The Foreign Service Journal, April 2004

was strapped to her back, killed by repeated blows aimed at her to urge her on in the killing fields. ... The brutality that occurred in Rwanda 10 years ago need not have happened — or at least it could have been mitigated had the international community cared enough to act. It Was No Secret Ismael Amrisued was an aide and adviser to Rwandan President Juv- enal Habyarimana, whose death in April 1994 in a suspicious plane crash marked the start of the genocide. I interviewed him in Rwanda where he was under protective custody of the rebels of the Rwandese Patriotic Front. He was a Hutu but was marked for death by the Inter- ahamwe because he was a political moderate who favored reconciliation and power-sharing with the Tutsi- dominated RPF. He told me it was no secret that young people from the ethnic Hutu side were being recruited and trained at special killing camps. It was public. They used to recruit young people, put them in buses, take them to [various places in the countryside] and those guys were staying there one month or more and they were coming back quite proud, telling their stories of how they were going to get us one day, how they are going to kill us. ... Mr. Amrisued told me the killings that began the night the president’s plane was apparently shot down could hardly have been spontaneous. Just hours after the crash, hundreds had been killed, even in Rwandan towns far from the capital, Kigali. He says people in Rwanda tend to go to bed early and since the crash occurred late at night, few could have heard the news on the radio. But at 2 in the morning, they had already started killing. Which means instructions or some phone exchange had been circulating in the country, and then they started killing those who were already targeted or listed to be killed, and of course Tutsis were there to be killed. He dismissed the notion that most of the killers had to be forced to par- ticipate in the bloodletting. They were believing in what they were doing. I can’t say all of them, but most of them were doing it will- ingly because they had been taught to do so. ... Once you believe that killing is good, killing a Tutsi is good, then you go and kill them. They have learned very well their lesson. ... A Betrayal of Humanity Senior U.N. officials confirmed to me that summer 10 years ago that they could have minimized the scope of the slaughter if authorities at the world body’s headquarters in New York had approved action by the peacekeepers who were in Rwanda. The head of the peace- keepers, Canadian Major General Romeo Dallaire, had detailed infor- mation on the location of the weapons eventually used in the killings. He also had information on where the Hutu extremist militia were being trained in the art of killing and how their weapons were being distributed. He even knew which Rwandan political figures had been targeted for death. Rwanda’s current president, Paul Kagame, was head of the rebel RPF at the time of the genocide. He told me in an interview in the summer of 1994 that everyone in the world com- munity knew what was going on. The international community as a whole knew. Every ambassador here, from whichever European or Ameri- can country, knew. So there is no- body who denies having prior knowl- edge. Everybody up to the Secretary General of the U.N., yes, that one I’m 100 percent sure of. Understandably bitter, other lead- ers of the RPF were equally harsh in their condemnation of the foreign community, especially of France, Belgium and the United States. Theogene Rudasingwa was the sec- retary general of the RPF in 1994. He referred to an unholy alliance of foreign interests who not only ignored the warning signs leading up to the killing, but who later conspired to prevent the new Rwandese gov- ernment from obtaining desperately- needed assistance. We’re talking about a very unholy cocktail of several people whom we may not mention [by name]. They may not be whole governments. They may be portions of govern- ments. But at the end of the day, we are talking about a deliberate attempt on the part of some people in the international community to either do very little about what is happening or to conceal the evil that has been committed ... or to be accomplices. It was not the international com- munity’s finest hour. It was a betray- al of the very essence of the Uni- versal Declaration of Human Rights in which nations effectively promised to fight tyranny and oppression in defense of individual dignity. Most troubling to me, what happened in Rwanda suggests that the very first article of the declaration, while well- intentioned, is in reality still a distant dream: “All human beings ... are endowed with reason and conscience and should act toward one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” 50 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / A P R I L 2 0 0 4 Everyone in the world community knew what was going on.