Their were UN troops in Rwanda when the genocide broke out. An informer told the UN of the plans for genocide.
Also Rwanda had just begun a term on the UN Security Council when the genocide started.
216.239.37.100
Dallaire sent his draft rules to New York for the approval of the UN Secretariat in late November. By this time, the situation in Rwanda was already rapidly deteriorating. The ferocious violence unleashed by the assassination of Burundi's President Ndadaye a month earlier had sent hundreds of thousands of virulently anti-Tutsi Hutu fleeing into Rwanda, while Hutu radicals in Rwanda exploited the upheaval. Dallaire's Pparagraph 17 was an attempt to prepare his puny command to deal more effectively with the situation that was already developing. New York never formally responded to his request for approval of his draft rules. But on every single subsequent occasion when he asked for more flexibility, he was firmly commanded, in no uncertain terms, to interpret his mandate in the most narrow and restricted way possible.
13.26. Never was this clearer than in New York's response to a cable from Dallaire dated 11 January 11, 1994, which one writer rather melodramatically labelled the genocide fax .'[33] (Although it is perhaps the best-known cable-fax of recent times, it only became public when it was leaked to a journalist in November 1995. Unaccountably, a copy was not included in the official UN record published in 1996 by the UN Department of Public Information, The United Nations and Rwanda, 1993-1996). The previous day, Colonel Luc Marchal, the Belgian officer who was commander of UNAMIR's Kigali sector, had met in great secrecy with an informant referred to only as Jean-Pierre, apparently a senior member of the feared interahamwe militia. Jean-Pierre Twatsinze, as he was later known to be, told Marchal that he had no objection to war against the RPF, but that his "mission now was to prepare the killing of civilians and Tutsi people, to make lists of Tutsi people, where they lived, to be able at a certain code name to kill them. Kigali city, he said, was divided in a certain number of areas, and each area was manned by&, let's say10, ten or maybe more people. Some were armed with firearms, some with machetes, and the mission of those persons was just to kill the Tutsi ...& Jean-Pierre gave& me a very good and clear description about the interahamwe organizsation. He described the cells, the armaments, the training, and he told me that everybody was suspected....[The goal] was to kill a maximum of Tutsi ..&. I felt it was a real killing machine because the objective was very clear for everybody -- kill, kill, and kill...just Tutsi must be killed. [34]
13.27. Dallaire immediately relayed to New York the main points conveyed by Jean-Pierre. They contained the information that a deliberate strategy had been planned to provoke the killing of Belgian soldiers, an event that could be expected to result in the withdrawal of the entire Belgian contingent from Rwanda. The interahamwe was said to have trained 1,700 men who were scattered in groups of 40 throughout Kigali. The informant had been ordered to register all Tutsi in Kigali,, and he suspected it was for their extermination. He said that his militia men were now able to kill up to 1,000 Tutsi in 20 minutes. Finally, the informant reported the existence of a weapons cache with at least 135 weapons --not a huge number,, but, according to the Arusha agreement Kigali was to be a weapons-free zone. Jean-Pierre was prepared to show UNAMIR the location of the weapons, if his family could be given protection.[35]
13.28. Dallaire sent this cable to Major-General Maurice Baril, Military Adviser to the UN Secretary-General. As was usual, Baril shared the fax with select other senior officials in the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), including Kofi Annan, then the Under-Secretary- General responsible for the Department, and his second-in-command, Assistant Secretary-General Iqbal Riza. The Carlsson Inquiry report faults Dallaire for failing to send his cable to others in DPKO,[36] which seems to us unwarranted; he was, after all, an officer following the chain- of- command and reporting to his immediate superior. In any event, it was widely known that the top bureaucrats in DPKO routinely shared information among themselves.[37]
13.29. The DPKO team clearly understood the full explosive implications of Dallaire's information. A response was sent immediately (under Kofi Annan's name, as was standard, but signed by Iqbal Riza, which was also standard and frequent practice). The reply was sent to Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh, the Special Representative to the Secretary-General for Rwanda. Booh-Booh and Dallaire did not get along, often analyzsing the local situation differently, and the two had different sets of informants in an intensely polarizsed society.[38] Booh-Booh was widely seen as close to the government camp, which alienated the RPF, while , Dallaire was seen as close to the RPF, which made him suspect in government eyes. C; critics of Booh-Booh believed he was blinded by his ties to the Ppresident's circle, while Dallaire was simply called the Tutsi. It was suggested to the Panel that Booh-Booh believed that maintaining good personal relationship with Habyarimana would facilitate implementation of Arusha.[39] As a result, he often took a less pessimistic and less apocalyptic view than Dallaire's, and DPKO was anxious to have Booh-Booh's assessment of both the informant and his information.
13.30. It seems that Booh-Booh often gave the benefit of the doubt to Habyarimana and his people. This time, however, he supported Dallaire all the way. He vouched for the informant, and explained that Dallaire was "prepared to pursue the operation in accordance with military doctrine with reconnaissance, rehearsal, and implementation using overwhelming force."[40] Annan's response, again signed by Riza, flatly vetoed any such operation on the grounds that it went well beyond UNAMIR's mandate. He proposed an alternative that seems, under the circumstances, simply unfathomable to have suggested.
13.31. A few facts serve to place DPKO's response in context: Habyarimana's record of frustrating the implementation of the Arusha agreement was universally known, and UN officials had confronted him on it, personally and directly, several times. In December 1993, James Jonah, Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs, warned the President that he had information that killings of the opposition were being planned and that the United Nations would not stand for this. [41] Only a week before Dallaire sent his January 11 cable, he had raised with Habyarimana the issue of arms distributions to the regime's supporters; the President had said that he was unaware of the distribution, but would instruct his supporters to desist if Dallaire's information was correct.
13.32. In spite of these facts, Iqbal Riza, writing under the name of his chief, Kofi Annan, but without consulting Annan,[42], and apparently without consulting the Security Council,[43] firmly denied Dallaire authorizsation to confiscate the illegal arms caches. The informant was not to be afforded the protection he sought for himself and his family, and he disappeared from UNAMIR's ken. Booh-Booh and Dallaire were instructed to share with Habyarimana the new information and the threat it obviously represented to the peace process. They were told to assume that the President was not aware of the activities the informant had described. They were to insist that the President immediately look into the matter, take necessary action, and ensure that the subversive activities were stopped. The President was to inform UNAMIR within 48 hours of the steps he had taken, including the recovery of arms. The aAmbassadors of Belgium, France, and the United States were also to be informed of the entire situation (the cable was, in any case, almost immediately common knowledge in their capitals),[44] and were to be asked to make similar representations to Habyarimana. Unaccountably, however, Riza chose not to instruct his Kigali people to inform the OAU or the Tanzanian ambassador;, both of whom of whom wwere monitoring Rwanda closely.[45] |
