Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda

Michael Barnett. Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002. xiii + 215 pp. Notes. Index. $25.00. Cloth.

Among the many books, articles, and documentaries that have come out on the role of the West in the Rwandan genocide of 1994, none provides as detailed a view of the situation at the UN as Eyewitness to a Genocide. Michael Barnett dissects the UN's failure to intervene meaningfully in the genocide that killed up to one million people in three months, an intervention that experts have subsequently argued would have been capable of saving most, if not all, of those victims. The book is organized around four main themes: international ethics, UN bureaucracy, humanitarian diplomacy, and operational ethics or peace and justice in relationship to international organizations. The author sets the stage for 1994 by taking us through the history of the UN during the period of the cold war-when the organization, acting as an umbrella for numerous dictatorships, promoted state security and sovereignty over the interests of ordinary citizens-into the post-cold war era when the UN began to emphasize human security.

Like Samantha Powers in her well-received book A Problem from Hell (Basic Books, 2002), Barnett demonstrates how the "Somalia syndrome" made the United States put pressure on the UN to oppose intervention in Rwanda. He dismisses the claim, however, that the Clinton administration opposed intervention because of ignorance of the situation, arguing instead that UN nonintervention was not the result of insufficient knowledge but rather a clear political choice; this is more disillusioning to him than anything else. He reveals the extent to which Secretary General Boutros Ghali was the instrument of France, which supported the Habyalimana government not only prior to, but also during, the genocide. But although he criticizes the UN bureaucratic culture that led to such diabolical inaction, Barnett clings to the belief that the world body is made up of well-intentioned individuals who believed that they were doing the right thing.

He shows how, under the principle of "neutrality, impartiality, and consent" in peacekeeping, the UN characterized the situation in Rwanda as civil war instead of "ethnic cleansing," as General Romeo Dallaire, the UN's senior military commander in Rwanda, was calling it from the field. Barnett also takes us inside the Security Council's debate, where "several council members made thinly veiled charges of double standard that the powerful were willing to expend unlimited resources on 'losing propositions' in Europe but ready to fold at the first hint of trouble in Africa" (107).

Under what Barnett calls "the fog of genocide," the United Nations Secretariat and the Department of Peace Keeping Operations demonstrated indifference in dealing with the situation after the genocide began. He traces Dallaire's efforts to control the situation and even to reason with one of the most notorious architects of the genocide, Colonel Theoneste Bagosora, highlighting the irresponsibility of the United Nations decision to pull out UNAMIR peacekeepers after Rwandan forces killed ten Belgian peacekeepers. Adding insult to injury, the United States showed "Rwanda's absence of strategic relevance" by pushing for nonintervention on the grounds that it was civil war, despite Dallaire's letters to the DPKO about "a very well-planned, organized, deliberate and conducted campaign of terror initiated principally by the Presidential guard" (102).

While Barnett effectively demonstrates the impotence of the UN to react morally and ethically to genocide, he avoids blaming individuals and instead attributes this impotence to the discursive forces that rob otherwise moral, ethical individuals of their personal agency. A more radical critique of this situation might suggest that those with the knowledge, power, and capacity to intervene in genocide are even more culpable than those illiterate peasants in Rwanda who actually wielded the machetes.

Charles K. Mironko

Brown University

Providence, Rhode Island

Copyright African Studies Association Sep 2003
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