INTL 500 LIBERTY UNIVERSITY Ghosts of Rwanda 2025.pdf

Deonna Purrazzo

Liberty University

INTL 500 – Ghosts of Rwanda

10 November 2024

Since 1980, Rwanda has been considered a “failed” state. Helen M. Hintjens describes in

her journal Explaining the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda that if Rwanda is an example of a failed

state is not because it is ineffectual, rather it is because the Rwandan government became so

powerful it simply crushed itself. The government of Rwanda had also undergone several

transformations including gaining independence from Belgium in 1962, rising political

from one group to another.” (Mingst, K. A, & McKibben, H, p. 373) In Rwanda, genocide was

committed when nearly 800,000 Tutsi were murdered by opposing ethnic group, the Hutu.

Dating back to the 1930’s, Rwandans, under Belgian rule, had been given identification cards,

grouping them into Tutsi, Hutu, Twa. Colonial Belgium policy had favored the Tutsi, giving

them administrative and education jobs whilst giving the Hutu hard labor jobs. Naturally, this

process of identification and favoritism created resentment between groups of Rwandans and

when Rwanda gained its independence from Belgium in 1961, the Hutu were ready to ascend to

power. (Newbury, C., 1995)

For years prior to the tragic genocide, Rwanda had already been the focus on

international attention and diplomacy. In 1992, the Organization of Africa had sent military to

President Habyarimana, a Hutu, into negotiations for a ceasefire and in 1992, the United Nations

Security Council deployed a peacekeeping unit to Rwanda with upwards of twenty-five thousand

troops. Eventually the civil war between the Hutu government and the Tutsi Rwanda Patriotic

Freedom (RPF) came to an end in August 1993 with the signing of the Arusha Accords.

However, President Habyarimana had no intent to keep his word with the Accords and instead

operation.” (Burkhalter, H. J.,1994)

In the documentary “Ghosts of Rwanda” you hear from main United Nations officials,

peacekeepers, and government officials that were involved in the decision-making processes at

the start of the genocide. General Romero Dellaire, Commander of the UN assistance mission of

Rwanda was in country to negotiate peace between the Hutu and Tutsi. Upon learning of a plan

to “exterminate” the Tutsi and Belgium peacekeepers on the ground through an informant, Gen.

Dellaire informed the UN. The UN however replied with distinct orders of “no action” and urged

the General to allow the informant to know they knew of the plans, hoping to use the knowledge

as deterrent. Unfortunately, the “no action” order only solidified to the Hutu that there would be

no repercussions if they executed their plan, and they did so on April 7, 1994.

servicemen in 1993. During the Somalian civil war, then-President Bush had approved of a U.S.

led collation that would deploy up to thirty-thousand troops to secure strategic points throughout

Somalia. When the Bush administration turned over the operation to the new incoming Clinton

administration, Clinton had adopted a foreign policy known as “assertive multilateralism” and

wanted to keep troops within Somalia to being national building. Despite efforts to change his

faced with the ensuring violence in Rwanda, they were hesitant to get involved. When President

Habyarimana’s plane was shot down on April 6, almost immediately did the plan of genocide

begin. Barriers were placed around Kigali with checkpoints for exit and entry and Prime Minister

Uwilingiyimana was hunted and murdered along with ten Belgian peacekeepers. (Burkhalter, H.

J.,1994) As killing of the Tutsi people began in mast quantities, Belgium had deployed troops to

evacuate Belgian citizens as President Clinton also ordered mass evacuations of all American

citizens and personnel.

Besides ordering the evacuation, President Clinton and his administration strangely were

quiet in the mass killings taking place in Rwanda. Holly Burkhalter states he “limited his

remarks to statements in April calling for all sides to stop the violence, suggesting-wrongly- that

Clinton's national security adviser, is cited saying within the administration, there was nearly no

discussion about Rwanda at his level. "I asked some of the people from the Defense Intelligence

Agency, `So what's going on? Who's killing who? I haven't seen much about this.' And they

couldn't tell me," Lake recalls. "I should have reached out and said `Tell me more.' And I didn't.

