COLUMN ONE : Why the World Let Rwanda Bleed : Chastened by Somalia, a gun-shy U.S. urged caution on an already weary United Nations, braking efforts to stem the brutality.

Like the numb and hollow-eyed gaze of the emaciated survivors of Treblinka or the mountains of skulls stacked up by Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, the shriek of pain of the people of Rwanda has seared itself onto the world’s conscience.

These are harrowing images of spring and summer: blood-smeared churches stacked with machete-slashed bodies as though they were so much deadwood; weakened children stumbling and dying in the mud as they were trampled underfoot by the swiftest tide of refugees in modern times; stinking, teeming refugee camps at Goma and Bukavu in Zaire, still sumps of disease and want and fear.

Along with these appalling images come the questions, nagging and disturbing because they mock our belief and hope that on the threshold of the 21st Century, human beings have learned to live in a kinder and more civilized world.

Did the genocide of Rwanda, the organized, wholesale slaughter of something like half a million people, and maybe twice that many, have to happen?

Could the outside world and the United Nations have done more to stop it? If so, why didn’t they? And what was the role of the United States?

Finally, what were the lessons learned? Could Rwanda’s nightmare recur, if not here, then elsewhere?

“We’ve been so late it’s not funny,” Canadian Maj. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, the top U.N. military officer in Rwanda during the blood bath and a career soldier praised by many for his professionalism and panache, said as he turned over command here Aug. 18.

The departing Canadian didn’t say it, but many others have: One potent, decisive force urging delay in international intervention was the United States, with its newfound caution about U.N. involvement in countries’ internal unrest.

But in truth, there were few voices heard in opposition to the U.S. counsel against precipitate action--few, at least, with the will and means to back up their arguments with solid and substantial commitments of their own.

U.N. peacekeepers in Rwanda who warned early of impending catastrophe would find themselves restricted from acting by the language of U.N. Security Council resolutions produced in this context of caution and compromise. Even after the storm broke, the U.N. reaction was to retreat, to reduce rather than increase its forces in the riven country.

Some Rwandans fear that nothing has been learned--that, as in their own national tragedy, the outside world will intervene too late, with too little, elsewhere.

Now, in the aftermath of the violence, the world’s reaction has remained piecemeal, although the top U.N. official in Rwanda, Shahryar Khan of Pakistan, warned his superiors this week that “guerrilla warfare” might be set to break out, reviving the deadly cycle of civil war and massacre.

On May 17, the U.N. Security Council authorized a peacekeeping force of 5,500 soldiers, but as of Friday, exactly 4,150 were on the ground.

“We have countries offering to send an infantry battalion. Then we say, ‘Anybody want to equip them?’ We are waiting for the phone to ring,” said Canadian Maj. Jean-Guy Plante, spokesman for the U.N. Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR). “Of course, it is now too late to stop the massacres anyway.”

A U.N. commission created in July to determine formally whether acts of genocide and large-scale violations of human rights occurred in Rwanda, as a first step toward identifying and punishing the mass murderers, has called on the world community to supply 200 forensic medical experts and investigators. At last count, four were in the country.

The members of the commission itself, distinguished jurists from Togo, Guinea and Mali, spent only a week here and then left, saying they might be back later this month.

“You listened to the questions that they asked, and it was clear they weren’t really briefed at all,” one high-ranking U.N. official involved in relief efforts here said.

What is particularly tragic--some would say criminal, in light of the high-sounding ideals proclaimed in the U.N. Charter--is that as long ago as last Oct. 5, the United States and other members of the U.N. Security Council, in its Resolution 872, ordered the creation of a “peacekeeping mission” in Rwanda “in the shortest possible time.”

The mission’s goal was to aid in the establishment of the coalition government and pluralistic, non-ethnic constitution mandated by the Arusha Accord of Aug. 4, 1993, that had, it seemed, put an end to a withering 3-year-old civil war between the Rwandan government and the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front led by returnees from exile.

But as early as last December and January of this year, U.N. military observers who arrived here got wind of activities that presaged a possible blood bath in this verdant, beautiful country in the highlands of central Africa.

Rwanda’s strife-plagued history made the most nightmarish scenarios possible, even highly likely: In five years of slaughter beginning in 1959, an estimated 100,000 members of the Tutsi minority were slain by the majority Hutus.

According to one senior U.N. official in Kigali, Dallaire and his subordinates, then in command of a 2,500-member force from Belgium, Ghana and Bangladesh, asked superiors at U.N. headquarters for permission to act to prevent what appeared to be preparations for a new round of bloodletting.

The request was turned down, he said.

“We had reports that certain elements were distributing arms to civilians and training civilians to carry out atrocities,” the senior official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “We informed New York and wanted to mount operations, and were told it was not in our mandate.

“We had information on the location of weapons, training camps, information on the distribution of arms,” the official recalled.

Dallaire, a 47-year-old cigar-smoking artilleryman from Quebec City, wanted to take preventive action--to seize the weapons--as early as December, he said.

“He was dissuaded, he was instructed, he was cautioned: It was not in his mandate,” the official added.

