Report Faults U.N.’s Inaction in ’94 Genocide

In an emotionally searing report, a special commission concluded Thursday that a lack of will and resources prevented the United Nations from stopping the genocide in Rwanda that killed 800,000 people in 1994.

The three-member panel placed broad blame--from former Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who rarely attended Security Council meetings and did not allow officials with responsibility for Rwanda to brief council members, to Kofi Annan, the current secretary-general.

The panel, chaired by former Swedish Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson, said that Annan, then head of U.N. peacekeeping, was cautious to a fault and did not sound the alarm to higher authorities when a top informant indicated the presence of an arms cache intended for mass killings.

Annan refused to allow U.N. peacekeepers to try to seize the weapons because such action went beyond their mandate.

The report said that Annan did not brief Boutros-Ghali about the cable from the U.N. field commander relating the informant’s information.

“The seriousness of the threats in the cable justified informing the council as a whole,” the report said. “It is incomprehensible to the inquiry that not more was done to follow up on the information provided by the informant.”

The panel said the instructions from U.N. headquarters gave the signal to extremists that the U.N. force in Rwanda was not going to take assertive action.

Diplomats said that, together with a self-critical analysis issued in November about the U.N.’s role in the fall of Srebrenica in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Thursday’s report could add impetus to the debate concerning the role of the world body in halting human rights violations within the borders of member states.

In a key recommendation, panel members called upon the U.N. to improve the availability of troops and other resources. They also sought to strengthen the world body’s early-warning systems that would raise a red flag before a country is enveloped in crisis.

Annan accepted the report’s conclusions and said in a statement that “all of us must bitterly regret we did not do more” to prevent the genocide.

“There was a United Nations force in the country at the time, but it was neither mandated nor equipped for the kind of forceful action which would have been needed to prevent or halt the genocide,” Annan said. “On behalf of the United Nations, I acknowledge this failure and express my deep remorse.”

The commission accused major countries on the Security Council, including the United States, of dithering while thousands of Tutsis and moderate Hutus were beaten to death with clubs, hacked with machetes or tossed into latrines to drown.

“It is a failure for which the United Nations as an organization but also its member states should have apologized more clearly, more frankly and much earlier,” the report said. “The focus seems to have been solely on withdrawal rather than on the possibilities for the United Nations to act.”

At a news conference commenting on the report, Carlsson fought back tears as he described seeing a pair of small shoes belonging to a 3-year-old girl who was slain in a church.

“It’s left there to remind us about this in the future,” he said.

“There is the blood, the clothing, what’s left of human beings. . . . She probably didn’t know about the world. I can assure you, I will never forget. I will never forget those two shoes. To me, it is a symbol of the genocide, of the terrible evil.”

The United Nations began its peacekeeping mission in Rwanda in October 1993 to monitor the cease-fire agreement between the Hutu government and the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front.

The mission proved to be largely futile. The government, spurred by extremists, began the slaughter of an estimated 800,000 minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus after the shooting down of the Rwandan president’s plane April 6, 1994.

“The systematic slaughter of men, women and children which took place over the course of 100 days between April and July of 1994 will forever be remembered as one of the most abhorrent events of the 20th century,” the report said.

Besides Carlsson, the panel included former South Korean Foreign Minister Han Sung Joo and Nigerian Maj. Gen. Rufus M. Kupolati.

It said that U.N. members, including the United States, lacked the political will to provide necessary troops to stop the killing.

Officials at U.N. headquarters never responded to a draft of rules of engagement the commander of the force in Rwanda submitted. Thousands of people who sought the protection of the U.N. troops, who had inadequate supplies and insufficient ammunition, were abandoned and slaughtered, they said.

While praising the performance of some peacekeepers, the panel said that, in at least one instance, the manner in which the troops left, “including attempts to pretend to the refugees that they were not in fact leaving, was disgraceful.”

Panel members said the basic underpinning of the mission was flawed when the force was established “without a fall-back position or a worse-case scenario.” The report also said the U.N. Secretariat, or administration, lacked the analytical capacity to respond to the deteriorating situation in Rwanda.