The UN Security Council, Indifference, and Genocide in Rwanda

Habyarimana of Rwanda had mysteriously crashed as it approached the Kigali airport. My first response was to study the photograph of the dead president; after closely covering his comings and goings for the past several months, it struck me as odd that the first time that I would see his face was in a newspaper article announcing his death. Then I felt frustration bordering on exasperation. As a political officer at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations who was assigned to cover Rwanda, I had spent the last part of March consumed by the negotiations on the mandate extension of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR). Although many of the Security Council debates on whether to extend a mandate and under what conditions have a scripted quality that foreordain renewal, this instance was uncharacteristically lengthy and contentious. UNAMIR was charged with overseeing the implementation of the Arusha Accords, the blueprint to end the civil war between the Tutsi-backed Rwandan Patriotic Forces (RPF) and the Hutu-dominated Rwandan government, and to