U.N. Chief Defends Decisions on Rwanda, Says World Failed

A global lack of willpower was to blame for the failure to prevent Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary-general, acknowledged Monday. But he said he had no personal regrets for decisions he made as then-head of U.N. peacekeeping.

“The fundamental failure” in the Rwandan situation “was the lack of political will, not the lack of information,” said Annan, reading a prepared statement to a news conference in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, one of the stops on his eight-nation Africa tour.

While falling short of an apology, his comments were similar to those made by President Clinton on his tour last month of Africa--that the world had failed the people of Rwanda.

Annan’s remarks, coming just four days before his first trip to Rwanda as the U.N.’s top official, came in response to an article in the May 11 issue of the New Yorker asserting that his office, in effect, dismissed a warning of the impending genocide from the commander of peacekeepers in Rwanda on Jan. 11, 1994--three months before the start of the slaughter of more than 800,000 Rwandans, most of them ethnic Tutsis.

The comments are likely to confirm the belief of many Rwandans that the international community turned its back on the Central African nation in its most dire time because it did not care and was reluctant to get involved in another African conflict.

The New Yorker says Annan received a fax about the then-government’s plans to exterminate Tutsis, and it asserts that he gave the order not to intervene. Full details of the commander’s cable were reportedly forwarded to the American, French and Belgian ambassadors in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, the day after the report was sent to Annan in New York.

But none of the three Western powers was willing to act.

Annan dismissed the article as “an old story that has been rehashed” and added that he thought “too much is being made out of one cable.”

Rwandan officials could not be reached Monday for comment. But leaders, human rights groups and Rwandans have placed equal blame for the genocide on fanatical Hutu extremists and on the international community’s inaction.