Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda (review)

In Eyewitness to Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda, Michael Barnett examines two main questions concerning what went wrong within the United Nations' response to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. First, he identifies the individuals responsible for the proper flow of information and decision-making within the international organization and where they failed to live up to their responsibilities. Second, he inquires into the ethics and practice of an international bureaucracy that made the tragically inadequate response to Rwanda appear to be a rational and tolerable choice by decent individuals.

Barnett offers a unique perspective as someone who operated from within a bureaucratic system during an unfolding genocide and whose doubts grew only after the genocide occurred:

I can pinpoint the exact moment when I began to reconsider the moral metric that I had been using to justify the UN's actions. I was watching a news program commemorating the first anniversary of the beginning of the genocide. Dreadful, searing images radiated from the television screen as the commentator's voice provided the jarring counterpoint—that the UN had done nothing. I instinctively launched into my frustrated "you don't get it" recitation. But I caught myself in mid thought, interrupted by a private, emotional dissent.

(xi)

Barnett places the question of personal responsibility within the context of the intense strain that the United Nations was under at the time of the genocide. UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali had outlined an ambitious vision of the United Nations as the international agent of peace,¹ but in practice presided over an institution that was overextended, underfunded, and increasingly blamed for problems it created as well as ones with which it had been burdened by member states. The most visible symptom of this strain was the Somali debacle—particularly the October 1993 raid that resulted in the death of eighteen U.S. soldiers.

The United Nations was reconsidering its priorities, trying to bring them into line with what was achievable. Rwanda appealed as an easy mission keeping a peace that had been agreed on by two warring sides; it was not seen as a reignited conflict and the carefully planned extermination of a people. Barnett refuses to accept this contextualization as a justification for how the United Nations responded, and points to three moments that loom large in considering where personal responsibility failed and where the truth of the genocide clearly broke through the desired interpretation of what was happening in Rwanda.

The first is the refusal to allow General Romeo Dallaire, head of the peacekeeping operation in Rwanda, to seize arms caches and confront the genocidal plan in January 1994, when he first learned of it. Dallaire's information, Barnett argues, was extraordinary and caused a considerable stir in the UN Department of Peacekeeping. But the stir it caused was based on fear of what Dallaire, not the genocidaires, might do. Dallaire was ordered not to seize the arms.

The second moment is Boutros-Ghali's failure to turn over all the available information to the Security Council. It is unlikely, Barnett argues, that the Security Council would have changed its mind about how forcefully to respond to the genocide, but Boutros-Ghali had a responsibility to present all the information he had. Instead, he avoided language that would have highlighted the civilian death toll in favor of the "more neutral language of civil war, and refrained from making the strongest case available for intervention" (p. 174). Barnett's conclusion on this subject is strong: "The Secretariat bears some moral responsibility for the genocide . . . because [it] made a choice that thoroughly violated its professional obligations and ethical duties" (p. 174).

Finally, Barnett points to the Security Council's failure to approve an interventionary force in April 1994. Barnett argues that France (whose role in this genocide has not yet been...