Never Again: Revisiting the 1994 Rwandan Genocide
A monument over a mass grave, commemorating the 800,000 lives lost in the brutal 100-day Rwandan genocide. Photo by Adam Jones.
“Never again must we be shy in the face of the evidence.”
President Bill Clinton arrived in Rwanda in 1998 with weight on his shoulders, just four years after his administration failed to recognize the situation in Rwanda for what it was: an ethnic genocide. In 1959, the Hutus overthrew the Tutsi monarchy, leading to thousands of Tutsi fleeing to neighboring countries. After an extended period of conflict between the two sides, a peace deal was signed in 1993. However, less than a year later, on April 6th, 1994, a plane carrying then-President Juvenal Habyarimana and his Burundi counterpart was shot down—killing everyone on board. Both President Habyarimana and Burundi President Cyprien Ntaryamira belonged to the Hutu tribe. Around 85% of Rwandans are Hutus, despite the Tutsi minority’s long-held political dominance. When President Habyarimana’s plane was shot down less than a year after the peace agreement, Hutu extremists blamed the Tutsi for violating the peace agreement.
What happened next is nearly impossible to comprehend: a 100-day spree where militias from the Hutu tribe brutally killed innocent members of the minority Tutsi tribe. Across the country, the slaughter occurred in plain sight and with vicious precision, while both the UN and Belgium had forces stationed in Rwanda. Hutu men killed their Tutsi wives. Priests slaughtered innocent Tutsi men and women in the very churches in which they sought refuge. Both UN peacekeepers and Belgian forces, fearing Hutu aggression, pulled out of the country.
For the Tutsi, the departure of these forces signified something deeper: that the international community had abandoned them. The U.S., paralyzed by the recently failed “Black Hawk Down'' incident in Somalia, was hesitant to get involved in another conflict in Africa. In all, between 800,000 and one million people were slaughtered while the United States, and the world, did nothing. The gruesome killing spree in Rwanda will forever be a stain on both the United States’ foreign policy and the international community. In reckoning with Washington’s misstep, one must first ask three simple questions: Were there early warning signs that genocide was set to commence? Is the U.S. response to genocide a global anomaly? Is intervening in cases of genocide justified? By answering these questions, we not only will have a better understanding of why Washington failed to act then, but also why we are in danger of repeating the same mistakes in today’s world.
Early Warning Signs
Clearly, Rwanda was on President Clinton’s agenda when he took office in 1993. Documents warning about the tragedy in Rwanda date back to the administration of George H.W. Bush, Clinton’s predecessor. One such report, written in 1992, warned “that Hutu extremists with links to Rwanda’s ruling party were believed to be advocating the extermination of ethnic Tutsis”. According to Foreign Policy, the earliest cable warning of possible ethnic violence from the U.S. Embassy’s deputy chief of mission sent from Kigali in August 1992, four months before President Clinton took the oath of office.
With this in mind, the first question is perhaps the simplest to answer. In an interview with the Columbia Political Review, Professor Roy Licklider, an Adjunct Senior Research Scholar at the Saltzman Institute for War and Peace Studies and Adjunct Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, put it plainly, stating, “It’s not just genocide. It’s any mass violence. The standards are long-term hatred between groups, long-term interactions between groups, and perception of inequality between groups.” He believes, rather pragmatically, that the warning signs of genocide are not just present but easily recognizable. “Something is wrong in the country involved,” he continued. “It could be a civil war, a depression, or something else. All of those are contributors to an environment where genocide seems imminent.” Rwanda, a country that had recently experienced a regime change followed by a civil war, showed multiple of these contributors. Tensions between the Hutu and the Tutsi were not new. Twenty-two years before the genocide, in 1962, the Hutu majority viciously killed thousands of Tutsi men and women, causing thousands to flee the country. In neighboring Burundi, the Tutsi maintained control over the country’s government and military through violence committed against the Hutu. The instability and conflict match Professor Licklider’s conception of early warning signs, making the U.S. all the more culpable for missing, or ignoring, such clear indications that genocide was set to occur.
Professor Licklider’s answer seems in lockstep with the rest of the international human rights community. According to the UN Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, atrocity crimes “are processes; they require planning and preparation.” Atrocity crimes are simply too massive an undertaking to be spontaneous. With this in mind, it is even more difficult to comprehend U.S. inaction. If the majority of the international community recognizes that a genocide has early warning signs, why didn’t the U.S. take them seriously? The Clinton administration watched the massacre of the Tutsi people in Rwanda. They cannot claim they weren’t aware.
In the months following the slaughter, the administration didn’t just fail to call the situation a genocide––it went so far as to actively warn against such a classification. According to a Defense Department discussion paper, a “genocide finding could commit [the U.S.] to actually ‘do something.'” Simply put, the United States was presented with the facts and chose to ignore them. Perhaps it is best summarized by Greg Stanton, a professor at George Mason University and the president of Genocide Watch: “When President Clinton said after the Rwandan genocide, ‘We really didn't know,' I'll be direct. He was lying.”
