Channels, Fall 2016

Page 10 Dotson • The Successes and Failures of the Battle of Mogadishu monarchy and enslaving Hutus, a prospect met with extreme opposition. Genocidal killings began soon after. Soldiers, police, and militia quickly executed key Tutsi and moderate Hutu leaders then established checkpoints and funnels around the country, using Rwandans' national identity cards to systematically kill the Tutsi. The soldiers recruited and pressured Hutu civilians to arm themselves with anything they could find in order to slaughter their Tutsi neighbors, destroying or stealing their property as they went. The breach of the peace agreement led the RPF to restart its offensive and rapidly seize control of the northern part of the country before capturing Kigali in mid-July, bringing an end to the genocide. During these events and in their aftermath, the United Nations and countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Belgium were criticized for their inaction; this included their failure to strengthen the force of the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) peacekeepers. In fact, rather than bolstering the amount of troops in the country once the killings began, “the UN Security Council voted to reduce the number of peacekeepers in UNAMIR from 2,100 to 270, making their principal task negotiating a ceasefire between the belligerents.” 26 U.S. officials reasoned that continuing with the UN operation would invite a disaster similar to the kind witnessed in Somalia just a few months prior; they believed a lack of security interests was equivalent to a lack of interest. 27 If only a testament to this fact, the White House was the first to advocate a pullout of UN troops from Rwanda during the genocide, not a beleaguered Belgian government that had just suffered the brutal murder of ten of its soldiers. These UN troops served as a last line of defense for tens of thousands of terrified Tutsi civilians. 28 The Clinton Administration even went so far as to refuse to call it genocide officially; they believed officially labeling the conflict as genocide required the United States to take action. According to an article in The Guardian , “senior officials privately used the word genocide within sixteen days of the start of the killings, but chose not to do so publicly because the president had already decided not to intervene.” 29 The official U.S. line was that the killings in Rwanda were not genocide but were part of the resumption of hostilities in the civil war, a situation that by its very definition precludes the use of peacekeeping troops. In an effort to explain why the United States did not intervene, a writer for Stars and Stripes said, “when Rwanda’s genocide began days after the last U.S. troops left Somalia, the U.S. 26 Eric Heinze, “The Rhetoric of Genocide in U.S. Foreign Policy: Rwanda and Darfur Compared,” Political Science Quarterly 122, no. 3 (Fall, 2007): 364. 27 Colum Lynch, “Genocide under Our Watch,” Foreign Policy (April 16, 2015), accessed January 21, 2016, http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/04/16/genocide-under-our-watch-rwanda-susan-rice-richard-clarke/ . 28 Ibid 29 Rory Carroll, Us Chose to Ignore Rwandan Genocide, Guardian , March 31, 2004, accessed March 23, 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/mar/31/usa.rwanda .