# data[].attributes.headline
Some countries don't have the resources to stop a mass genocide

# data[].attributes.subject
Some countries don't have the resources to stop a mass genocide

# data[].attributes.headline
It is the responsibility of a sovereign country to protect others who can't protect themselves regardless of their position

# data[].attributes.subject
It is the responsibility of a sovereign country to protect others who can't protect themselves regardless of their position

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Image

The Rwandan refugee camp in Benako, Tanzania, in 1994. Credit Credit Sebastiao Salgado

It was a paroxysm that inscribed new chapters in the annals of genocide and turned a spotlight on the failure of international peacekeepers to come anywhere close to living up to their name.

Twenty-five years ago, on April 7, 1994, the dominant Hutus of Rwanda turned with well-planned violence on the Tutsi minority whom they held to be traitors. One hundred days later, when the killing finally stopped, the death toll stood at as many as one million, mostly Tutsis but also including some moderate Hutus who had opposed the bloodletting.
[For more stories about the experiences and costs of war, sign up for the weekly At War newsletter.]
The scale of the fatalities was shocking, but more was to come as the torrent of killings washed into the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo, igniting years of strife in Africa's Great Lakes region. And, along this bloodstained way, sexual violence became woven into the horrors of war. Women suffered untold rapes and gang rapes, accelerating the spread of AIDS. The offspring of these assaults were stigmatized as "children of the killers."

Image

In the same year in which Nelson Mandela was installed as South Africa's first black president - the very emblem of a continent's hope and triumph over adversity - Africa was also in the public eye for cataclysmic anarchy and violence.

But Africa had no monopoly on blame.

The United States, scarred by the killing and humiliation of its soldiers in Somalia during the Battle of Mogadishu a few months earlier, had no appetite to intervene. President Bill Clinton, who was in office as the killings unfolded half a world away, said years later during a visit to Rwanda, "I don't think we could have ended the violence, but I think we could have cut it down. And I regret it."

France, a significant player in French-speaking Africa, has long faced charges that it supported the Hutu leadership before and even during the massacres. President Paul Kagame of Rwanda has called French soldiers "actors" in the genocide - a charge denied by the former French prime minister, Édouard Balladur, as "a self-interested lie." But on Friday, President Emmanuel Macron of France ordered a two-year government study of France's role in the Rwandan genocide.

The United Nations, which had a modest force of some 2,500 troops in Rwanda in the days leading up to the killings, was accused of refusing permission for its local commander, the Canadian Maj. Gen. Roméo Dallaire, to raid a Hutu arms cache that had been set aside for use in the atrocities. At the time, Kofi Annan, who later became the secretary general of the United Nations, was in charge of peacekeeping operations. Years later he said of the killing, "All of us must bitterly regret that we did not do more to prevent it."

History suggests, however, that Rwanda's lessons were an insufficient deterrent. Just a year after the Rwandan genocide, events far away in Europe - in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica - offered another alarming example of the toxic combination of genocidal urges and United Nations caution: 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were murdered despite the presence of Dutch peacekeepers.

And, for its part, an African panel found many culprits for Rwanda's agony, from the Roman Catholic Church to Belgium, a former colonial power.

The ostensible trigger for the genocide came on April 6, 1994, when an airplane carrying the country's Hutu president, Juvenal Habyarimana, and President Cyprien Ntaryamira of neighboring Burundi was shot down as it approached Kigali, Rwanda's capital. It has never been clearly established who brought the plane down or whether the genocide had been planned well in advance and needed only a spark to ignite its lethal tinder.

But within hours, the killing had started. Elite government forces, supported by a dreaded Hutu militia, the Interahamwe, which translates roughly as "those who work together," rounded up and executed Tutsi military and political leaders. Roadblocks were thrown up to filter out Rwandans whose official ID tagged them as Tutsis - a distinction introduced in the 1930s by the Belgian colonial authorities. Like their imperial German predecessors, Belgian officials had favored a Tutsi elite until the Hutu majority rose up in 1959.

In rural areas, where Hutus and Tutsis had intermingled and sometimes intermarried, pervasive government propaganda in radio broadcasts and newspaper articles urged Hutus to take any weapon they could find - machetes, clubs - to kill or maim their neighbors. Foreigners working in the country were evacuated, but not their Rwandan staff. People were massacred in churches and homes, fields and roadside ditches, stadiums and checkpoints.