A few months after Dallaire failed to get the go-ahead, Rwanda would reap the whirlwind of ethnic violence from scrupulous adherence to the language of Resolution 72. From the arms caches that the 2aU.N. peacekeepers had detected came some of the weapons used to perpetrate the most rapid genocidal slaughter in modern times.

The spark for the explosion came when a plane carrying Rwanda’s president, Juvenal Habyarimana, and his counterpart from neighboring Burundi, Cyprian Ntayamira, crashed April 6 on approach to Kigali’s airport after apparently being hit by a missile. Both leaders were killed. The Rwandan government accused rebel Tutsis of shooting down the plane.

Commanded by the hard-line Hutu leaders who succeeded Habyarimana, Rwandan soldiers, members of the ruling party’s youth wing, the Interahamwe, and ordinary Hutus embarked on a massacre of their opponents and members of the Tutsi minority.

Day after day, bands armed with machetes roamed the hills of Kigali, butchering people and tossing hand grenades into houses.

“There are massacres all over the place,” one person trapped here told the Associated Press on April 17. “The army’s delight is to murder civilians, while civilians turn on each other in ethnic revenge.”

Faced with such barbarism on a massive scale and renewed hostilities between Rwanda’s civil war foes, the Security Council decided April 21 to slash the number of its peacekeepers here rather than reinforce them.

“Don’t forget, at the time, many of our people were unarmed; they were military observers,” UNAMIR spokesman Plante said. UNAMIR’s repeated pleas for reinforcements and essential supplies such as armored vehicles were falling mostly on deaf ears.

Finally, “Gen. Dallaire said, ‘For security reasons, I can’t operate with 2,500 people,’ ” Plante recalled.

Uppermost in his mind was the massacre of 10 Belgian soldiers on the first day of terror after they tried in vain to protect the prime minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, a moderate Hutu, from a murderous band of soldiers.

As in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Somalia, Lebanon and elsewhere, U.N. peacekeepers, too few to deter attack, had become targets. When the Belgian government, rocked by public opinion, quickly pulled out its key contingent of 440 troops for their safety, no other Western country volunteered to replace them.

U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali then warned that carrying out even the Security Council’s limited mandate in Rwanda would become “untenable.” Before April 21, some of Dallaire’s men had already been pulled back to Kenya. With the massacres in full swing, and Kigali’s streets echoing with screams and explosions, the U.N. force was then cut to 450, although Dallaire was authorized to pare it to as few as 250.

The butchery had been so carefully prepared and spread so widely--this country is as big as Maryland--that only a huge and rapid invasion of well-equipped troops could have halted it with certainty. But there is little doubt in the minds of many U.N. peacekeepers that even with several thousand more soldiers, they could have saved countless more lives.

Dallaire at one point asked for 8,500 and was told by U.N. officials in New York to be more modest in his requests.

“We were confined here. We knew places badly needed our protection, but there was nothing we could do,” said Plante, who arrived in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, six days after the massacres began. “With 450 men, we had our hands full. If we had had the 5,500 (the number of troops finally authorized by the United Nations), instead of protecting 18,000 to 20,000 refugees in the city, we could have protected maybe 100,000 to 200,000 . . . .

“We could have gone out to the churches where we knew people were trapped,” Plante said. “We would have been able to protect them and deliver them food. There was hundreds of thousands of tons of food in the city, but we didn’t have access. Because when we went to the warehouses, people would fire on us.”

Its ranks slashed, UNAMIR’s remnants hunkered down at the airport, a hotel-turned-command-post and Kigali stadium, which was filled with thousands of refugees. U.N. troops rode in trucks and other vulnerable “soft-skin” vehicles because Dallaire hadn’t received enough of the armored vehicles that he had pleaded for.

The blue-helmeted soldiers were further handcuffed by their mandate, which the Security Council whittled down even more in its April 21 resolution. U.N. troops in Rwanda were ordered to do no more than try to mediate a cease-fire between the government and the rebels, to act as observers and to supervise humanitarian relief, if possible.

“When people say, ‘Why didn’t you go into the massacres and separate the Tutsis and the Hutus?’ . . . that wasn’t our mandate,” Plante said.

Even when a Kigali radio station, Mille Collines, was on the air urging Hutus to exterminate the “cockroaches,” UNAMIR took no action to knock it off the air.

“It wasn’t in our mandate,” Plante said.

In the jargon of U.N. peacekeeping, Dallaire, unlike his peers in Somalia, had not been given “Chapter 7” authority by the Security Council to intervene militarily to try and force an end to the fighting and killing.

“UNAMIR could have stopped this if we had granted them Chapter 7 authority,” one State Department official maintained.

But the U.S. official acknowledged that only “overwhelming authority, tens of thousands of troops,” could have stanched the Rwandan blood bath or forced an end to the civil war.

Such a commitment never came. In the words of a blistering report in May from the London-based watchdog group Africa Rights, in Rwanda “the coup was mounted and the genocide perpetrated without international denunciation of those responsible.”

That same month, more than four weeks after the slaughter began, diplomats at U.N. headquarters in New York were still heatedly debating what to do. The most insistent voice urging caution came from the United States, which was worried that intervention might degenerate into the sort of debacle that the earlier U.N. relief operation in Somalia had become.

