Why the World Did Not Stop the Rwandan Genocide

A UN peacekeeping force, UNAMIR, was already in Rwanda in 1994, commanded by Canadian general Roméo Dallaire. In January he warned UN headquarters of a plot to exterminate Tutsi and of hidden weapons, but he was told not to raid the caches. After ten Belgian peacekeepers were killed in April, Belgium withdrew its troops, and on 21 April the Security Council voted to cut the force to a few hundred.

Major powers avoided the word 'genocide', partly because it might create pressure to act; the United States, shaped by its losses in Somalia in 1993, was reluctant to commit troops. France had close ties to the Rwandan government, and its later Opération Turquoise remains controversial. Afterwards, an independent UN inquiry in 1999 described a failure of the whole UN system, and US President Bill Clinton apologised in Kigali in 1998. Rwanda became a central reference point for debates on whether outsiders have a duty to intervene.