All Eyes Look to the Free World
Before addressing the question of whether or not the U.S. should intervene in cases of genocide, it is important to first address why the nation has been so hesitant to do so in the past. It is equally important to recognize that Washington’s poor track record on the subject is anything but a global outlier. “Intervention to prevent genocide is very rare,” said Professor Licklider. “It’s rare historically, and it’s rare recently.”
Intervention refers to an economic or military response to a country’s affairs. Professor Licklider’s bleak assessment of the history of genocide intervention is corroborated by a wealth of historical evidence. In Rwanda, for example, the UN was met with heavy resistance when it attempted to solicit troops. Initially, in fact, only Belgium and Bangladesh offered any troops at all—a pitiful 400 troops each.
Instead, each global power focused on issues of immediate importance for their own countries: Belgium on extricating its peacekeepers with as little dishonor as possible; the U.S. on avoiding to commit resources to a crisis severed from U.S. concerns; and France on protecting its zone of Francophone influence.
This is not to say that intervention was unjustified. In fact, international law proves the contrary. The adopted 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide both established that genocide is an international crime and explicated an obligation to prevent and prosecute cases in which it has occurred. Despite having international law on their side, no countries—with the partial exception of Bangladesh and Belgium—invoked this call to action. While global leaders were quick to rectify their inaction, their explanations fell flat.
Four months after the slaughter of 800,000 Tutsi people, then-France President François Mitterrand infamously asked, “What genocide are you talking about, Sir, that of the Hutus against the Tutsi or of the Tutsis against Hutus?" President Mitterrand’s quip highlights the reluctance of global leaders to admit that they sat on the sidelines. It is much easier, perhaps, to muddy the water. While the world has been painfully slow to recognize cases of genocide, it is been even worse at acknowledging it.
According to a special report by the Council on Foreign Relations, the UN Security Council—which is often unable to agree on any tangible measures to prevent genocide—resorted to weak responses while the genocide occurred, as only diluted action could garner enough support to implement. Responses like French President Mitterrand’s, which sow confusion about the true perpetrators of genocide, have been common in the immediate wake of atrocity crimes. It should be said, however, that the confusion that follows cases of genocide is not entirely fictional. It can be difficult to identify all those involved in the planning and execution of genocide and the extent to which they were involved. To credit the U.N., the Security Council ordered states to arrest anyone suspected of taking part in the genocide, and announced eight indictments of alleged participants in December of 1995, over a year after the genocide began. The international community had an extremely difficult time eliciting meaningful witness testimony, as Hutu extremists carried out a series of murders against people who testified. Punishing acts of genocide becomes even more complicated when its perpetrators cross international borders. Multiple refugee camps in neighboring Zaire fell under control of the Hutu, even after the new government in Rwanda was established. That being said, it would be ludicrous to suggest that President Mitterrand was so ill-informed of world affairs that he couldn’t confidently say which side was responsible for the slaughter.
Like the U.S., France has little room to avoid responsibility. It is the responsibility of each of these nations and its leaders to pay attention, both to the warning signs that genocide could be imminent and to the perpetrators it when it occurs. Although countries like France and the U.S. are more than willing to intervene in a wealth of foreign affairs, such as securing foreign ports, toppling oppressive dictators, or even launching a multinational military effort to liberate Kuwait in order to protect its oil interests. Despite that, it seems—at least for the time being—that these same countries have failed to step up to the plate in the most important section of foreign policy: protecting human life.
Fool Me Once
Genocide prevention carries political repercussions. Military action is a tough sell, and Washington policymakers have often refrained from addressing the subject altogether. “Genocide is a subject where you get penalized for failure, and not much reward for success,” said Professor Licklider with a smile. Genocide is carried out by illogical actors—rendering logical solutions obsolete. Those who argue against military intervention often point to its unsuccessful past. It is helpful, perhaps, to look at past decisions on part of the U.S. to determine whether intervention is truly as ill-fated as policymakers would make it seem. There is no better place to start than by looking at the United States’s military intervention in Somalia in 1993. Following its independence in 1960, Somalia enjoyed only a brief period of peace before the Somali Armed Forces launched a coup, placing authoritarian Mohamed Siad Barre in office. A period of unrest followed, with rebels eventually joining forces to drive Siad Barre out of the capital and plunging the leader-less country into further conflict. President George H.W. Bush ordered troops into Somalia to deliver aid intended to relieve the resulting country-wide famine. In October 1993, now under the direction of President Clinton, U.S. forces conducted a failed raid to capture Somali warlord Mohammed Aidid, which led to the deaths of 18 U.S. troops. The “Black Hawk Down'' incident was widely viewed as a failure, and President Clinton soon pulled U.S. forces out of the country. The mission was wildly unpopular, and President Clinton suffered politically. A year later, when faced with the ongoing genocide in Rwanda, the President—still haunted by the failed Black Hawk Down incident—chose not to intervene.
