{Twenty years after the Rwandan Genocide, the former Force Commander of the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda, said that in the months leading to the genocide, “the international community did its best to ignore Rwanda.”}
Speaking to a Press Conference on “Genocide: A Preventable Crime – Understanding Early Warning of Mass Atrocities,” Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire, who was the Force Commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission For Rwanda (UNAMIR) said the conflict “wasn’t under the radars, it was of no self-interest, it was no strategic value.”
Dallaire admitted that mistakes were made in the field and at UN Headquarters, but he stressed that the onus “is on every state that make up this UN, and how every sovereign state washed it’s hands, didn’t want to get involved.”
The former Force Commander said that today “we have actually been given the tools to fight impunity in the field, and not just in the courts afterwards” but member states are still “reticent because self-interest still dominates, and the human being is still the lowest factor of intervention, let alone prevention.”
Speaking of the 2011 Libyan conflict, Dallaire said that when former Libyan leader Muammar al-Qadhafi, referring to the rebel forces said he would “crush these cockroaches,” that was “the day that boots had to be on the ground. Not planes in the air at 10,000 feet but boots on the ground in order to separate, to establish a ability for a separation force to be there and not let the, call them rebels, bleed and fight, and have to, an nor let the Qadhafi forces run amuck as they wanted to.”
Also speaking at the same press conference, Rwandan Ambassador Eugene-Richard Gasana said it was “a shame to the UN” that the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) continued to operate in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
Gasana said the United Nations is spending “billions and billions of dollars” in the DRC, while the FDLR, widely considered to be responsible for the Rwandan Genocide “are still there, they are not doing anything about it, against it.”
Gasana asked “what do you want us to say about that? That they learned the lesson? No.”
During the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, up to one million people perished and as many as 250,000 women were raped, leaving the country’s population traumatized and its infrastructure decimated. Since then, Rwanda has embarked on an ambitious justice and reconciliation process.
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