As in Cambodia after the atrocities by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s, future generations inherited a national nightmare, memorialized in the exhibited skulls of victims stacked in rows.

In 1994, the genocide also ruptured a cease-fire in a civil war that had been raging since 1990 between government forces and insurgents from the Rwanda Patriotic Front, led by the Tutsi Mr. Kagame (who was to become Rwanda's president).

The Patriotic Front launched a broad attack to take the capital, Kigali, in early July. The killing in Rwanda itself came to a halt, but not the ethnic recriminations. With the land ruined, crops untended and the population diminished by the killing of Tutsis and the subsequent flight of Hutu refugees into Congo, Rwanda entered a new, gradually prospering but ambiguous era. The following years raised questions about post-genocide justice and the price Rwandans paid for well-being and stability under Mr. Kagame.

Internationally, the Rwandan leader, who took over the presidency in 2000, became a darling of Western leaders and donors, including Mr. Clinton and Bill Gates. His cities boasted clean streets and low crime. His economy grew rapidly. Admirers compared him to Lee Kuan Yew, the Singaporean leader who fused authoritarian rule with prosperity.

And, as Mr. Kagame's regime grew ever more entrenched and ever more intolerant of dissent, he often got a pass. "Western states that did nothing to prevent the massacres have treated Rwanda with kid gloves ever since, in part out of a frequently acknowledged sense of guilt," the author and journalist Michela Wrong wrote in The Guardian.

Mr. Kagame was limited to two terms in office, but like his regional peers in Uganda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo - and rulers much farther afield - he chafed at the restriction. A referendum in 2015 changed the Constitution, enabling him to remain in office until 2034. In elections in 2017 he won with a staggering 98.8 percent of the vote. (Of his two major opponents, Diane Rwigara was disqualified, later to be jailed, and Victoire Ingabire was already in prison.)

Rights groups have chronicled abuses inside Rwanda and have accused the authorities of hunting down adversaries and critics in Uganda, Kenya, South Africa and Europe. In 2014, Patrick Karegeya, Mr. Kagame's former chief of external intelligence and a known dissident, was found murdered in a luxury hotel in Johannesburg, although the government in Kigali has denied suggestions that it was behind the killing.

In 2014, as Rwanda marked the 20th anniversary of the genocide, an editorial in The New York Times hailed the country as "an island of order and relative prosperity in a poor and politically volatile region."

But, listing a tally of restrictions on civil and political rights, including detentions and torture, disappearances and killings, the article concluded: "Addressing the poisonous legacies of Rwanda's genocide is the only way to avert future tragedy, and it is the best way to honor Rwanda's dead."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Rwanda Marks 25 Years Since the Genocide. The Country Is Still Grappling With Its Legacy.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It was a paroxysm that inscribed new chapters in the annals of genocide and turned a spotlight on the failure of international peacekeepers to come anywhere close to living up to their name. Twenty-five years ago, on April 7, 1994, the dominant Hutus of Rwanda turned with well-planned violence on the Tutsi minority whom they held to be traitors.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Op-Ed Contributor

Image

Credit Credit Alvaro Dominguez; Photo courtesy of of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

WASHINGTON - Twenty years ago this Saturday, the commander of United Nations peacekeeping forces in Rwanda wrote a coded cable to his superiors in New York that has come to be known as the "genocide fax." Citing inside information from a "top-level trainer" for a pro-regime militia group, Brig. Gen. Roméo Dallaire warned of an "anti-Tutsi extermination" plot.

The refusal by United Nations officials to approve the general's plan for raids on suspected arms caches has been widely condemned as paving the way for one of the worst genocides since the Holocaust. But evidence submitted to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, some of it still under seal, reveals a murkier, more complicated situation than has often been portrayed.

New details about the mysterious informant known to General Dallaire as "Jean-Pierre" serve as a reminder that history can take a long time to reveal its secrets. Important documents that could shed light on the unresolved mysteries and ambiguities of the Rwanda genocide remain under lock and key.

It is now commonly recognized that the international community failed miserably in its efforts to protect the people of Rwanda. But even 20 years later, there is still much to learn. While the new evidence does not absolve the United Nations and Western governments for failing to take timely action, Jean-Pierre's story illustrates the challenges that continue to vex decision-makers struggling to make sense of unfolding crises in countries like the Central African Republic or South Sudan.