It is easy to view the conflict in Somalia as giving credence to the argument that the effectiveness of intervention in humanitarian crises outside of our own borders has run its course. Professor Licklider disagrees. “I doubt it,” he said flatly. “At some point, the U.S. will have to hold its nose and go back in.” It is important to note that while the conflict in Somalia was certainly an atrocity, it was not a genocide.
Years after President Clinton’s Black Hawk Down raid, President Barack Obama ordered U.S. troops into Libya to protect peaceful protestors from ruthless dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi. The President defended the move by saying, “We knew that if we waited one more day, Benghazi—a city nearly the size of Charlotte—could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.” The U.S. had a moral obligation to act, the President argued. In its wake, the intervention not only failed to protect democracy but instead promoted a failed state. It has been called President Obama’s “worst mistake,” and has been used to argue that humanitarian intervention is no longer justified. While the intervention in Libya was ultimately a failure, it provides an important lesson: that the U.S. failed to meaningfully consider the consequences of the day after. President Obama, talking to lawmakers, infamously said that U.S. involvement in Libya would last “days, not weeks.” The Obama administration’s goal, to end al-Qaddafi’s regime, was misaligned for the conflict they were entering. This was the mission’s fatal flaw. By insisting on minimizing the mission, the U.S. failed to follow through, toppling the oppressive regime without considering the difficulty of rebuilding what the last government had destroyed. The Obama administration, much like the Clinton and Bush administrations, correctly asserted that the United States had a moral obligation to intervene in atrocity crimes, but was only willing to commit to nominal action in the fear of political repercussions.
The criticism, therefore, should not be of intervention in general, but rather how the U.S. chooses to intervene, and what it hopes to achieve. The U.S. failed to plan for the morning after, much to the detriment of its goal. Any act of intervention, military or otherwise, must be carried out with proactive planning, precision, and care. This is where the U.S. has failed.
The global community has a poor record of genocide prevention. All too often, global powers have been slow to identify situations in which genocide is set to commence, acknowledge it once it does, and prevent it from continuing. That being said, the U.S. has no reason to brag: the nation’s lack of action, and its subsequent lack of leadership, has given other world leaders the room they desire to avoid responsibility. What is clear, however, is that the world takes its cues from Washington, where U.S. officials have been quick to bury knowledge of early warning signs, refuse to label genocide once it occurs, and commit only to nominal action, if any action at all. Washington’s missteps are not due to a lack of knowledge or precedent. It's due to a lack of will. Since World War II, the U.S. has never intervened to prevent genocide. When the U.S. has intervened on humanitarian grounds, its efforts have been thwarted by a lack of commitment and misaligned goals. In Rwanda, as in every case of genocide, paralysis in foreign policy costs thousands of lives. Millions of innocent men and women were trapped and left to die, all while the global community, which had every legal and moral justification to intervene, watched. When reflecting on past atrocity crimes, it is all too easy to point fingers, decrying inaction. What takes real courage, however, is using the lessons of the past to act in the present.
Genocide has not gone away. Today, situations in Sudan, China, Myanmar, and Syria meet the requirements to be classified as genocides, as defined by the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. In China, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, between eight hundred thousand and two million Uyghur men and women have been detained since April 2017, most without being charged with a crime. Outside of the detention camps, officials have destroyed thousands of mosques, Communist Party members have been recruited to stay in Uyghur homes to report of “extremist” behavior (including fasting during Ramadan, a Islamic requirement), and Uyghur women have reported forced sterilization. Once again, the early warning signs were present as early as 2017, yet the U.S. failed to even recognize the situation as a genocide until January of 2021, over 3 years later. While innocent people are being displaced, detained, sterilized, and killed by their own government, the world has once again turned to the United States. Washington must put immense pressure on the international community to condemn China for their actions through sanctions and halting business with Chinese companies. The U.S. has classified the situation a genocide—it is now Washington’s responsibility to “do something”. Now is the time for the U.S. to prove that it has learned from its mistakes in nations such as Rwanda and Libya. Now is the time, for the first time, to make good on President Clinton’s promise. “The United States charts the course,” said Professor Licklider, as we concluded our interview. “A lot of times, the United States must decide, for the entire world, whether to act in times of crisis, or whether to stay silent.”
Collin Woldt is a rising sophomore at Columbia College planning to study international politics and human rights. He spent his junior year of high school working for the United States Senate, and he hopes to become a human rights attorney.