Why Did Rwanda Genocide Happen

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The Genocide in Rwanda: Why did it happen? On April 7th 1994 the day after the presidents of the African states of Rwanda and Burundi had been killed in a plane crash near the Rwandan capital, what followed is one of the darkest and most brutal tragedies in modern history. Leaders of the Hutu Power and other hard-line extremists orchestrated the annihilation of around 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus and further displaced another 4 million. There are many factors which influenced the genocide including the radical ideologies of the extremist faction of the Habyarimana regime but ultimately the catastrophic failures of the UN and the idleness international community led to genocide. Rwanda is a country with a rich colonial history; firstly…show more content…
Military Intervention led to the deaths of 18 American soldiers and subsequently shaped America’s foreign policy. In October 1993 United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) was set up to broker a ceasefire between armed Forces of the mainly Hutu Government of Rwanda and the Tutsi-led Rwandese Patriotic Front, but with a ‘token force’ of 270 soldiers the task was clearly impossible. The lack of international commitment was clearly effected by the events of Mogadishu and to make matters worse in May 1994 President Clinton enforced a Presidential Decision Directive (PPD) which limited US involvement in peacekeeping operations to situations in which American national security interests were at stake, evidently they believed their national security was not at stake in Rwanda. Clinton’s stance was echoed by Kofi Annan who was then the head of peacekeeping for the UN. Annan on January 11, 1994, ignored the advice of Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian UN force commander in Kigali who “sent a "most immediate" cable to UN headquarters in New York indicating that a top level trainer of the Interahamwe militia had come forward with information to the effect that he had trained seventeen hundred men, now scattered in groups of forty throughout Kigali.” This message which Dallaire speaks about in his book ‘Shaking hands with the Devil’ is nothing less that…show more content…
'Leave None to Tell the Story': Genocide in Rwanda. New York, NY: n.p., 1999. Print. * Dallaire, Roméo, and Brent Beardsley. Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. New York, NY: Carroll & Graf, 2005. Print. * Jones, Bruce ‘Peacemaking in Rwanda: The Dynamics of Failure’ Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001 * Martin, Guy. ‘Readings of the Rwandan Genocide’ African Studies Review, Vol. 45, No. 3. (Dec., 2002) * http://www.un.org/en/preventgenocide/adviser/pdf/osapg_analysis_framework.pdf -------------------------------------------- [ 1 ]. Forges, Alison Des. 'Leave None to Tell the Story': Genocide in Rwanda. New York, NY: n.p., 1999. Print. Page 34 [ 2 ]. http://www.un.org/en/preventgenocide/adviser/pdf/osapg_analysis_framework.pdf [ 3 ]. Martin, Guy. ‘Readings of the Rwandan Genocide’ African Studies Review, Vol. 45, No. 3. (Dec., 2002)- page 22 [ 4 ]. Forges, Alison Des. 'Leave None to Tell the Story': Genocide in Rwanda. New York, NY: n.p., 1999. Print. Page 482 [ 5 ]. Dallaire, Roméo, and Brent Beardsley. Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. New York, NY: Carroll & Graf, 2005.

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