‘Never again,’ again and again

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 As the bloodshed escalated, peacekeeping troops were withdrawn, and Rwanda was left to its fate.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.”

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.