Also in this section:

• OpEds from the New York Post
• OpEds from other publications

The U.N.Shrugged
by Jonathan Foreman
The New York Post, April 7, 2004

Ten years ago today the Rwanda massacres began in earnest. It was the worst genocide since the Holocaust. And it will forever be a stain on the record of the Clinton administration, the United Nations and the whole so-called "international community." Nothing the Clintonites ever did or were accused of doing comes close to the grotesque immorality of their failure to act to stop the Rwanda slaughter.

And no matter how intimately U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan turns out to have been involved with the U.N./Iraq Oil-for-Food scandal, with its billion-dollar scams and disgusting collaboration with the Saddam regime, the real measure of his failure as international diplomat is Rwanda.

Nothing the outside world has learned in the intervening decade dilutes the guilt of those who stood by and allowed the killing to go on, when (as Canadian Gen. Romeo Dallaire pointed out) 2,000 Western troops could probably have stopped it in its tracks.

Indeed, the two big things we have learned are:

• The Rwanda genocide was no spontaneous outburst of traditional tribal hatred, but a carefully planned mass murder operation. And,
• France played a key role in enabling that operation.

In the wake of the shooting down of President Juvenal Habayarimana's plane on April 6, 1994, at least 800,000 men women and children were butchered over 100 days.

Most were members of the Tutsi minority; some were some moderates from the Hutu majority.

The weapons were primitive: machetes and garden hoes. But the means by which the killing was organized were modern enough: Government radio stations and newspapers encouraged and coordinated the extermination efforts of the Hutu militia.

A small contingent of U.N. peacekeeping troops was in the country when the violence started. There as part of a peace process between the Rwandan government and a predominantly Tutsi rebel force, they refused to intervene when the slaughter began because it wasn't in their mandate.

On April 7, 10 of them, Belgian paratroopers, were ordered to disarm in order not to "provoke" a Hutu crowd. When they did so, they were mutilated and murdered. The U.N. Security Council, with the full blessing of the U.S. representative, then ordered the remaining peacekeepers to withdraw.

When it became obvious that the outside world would not intervene, the killing intensified.

The Clinton administration - still badly rattled by the debacle in Somalia, where it pulled out U.S. troops after the loss of 18 soldiers (in a battle that was in fact a triumph against extraordinary odds) - steadfastly opposed any kind of intervention by the United States or its allies. U.S. diplomats refused to use the word "genocide" in connection with Rwanda in order to avoid triggering American treaty obligations (in particular the 1948 Genocide Convention) to prevent such occurences.

Incidentally, Richard Clarke, then a top National Security Council aide, was the loudest voice against intervention - at one point complaining to Madeline Albright that the evacuation of U.N. troops was proceeding too slowly.

Annan was then the head of U.N. peacekeeping forces. His failure to push for action from member states soon after his organization's gross failure to prevent the horrors of Bosnia's war of "ethnic cleansing" is harder to understand - except to the extent that Annan's career has been marked by a Third Worldist hostility to interference in the internal affairs of post-colonial states and by an engrossing obsession with the Middle East.

What eventually brought the massacres to an end was the victory of the mainly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front.

But the killing continued even after the RPF took control of the capital Kigali - thanks to a belated, U.N.-authorized intervention by French troops. One of the most cynical and immoral acts of the 20th century, this French intervention ("Operation Turquoise") was actually on behalf of the Hutu murderers in the "Interhamwe" militia and the (French trained and equipped) Rwandan army.

The French troops created a "safe area" where the old Hutu government retained control - and there the slaughter of Tutsis continued under the noses of the so-called peacekeepers until July.

Which makes it all the more sickening that the American Left and much of European opinion now hold France up as the bulwark of international law, multilateralism and morality in international politics.

America, though rightly blamed for the genocides it fails to prevent, is rarely if ever praised for the ones it does prevent or avenge. And at least the United States seems to have learned something from Rwanda. The failure there may have spurred Clinton to act in Kosovo, and helped create the intellectual climate in which many liberals supported George W. Bush's liberation of Iraq.

On the other hand, even now the Arab rulers of Sudan are engaged in a war of racial extermination against the country's black tribes, while the United Nations, the United States and the European states - despite their moral posturing—do nothing.