The immediate trigger for the Rwandan genocide was the shooting down of a plane carrying President Juvenal Habyarimana on April 6, 1994. Over the next hundred days, Hutu militia groups murdered at least half a million members of the Tutsi minority, along with tens of thousands of "moderate" Hutus. These massacres took place against the backdrop of a war that pitted the Hutu-dominated regime against Tutsi-led insurgents who had invaded Rwanda from neighboring Uganda.

Whether the genocide was planned, and was thus foreseeable, has been hotly debated by scholars, politicians and lawyers. The "genocide fax" has been a key part of this debate. Controversy has surrounded Jean-Pierre's motives for cooperating with General Dallaire, the reliability of his information, and his fate after his request for protection was rejected by the United Nations.

We now know a lot more about Jean-Pierre Abubakar Turatsinze (his full name was established by the war crimes tribunal). Half-Hutu and half-Tutsi, he operated on both sides of Rwanda's political and ethnic divide. While his prediction of mass murder of Tutsis by Hutu militia groups proved chillingly accurate, he misled United Nations peacekeepers on some key points.

Important details about his background and eventual fate are contained in a 2003 interview with his wife by tribunal investigators that has never been officially released but is now available. At the time of his marriage, in 1990, he worked as a driver for a senior Rwandan official. In the turmoil following the rebel invasion, Jean-Pierre used his connections to become an intermediary to the Interahamwe militia, whose principal goal was to defend the Hutu-dominated regime.

Curiously, the fact that he was married to a Tutsi and was the product of a mixed Tutsi-Hutu marriage does not seem to have affected his advancement in the Interahamwe, at least until the end of 1993. Around this time, he told his wife that he might have to kill her because the ruling party was planning to carry out "massacres." As she told investigators, "because I am Tutsi and his mother was Tutsi, I understood this to mean that the massacres were going to be against the Tutsi population."

Jean-Pierre told General Dallaire's aides in January 1994 that he had been instructed to register "all Tutsis" living in Kigali, apparently for "their extermination." He also said that the Rwandan Army had been supplying the Interahamwe with weapons, and identified several arms caches, including one in the headquarters of the ruling party. The Interahamwe went on to commit many of the murders during the genocide.

The Arusha-based international tribunal has found that the Rwandan Army channeled weapons to the Interahamwe and provided military training to militia members. But tribunal judges were not convinced that the purpose of that training was the "extermination" of Tutsis, as Jean-Pierre claimed, rather than preparation for renewed hostilities with the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front. They found that the Interahamwe had drawn up lists of "suspected opponents of the regime," but such lists were "not focused exclusively on ethnicity."

Evidence submitted to the tribunal showed that Jean-Pierre may have had other motives for seeking United Nations protection. He had fallen out with party leaders who suspected him of selling arms to rebels in Burundi. Some witnesses believe he might have been an agent of the Rwandan Patriotic Front assigned to penetrate the Interahamwe.

While there is no reliable evidence to back the claim that he was an R.P.F. agent in January 1994, it is clear that he had connections to opposition parties allied with the Tutsi-led rebels. According to United Nations cables, a Hutu opposition leader named Faustin Twagiramungu served as Jean-Pierre's conduit to General Dallaire. These connections caused French and Belgian analysts to suspect that Jean-Pierre might be spreading "disinformation."

In his 2003 memoir, "Shake Hands With the Devil," General Dallaire raised the possibility that his informant had "simply melted back into the Interahamwe, angry and disillusioned at our vacillation and ineffectiveness, and become a genocidaire." Jean-Pierre told the general's aides at their final meeting in February 1994 that he was planning to go to Zaire, for "commando training."

Instead, he went to Tanzania where he joined the R.P.F., according to his wife. In late March, two weeks before the president's assassination, he moved to a rebel-held enclave in northern Rwanda, where he was reported to be "in very good books with senior members of the R.P.F." In late 1994, a minister in Rwanda's new Tutsi-led government informed the family that Jean-Pierre had been " killed in battle."

The circumstances of his death remain a mystery. As his wife told investigators, "I do not know how he died and where." She was unable even to establish whether he was "surely dead."

General Dallaire has told the tribunal that he operated on "instinct" in sending the genocide fax, which was followed up by a series of warnings to New York in early 1994 that were rebuffed or ignored. He sensed that the peacekeeping force had to reassert its authority. But his superiors in New York needed something more than their field commander's instincts to justify aggressive action.