[I was] concentrating mostly at the time on Bosnia and Haiti.” (Public Broadcasting Service)

required somebody above a kind of State Department assistant secretary level, preferably

somebody of a Cabinet-level post, who simply made it their business to put the issue in

front of the president, to put the issue and even the moral stakes in front of his or her

colleagues in Cabinet-level meetings, in principals' committee meetings.It would have

required personal risk, putting your career on the line, being associated forever with, yes,

a loser, as it were. I mean a loser in the sense that there's nothing geopolitically to be

gained by getting involved with this, and only risks on the horizon. (Public Broadcasting

It seems like a unanimous answer when asking key players in the Rwanda genocide what

went wrong is the believe that there was a complete lack of leadership from the United States

leadership involved. When asked something like this could happen again or if the world has yet

to learn lessons in face of the Ghosts of Rwanda, General Dallaire stated “…I’d like to use the

example of Dian Fossey and the mountain gorillas in the northwest of Rwanda. I have this

terrible feeling that if some outfit wanted to go and slaughter 300-odd gorillas, that today, people

would react with far more consternation than they would if they started killing thousands of

it's like "Yet again, yet again, yet again, yet again.” (Public Broadcasting Service)

Despite this feeling among many involved, the international community has attempted to

come together and add provisions as well as promote human rights advocation across the global.

Crimes of humanity are now incorporated into Article 7 of the Rome Statue of the International

Criminal Court, states:

crimes against humanity means any of the following acts when committed as part

of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with

knowledge of the attack: murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation or forcible

transfer of population, imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in

violence of fundamental rules of international law, torture, rape, sexually slavery,

national, ethnic, cultural, religious, or gender, enforced disappearance of persons, the

crime of apartheid, or other inhumane acts of similar character intentionally causing great

suffering. (Mingst, K. A, & McKibben, H, p. 375)

There have also been numerous Non-government organizations (NGOs) that have been formed

in the wake of human rights violations. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both

machetes were used in crowds of people just outside of the churches. Timothy Longman in

Church Politics and the Genocide in Rwanda states that one human rights activist group believes

that “’more Rwandese citizens died in churches and parishes than anywhere else.” (CITE)

However, prior to the start of the genocide, the Church was deeply involved in IDing Rwandans

at Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa, as well as involved with the President’s regime and power struggle. In

the aftermath it was seen as culpable for the tragic murdering of nearly a million Rwandans

based on its inaction. (Longman, T.)

More than just NGOs have taken on the responsibility that governments around the world

did not. While not a permanent fixture of the International Humanitarian Law (IHL), the

Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is another form of protection that began in the wake of the

interests” Francis Deng argued that sovereignty included its responsibility to protect its

population (Hornung, J.) By creating societal norms that dictate the meaning of sovereignty as

the simple right to responsibility. R2P was created to “develop global political consensus about

how and when the international community should respond to emerging crises against

humanity.” (Hornung, J.) Within the R2P, one of the main principals’ details that if one state

watered down to already existing notions. Ideally, the R2P would force governments to put the

needs for victims of crimes of humanity ahead of their own national interests. However, when

faced with that moral dilemma, history shows that nations will put their own national security

and geo-political interests ahead of humanity, nearly every time. (Hornung, J.) Obligation is

another ambiguous definition that individual states cannot agree on. While human rights treaties

state that there is a requirement to take “appropriate” action, appropriate means differ from state

to state.

Despite all the seemingly positive changes towards crimes against humanity, human

rights, and genocide, the feeling that the international community simply cannot prevent of stop

mass human rights abuses. In the awake of the Holocaust, the Convention of the Prevention and

to disagreements on how to compromise or even what constitutes genocide, leaving confusion

and a lack of transparency to allow these mass murders to continue to happen throughout history.

(Mingst, K. A, & McKibben, H, p. 373-4) Regardless, action to criminalize genocide matters.

The International Criminal Court was founded to investigate and prosecute individuals of states

responsible for human rights violations. (Mingst, K. A, & McKibben, H, p. 373-4) Providing a

humanitarian effort, the United States and Clinton Administration choice to save its citizens and

military members from possible death over the Tutsi people in Rwanda. With high-ranking

officials having little to no conversations about the predicament or how to effectively stop it in its

tracks, to the media failing to report what was going on, Rwanda was abandoned by the rest of

the world. The world may never know the true toll of the genocide in Rwanda, and it remains

that the world also cannot prevent a similar situation from happening to another group of people.