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‘Never again,’ again and again

Analysis: What has the international community learned since failing Rwanda?

Twenty years ago this week, a small and then relatively unknown country in East Africa erupted into a paroxysm of violence. In the roughly 100 days between early April and mid-July 1994, the Rwandan army, government-backed militias and Hutu civilians slaughtered ethnic Tutsi and moderate Hutu in a shocking display of human savagery. Between 800,000 and 1 million people were killed.

As the killing unfolded the world stood silent, its attention elsewhere. That month, the American news cycle was flooded with coverage of rock singer Kurt Cobain’s suicide. In Africa, an ecstatic South Africa was about to elect Nelson Mandela as its first black president. In the shadow of global media attention, national capitals avoided reference to “genocide” for the moral and legal requirements it demanded. Though the United Nations had more than 2,000 peacekeeping troops in Rwanda, the Security Council ignored repeated requests by the force commander to be given the mandate to intervene. As the bloodshed escalated, peacekeeping troops were withdrawn, and Rwanda was left to its fate.

“The genocide in Rwanda that targeted the Tutsi was one of the darkest chapters in human history,” said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, speaking in Rwanda's capital, Kigali, on Monday. “We could have done much more. We should have done much more.”

This week has marked an intense period of reflection among policymakers over how much has changed in the two decades since the Rwandan genocide. Much of the focus is on whether the international community is better able and more willing to intervene in the face of mass murder. Though progress has been made, to many observers the lessons learned have not always been followed by action. Violence in places like Syria and the Central African Republic indicate that the world has yet to overcome its divisions and indifference in the face of atrocity.

There are several important strides that have been made. International criminal courts are expanding their reach, leading the shift “from the culture of impunity to a culture of accountability,” according to Adama Dieng, the U.N. special adviser on the prevention of genocide. The international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda have prosecuted dozens of perpetrators. The International Criminal Court came into being just eight years after the Rwandan genocide. Though it is accused of bias against Africa — with only two convictions in 12 years, both against former African leaders, and all of the eight current investigations involving African countries — warlords and despotic leaders now at least face the threat of prosecution for their crimes.

The number of civil society organizations like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Doctors Without Borders is growing, and they are becoming more sophisticated in their approaches. They are now better able to use technology to alert diplomats, journalists and the public to atrocities as they unfold. This helps put immediate pressure on domestic decision makers to act. “It is in the realm of domestic politics that the battle to stop genocide is lost,” wrote Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., in her seminal 2002 book “A Problem From Hell,” about U.S. inaction in the face of genocide. “American political leaders interpret society-wide silence as an indicator of public indifference,” Powers wrote.

‘Responsibility to Protect’

During the U.N.’s period of self-scrutiny immediately following the events of 1994, then-Secretary-General Kofi Annan was moved to ask when and if military intervention is ever justified. The answer, the “Responsibility to Protect,” or “R2P” as it became known, was a complete shift in paradigm and perhaps the most significant change in international order in centuries. R2P seeks to make it the duty of the international community to intervene when national governments fail to fulfill their responsibility to protect citizens from genocide, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity and war crimes. “If there is a legacy of Rwanda, it's the Responsibility to Protect,” Simon Adams, the director of the Center for the Responsibility to Protect, told Al Jazeera. “It’s the culmination of 10 years of mulling over the extent of the enormity of the catastrophe of Rwanda, and of the failure of the U.N."

Though peacekeeping has been around since shortly after the founding of the U.N., R2P made the protection of civilians a central part of the mandate of missions in Darfur, Mali, South Sudan and the new mission to the Central African Republic. An “intervention brigade” was added to the peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo last year, and authorized to shoot first in the fight against the M23 rebels — unlike any peacekeeping mission before it. And in 2011, R2P was invoked by the U.N. Security Council to authorize military action in Libya to protect civilians under threat by government forces. 

But the culture of bureaucratic paralysis, which allowed the U.N. to stand by as genocide in Rwanda — and, just one year later, in Srebrenica — unfolded before its eyes, remained. In a tragic parallel, 15 years later, U.N. personnel were evacuated from Sri Lanka during the final months of its civil war as tens of thousands of civilians were murdered by government and rebel soldiers. An internal U.N. review concluded that the withdrawal was part of a “systemic failure” reminiscent of Rwanda.

In response, in December 2013 Secretary-General Ban launched “Rights Up Front,” an initiative aimed at retraining U.N. staff and encouraging a culture of action. Dieng, the U.N. special adviser, noted the events that unfolded that same month in South Sudan — where the head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission opened U.N. compound doors to tens of thousands of civilians fleeing fighting, instead of barricading them out — as a sign of positive change.

“At the end of the day, when people are facing the risk of genocide and war crimes, they have to be protected,” Dieng said. “It will be a disaster to keep quiet when these situations happen.”

But the same agreement that elevated R2P also made it necessary for the U.N. Security Council to be the sole institution capable of authorizing intervention. Russia, China, the United States, the U.K. and France — the five permanent members of the Security Council — have to agree to either go ahead with a military intervention or stand aside. “This means that the politics of the Security Council are determining now if the Responsibility to Protect is going to kick in,” said Thomas Weiss, professor of political science at the City University of New York Graduate Center. “For Syria, this means paralysis,” he said, referring to the three resolutions on Syria vetoed by Russia and China, allies of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

And in other crises, it means delay. On Thursday the Security Council authorized a nearly 12,000-strong peacekeeping force in the Central African Republic, which has been ripped apart by violence between Muslims and Christians. It will take over from a beleaguered group of African Union soldiers, but not until Sept. 15. Some human rights advocates say the council wasted months negotiating the resolution as the country descended into chaos, which Dieng warned in November was at risk of spiraling into genocide.

“This resolution proves that the U.N. has gone a long way since Rwanda on learning how to deal with potential mass atrocities,” said Philippe Bolopion, the United Nations director for Human Rights Watch, to Al Jazeera. “But also that it has a long way to go in terms of timely reaction. We started calling for a U.N. peacekeeping mission in November, and, had the council listened at the time, peacekeepers would now be able to deploy and make a difference on the ground, rather than be a distant prospect.”

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Africa, Rwanda
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United Nations

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Places
Africa, Rwanda
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United Nations

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