Newly released State Department records show that United Nations officials briefed the United States, Belgium and France on the emerging crisis, but there was zero enthusiasm in the Clinton administration following the "Black Hawk Down" debacle in Somalia in October 1993. Much stronger intelligence would have been necessary to disrupt the passivity of senior decision makers.

The "Jean-Pierre" revelations are a tantalizing indication of how much we still have to learn about the Rwandan genocide. Records that could shed light on whether it could have been prevented are still classified in Washington, New York, Paris, Brussels, Geneva, Arusha and Kigali - unavailable to the public despite pledges by international leaders to fully investigate the tragedy. In order to draw the correct lessons from history, we must first establish all the facts.
Michael Dobbs directs a Rwanda documentation and oral history project for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the National Security Archive.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | The Shroud Over Rwanda's Nightmare

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Op-Ed Contributor WASHINGTON - Twenty years ago this Saturday, the commander of United Nations peacekeeping forces in Rwanda wrote a coded cable to his superiors in New York that has come to be known as the "genocide fax." Citing inside information from a "top-level trainer" for a pro-regime militia group, Brig.

# data[].attributes.headline
When countries commit acts of appeasements the results lead to disaster

# data[].attributes.subject
When countries commit acts of appeasements the results lead to disaster

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Log In - ProQuest Central Student - ProQuest

# data[].attributes.headline
It is necessary to respect the autonomy of a country regardless of the conditions

# data[].attributes.subject
It is necessary to respect the autonomy of a country regardless of the conditions

# data[].attributes.headline
Acts of appeasement in some cases has lead to peace and prevented war

# data[].attributes.subject
Acts of appeasement in some cases has lead to peace and prevented war

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union engaged in a tense, 13-day political and military standoff in October 1962 over the installation of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles on Cuba, just 90 miles from U.S. shores. In a TV address on October 22, 1962, President John F. Kennedy (1917-63) notified Americans about the presence of the missiles, explained his decision to enact a naval blockade around Cuba and made it clear the U.S. was prepared to use military force if necessary to neutralize this perceived threat to national security. Following this news, many people feared the world was on the brink of nuclear war. However, disaster was avoided when the U.S. agreed to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's (1894-1971) offer to remove the Cuban missiles in exchange for the U.S. promising not to invade Cuba. Kennedy also secretly agreed to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey.

Discovering the Missiles

After seizing power in the Caribbean island nation of Cuba in 1959, leftist revolutionary leader Fidel Castro (1926-2016) aligned himself with the Soviet Union. Under Castro, Cuba grew dependent on the Soviets for military and economic aid. During this time, the U.S. and the Soviets (and their respective allies) were engaged in the Cold War (1945-91), an ongoing series of largely political and economic clashes.

Did you know? The actor Kevin Costner (1955-) starred in a movie about the Cuban Missile Crisis titled Thirteen Days. Released in 2000, the movie's tagline was "You'll never believe how close we came."

The two superpowers plunged into one of their biggest Cold War confrontations after the pilot of an American U-2 spy plane piloted by Major Richard Heyser making a high-altitude pass over Cuba on October 14, 1962, photographed a Soviet SS-4 medium-range ballistic missile being assembled for installation.

President Kennedy was briefed about the situation on October 16, and he immediately called together a group of advisors and officials known as the executive committee, or ExComm. For nearly the next two weeks, the president and his team wrestled with a diplomatic crisis of epic proportions, as did their counterparts in the Soviet Union.

A New Threat to the U.S.

For the American officials, the urgency of the situation stemmed from the fact that the nuclear-armed Cuban missiles were being installed so close to the U.S. mainland-just 90 miles south of Florida. From that launch point, they were capable of quickly reaching targets in the eastern U.S. If allowed to become operational, the missiles would fundamentally alter the complexion of the nuclear rivalry between the U.S. and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which up to that point had been dominated by the Americans.

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had gambled on sending the missiles to Cuba with the specific goal of increasing his nation's nuclear strike capability. The Soviets had long felt uneasy about the number of nuclear weapons that were targeted at them from sites in Western Europe and Turkey, and they saw the deployment of missiles in Cuba as a way to level the playing field. Another key factor in the Soviet missile scheme was the hostile relationship between the U.S. and Cuba. The Kennedy administration had already launched one attack on the island-the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961-and Castro and Khrushchev saw the missiles as a means of deterring further U.S. aggression.

