WASHINGTON (Islam Online) - A report criticizing the United Nations for its inability to prevent the 1994 genocide in Rwanda arrived just a month after another report on the massacre of
thousands of innocent Muslim civilians in the Bosnian village of Srebrenica.
The latest report illustrates the lack of political will on part of leading members of the U.N. Security Council that cost the lives of an estimated 800,000 Rwandans. The council debated the unfolding horrors of the genocide in Rwanda over many weeks in April and May 1994, but took no action, said the report, which was issued by a U.N. panel and a Swedish committee.
The report critiqued high-ranking U.N. officials bitterly, alluding they failed to take preventive measures before the genocide, and that the fundamental failure was the lack of resources and the lack of will to make the commitment necessary to stop the genocide.
The Security Council gave peacekeepers inadequate firepower and a weak mandate, which made it almost impossible for them to protect the civilian population against the atrocities committed, the report said.
The United States and other western governments had unilaterally decided to act through NATO to salvage the situation, sidestepping the United Nations.
The independent inquiry team, headed by Ingvar Carisson, a former Swedish prime minister, said the United Nations had neglected evidence that genocide was planned and had refused to act once it had started.
The team also reported that the incompetence and political paralysis of the United States and other major powers consequently led to the failure to stop the genocide. Apologies over the past year by world leaders, including U.S. President Bill Clinton and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, were inadequate.
The report, based on U.N. documents and interviews with more than 100 officials, is highly critical of Kofi Annan of Ghana, who was head of the U.N.'s peacekeeping department in 1994, and of his principal deputy, Iqbal Riza of Pakistan. The report also blames Security Council member United States of America for its inability to provide the world body with political support and material means to prevent the genocide.
According to the report, Annan and Riza neglected a U.N. commander in Africa, Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire of Canada, who had repeatedly warned that mass murder was being planned. An authorization from U.N. headquarters to Dallier to use force to disarm the plotters was granted, but Annan and Riza told the commander that he had neither the mandate nor the means to use force.
The panel investigating team makes a number of policy recommendations designed to ensure that similar failings do not occur again.
