Intervention in the Rwandan Genocide Essay -- Rwanda History Essays Ge

The Hutus and Tutsis were not traditionally different, and ethnicity in Rwanda only became important during Belgium colonization when the more European-looking Tutsis were chosen as the aristocracy to rule over the Hutus. After Rwanda's independence in 1961 the Hutu majority, comprising roughly 85% of the population, ruled the country. Between 1961 and the outbreak of genocide in 1994 many Tutsis fled the regime due to its discriminatory practices and anti-Tutsi policies. Even after gaining control of the country, however, Hutus had been scared of a Tutsi coup or an invasion from the Tutsi refugees in neighboring Uganda. The regime of president Habyarimana played on these fears in order to distract Rwandans from failing policies and keep their declining party in power. It was the assassination of the president that precipitated the implementation of ethnic cleansing, although not the cause; plans for such an event had been planned out by Colonel Bogasata the previous year, the assass ination of the country's Hutu leader just happened to be a convenient event for his clique of extremist Hutus to exploit. In October of 1993 the UN Security Council authorized the UN Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR) following a period of strife between the Rwandan Patriotic Front and the Hutu regime of Rwanda. When the government ordered assassinations were carried out in Kigali on April 6, 1994 there were about 2,500 UNIMAR peacekeepers in Rwanda. Soon after the violent outbreak Hutu government forces executed ten Belgian UNIMAR peacekeepers. On April 14 Belgium announced that it would be withdrawing its UNIMAR battalion, an action that unnerved other involved states and led the U.N. Security Council to cut the number of troops to a mere 270 the following week. Only after a month of vacillation did the UNSC vote to send 5,500 troops back into Rwanda, but it still dragged its feet and as of July only 10% of the promised force had been deployed (Economist, 1994). The RPF, meanwhile, had launched into Rwanda and by mid-July, it had ousted the genocidal regime from Rwanda. Preceding the Rwandan genocide, numerous western states made claims of their willingness to intervene in a humanitarian crisis, and this kind of rhetoric has proved counterproductive in the past by encouraging insecure regimes to act hastily. Alan Kuperman said ?If the West is unwilling to deploy such robust for... ...city in the genocide. This has further damaged relations between the ethnic groups, and has deepened the preexisting cleavages. The presence of a peacekeeping force to maintain order and accountability of the new regime could have hampered such atrocities. The Rwandan situation highlights the limits of intervention, and unfortunately as long as the duty of intervening lies in the hands of slow-responding multinational bodies and democracies too scared of a plummeting public opinion to risk troops for less central or non-state interests, it appears that humanitarian crises run the risk of progressing unacceptably far before the situation can be brought back under control. Works Cited The Economist. Learning from Rwanda (U.N. Peacekeeping Operations). April, 1994. Alison Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch/FIDH, 1999). Kuperman, Alan J. Rwanda in Retrospect. Foreign Affairs 79, no. 1 pp. 94-118 Jan/Feb, 2000. Report of the Independent Inquiry Into the Actions of the United Nations During the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda, 15 December 1999, accessed December 17, 1999 at http://www.un.org/News/dh/latest/rwanda.htm.