Kennedy Weighs the Options

From the outset of the crisis, Kennedy and ExComm determined that the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba was unacceptable. The challenge facing them was to orchestrate their removal without initiating a wider conflict-and possibly a nuclear war. In deliberations that stretched on for nearly a week, they came up with a variety of options, including a bombing attack on the missile sites and a full-scale invasion of Cuba. But Kennedy ultimately decided on a more measured approach. First, he would employ the U.S. Navy to establish a blockade, or quarantine, of the island to prevent the Soviets from delivering additional missiles and military equipment. Second, he would deliver an ultimatum that the existing missiles be removed.

In a television broadcast on October 22, 1962, the president notified Americans about the presence of the missiles, explained his decision to enact the blockade and made it clear that the U.S. was prepared to use military force if necessary to neutralize this perceived threat to national security. Following this public declaration, people around the globe nervously waited for the Soviet response. Some Americans, fearing their country was on the brink of nuclear war, hoarded food and gas.

HISTORY Vault: Nuclear Terror

Showdown at Sea: U.S. Blockades Cuba

A crucial moment in the unfolding crisis arrived on October 24, when Soviet ships bound for Cuba neared the line of U.S. vessels enforcing the blockade. An attempt by the Soviets to breach the blockade would likely have sparked a military confrontation that could have quickly escalated to a nuclear exchange. But the Soviet ships stopped short of the blockade.

Although the events at sea offered a positive sign that war could be averted, they did nothing to address the problem of the missiles already in Cuba. The tense standoff between the superpowers continued through the week, and on October 27, an American reconnaissance plane was shot down over Cuba, and a U.S. invasion force was readied in Florida. (The 35-year-old pilot of the downed plane, Major Rudolf Anderson, is considered the sole U.S. combat casualty of the Cuban missile crisis.) "I thought it was the last Saturday I would ever see," recalled U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (1916-2009), as quoted by Martin Walker in "The Cold War." A similar sense of doom was felt by other key players on both sides.

A Deal Ends the Standoff

Despite the enormous tension, Soviet and American leaders found a way out of the impasse. During the crisis, the Americans and Soviets had exchanged letters and other communications, and on October 26, Khrushchev sent a message to Kennedy in which he offered to remove the Cuban missiles in exchange for a promise by U.S. leaders not to invade Cuba. The following day, the Soviet leader sent a letter proposing that the USSR would dismantle its missiles in Cuba if the Americans removed their missile installations in Turkey.

Officially, the Kennedy administration decided to accept the terms of the first message and ignore the second Khrushchev letter entirely. Privately, however, American officials also agreed to withdraw their nation's missiles from Turkey. U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy (1925-68) personally delivered the message to the Soviet ambassador in Washington, and on October 28, the crisis drew to a close.

Both the Americans and Soviets were sobered by the Cuban Missile Crisis. The following year, a direct "hot line" communication link was installed between Washington and Moscow to help defuse similar situations, and the superpowers signed two treaties related to nuclear weapons. The Cold War was and the nuclear arms race was far from over, though. In fact, another legacy of the crisis was that it convinced the Soviets to increase their investment in an arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the U.S. from Soviet territory.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Cuban Missile Crisis - Causes, Timeline & Significance | HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Cuban Missile crisis was a 13-day political and military standoff in October 1962 over Soviet missiles in Cuba.

# data[].attributes.headline
Allowing countries to commit genocide without justice will influence other groups to result to violence to get their point across

# data[].attributes.subject
Allowing countries to commit genocide without justice will influence other groups to result to violence to get their point across

# data[].attributes.headline
In WWII the Holocaust was terrible and every country should respect basic human rights no matter what country is doing it

# data[].attributes.subject
In WWII the Holocaust was terrible and every country should respect basic human rights no matter what country is doing it

# data[].attributes.headline
Countries trying to intervene in other countries business could lead to aggression and tension between countries that could cause conflict

# data[].attributes.subject
Countries trying to intervene in other countries business could lead to aggression and tension between countries that could cause conflict

# data[].attributes.headline
Punishing countries by the use of military does not always work effectively

# data[].attributes.subject
Punishing countries by the use of military does not always work effectively

# data[].attributes.headline
If countries don't stop other countries from genocide then those countries governments could fall from rebellion and war could start

# data[].attributes.subject
If countries don't stop other countries from genocide then those countries governments could fall from rebellion and war could start