There, after unselfishly sending 20,000 Marines and soldiers to help a famine- and strife-stricken country on the Horn of Africa, Americans had grown uneasy as their young men and women became the targets of the people they had come to help--showered with rocks by children and shot at by snipers from warring clans.

Their disillusionment climaxed last October with the horrifying televised spectacle of an American corpse dragged through the streets of the Somali capital, Mogadishu, by jeering, exultant Africans. In the end, 42 Americans were killed and 175 wounded in a faraway country they had been sent to help.

It was a sobering and formative experience for U.S. policy, one that sent shock waves through the Pentagon and White House.

“What happened in Somalia has frankly made the American military gun-shy,” the State Department official said. “I don’t know how many times I’ve heard American officers say, ‘These people are not worth one American life.’ ”

The direct outgrowth of the costly misadventure was Presidential Policy Directive 25, whose avowed touchstone is “realism.” Under PPD25, which President Clinton signed May 5, the Administration said it will refuse to approve peacekeeping operations until they are subjected to close scrutiny, including an assessment of their chances for success.

PPD25’s first application came in Rwanda.

In mid-May, after the massacres had flickered out in Kigali but were continuing in other parts of the country, Madeleine Albright, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, invoked the new policy before the Security Council.

“Sending a U.N. force into the maelstrom of Rwanda without a sound plan of operations would be folly,” she said.

Some other Security Council members echoed the Americans’ caution and approved it as a fresh breeze of pragmatism. But Boutros-Ghali, though he refrained from mentioning the United States by name, flatly rejected the Clinton Administration’s preoccupation with preventing another Somalia.

“We must accept that in certain operations we will not be successful,” he argued. “And the fact that you are not successful in a certain operation must not be an obstacle to additional operations all over the world.”

As the dead piled up in Rwanda, Boutros-Ghali called on the 15-member Security Council to change course and send an enlarged force of at least 5,500 peacekeepers.

After numerous delays and considerable pressure from the United States, the council authorized the force but delayed sending more than a few hundred soldiers. Member nations wanted from Boutros-Ghali a military strategy, a commitment from countries to provide the troops and a timetable for their use. They also wanted assurances that both sides in the civil war would cooperate.

In Albright’s words, anything else would have been “pie in the sky.”

U.N. officials believe the Clinton Administration’s lack of enthusiasm for intervention crippled Boutros-Ghali’s attempts to recruit soldiers for the mission. But there hardly was an international outpouring of commitment, even from other African countries. Ethiopia, Ghana, Senegal, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Congo, Malawi, Mali and Nigeria were willing to send troops, but only if somebody else paid to equip them.

At the time, U.N. forces were already involved in 17 other peacekeeping operations, from Bosnia to Cambodia. Rwanda--this small, landlocked country plagued by its own murderous politics and ethnic hatreds, lacking strategic importance and anything to offer the world but coffee--fell victim to “donor fatigue.”

It was late June before the outside world intervened in force. Help came in the form of French marines and Foreign Legionnaires, who set up a “safe zone” for fleeing Hutu refugees in the country’s heavily forested southwest.

But for the now-almost-victorious Rwandan Patriotic Front, France was the most suspect actor of all. A former colonial master of much of Africa, it had supplied arms to the former government.

With the Hutu-dominated Rwandan government forces almost defeated, an estimated 2 million refugees had surged toward Rwanda’s frontiers with Zaire, Tanzania and Burundi.

It was only then, one senior U.N. official says, that the outside world became shocked by televised images of this wretched exodus. It was only then that it was moved to commit enormous resources to soothe Rwanda’s suffering.

“So many people coming into Goma made it a pure refugee operation,” the U.N. official said. “ . . . For U.N. agencies, you were responding to a classic situation.”

Clinton promised “immediate and massive” aid as part of an operation dubbed Support Hope, and the U.S. military began a round-the-clock airlift of food, water and medicine to the refugee camps. By July 2, the Administration had committed itself to delivering $250 million in aid.

Still, as Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stressed last month while inspecting the U.S. military assistance effort, the United States remains committed to avoiding any peacekeeping role here.

“The U.S. is not going to get involved,” he said.

Now, some U.N. officials involved in coordinating the mammoth response to the refugee crisis fear that it will obscure the failure of the international community to deal with the somber events behind it: the butchery that erupted in April.

“We’ve used the word genocide to describe what went on here, and the international community hasn’t done anything about it,” the U.N. official said. “If you have 500,000, 1 million people exterminated in this country, and don’t do anything about it, are we even going to blink an eye if 200,000, say, are exterminated somewhere else?”

Paul Kagame, the 36-year-old Tutsi who led the Rwandan Patriotic Front to victory and is now Rwanda’s vice president and defense minister, questions the United Nations’ ability to learn from its failure to prevent mass slaughter in his country.

“What happens in New York is beyond my control, and my experience is that it’s either negative or comes too late,” Kagame said. “Maybe someday, somebody will do the right thing. But I am not optimistic about the way they handle things.”

Times staff writer Stanley Meisler in Washington contributed to this report.