process going on, that is, the use of authority without restraint.

Need for Early Action

One of the most profound lessons derived from the Rwandan Genocide is the imperative of early action in humanitarian crises. It deprived the United Nations of the chance for timely identification of the genocide and for efficient response, which further weakened the organization’s potential for intervention (Haines, 2016). Had the world powers responded to the first indications and symptoms of violence, hate, and upcoming conflicts, countless people’s lives could have been saved, and the further worsening of atrocities could have been prevented. The sad end proved that delayed recognition increased suffering and death; therefore, adequate appreciation of humanitarian problems and prompt use of resources could be an indication of future humanitarian crises. It has evolved subsequent doctrines and policies to focus on anticipating the emergence of new conflicts and avoiding failure in humanitarian crises (Genser, 2017; Evans, 2015).

Adequate Support and Clearly Defined Roles

The Rwandan Genocide blatantly highlighted the critical need for adequate support and clearly defined roles in humanitarian interventions. UNAMIR had a weak mandate and lacked adequate resources and, as a result, was unable adequately to counter the upsurge in violence (Haines, 2016). These gaps became apparent primarily due to the absence of a strong authority capable of addressing the crisis directly, such as the mission’s experience, which pointed to the need to strengthen existing international frameworks for prevention and response. Moving forward, future humanitarian interventions need to prioritize adequate support for peacekeeping missions (Henderson, 2020). This includes making sure that they have adequate resources, supply chain, and political support to carry out their intended tasks efficiently. As important as those guidelines are, special and clear ones, which mean specifically provided instructions of actions that peacekeepers are allowed to perform in order to protect civilians and keep the peace, are equally important. Implications derived from Rwanda with regards to planning deployment of resources for intervention, true international partnership, and support in the event of humanitarian intervention are timely for every one of them (Ludlow, 1999).

Recommendations for Future Interventions

Based on the case of the Rwandan Genocide, several recommendations can be quickly noted when it comes to future humanitarian interventions. First of all, the primary requirement is the speed of response. This problem proves that the international community needs to enhance its methods for timely identification and fast response to new threats. The same commitment from powerful countries that become members of the analysis with adequate political and material support is considered central to interventions (Jemirade, 2021). Cooperation between the actors from different countries would be vital to avoid the inefficiency-oriented problems that occurred in the previous strategies. Moreover, enhancing the capacity of peacekeeping missions is paramount (Krishnan, 2020). This ranges from the supply of adequate resources and support services to training that will enable the peacekeepers to discharge their functions in the most efficient of manners. Tangible and strong rules to secure civilians and ensure peace agreement implementation are also essential for peacekeepers. Through these recommendations, potential and future military operations can ensure they stop or at least mitigate mass atrocities and, in that way, intervene to support the global community’s duty to humanity (Genser, 2017).

Conclusion 

The Rwandan Genocide stands out as a vivid example of the UN’s failures in terms of humanitarian intervention. The tragic events underscored the critical importance of prompt action, sufficient funding, strong political will, and robust international support in preventing and responding to genocides and other mass atrocities. This disaster demonstrated that the UN had structural problems and the cost of a weak reaction or an untimely intervention in humanitarian crises. However, there are a lot of suggestions that can be derived from the Rwandan experience regarding the enhancement of further efforts. Thus, the international community needs to pay more attention to the early response to conflicts, the strengthening of actionable capacities, as well as the precise definition of the tasks and adequate resources for peacekeeping missions to contribute to the overall fight for global justice and human rights protection. The events in Rwanda raise the question to the UN and its member states as to whether they are willing to take greater measures and be more cohesive in their actions concerning humanitarian crises so as to avoid further occurrences of the kind of tragedy that happened in Rwanda and to protect the vulnerable populations globally.

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