Product Description: Why was the UN a bystander during the Rwandan genocide? Do its sins of omission leave it morally responsible for the hundreds of thousands of dead? Michael Barnett, who worked at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations from 1993 to 1994, covered Rwanda for much of the genocide. Based on his first-hand experiences, archival work, and interviews with many key participants, he reconstructs the history of the UN’s involvement in Rwanda. In the weeks leading up to the genocide, the author documents, the UN was increasingly aware or had good reason to suspect that Rwanda was a site of crimes against humanity. Yet it failed to act. Barnett argues that its indifference was driven not by incompetence or cynicism but rather by reasoned choices cradled by moral considerations. Employing a novel approach to ethics in practice and in relationship to international organizations, Barnett offers an unsettling possibility: the UN culture recast the ethical commitments of well-intentioned individuals, arresting any duty to aid at the outset of the genocide. Barnett argues that the UN bears some moral responsibility for the genocide. Particularly disturbing is his observation that not only did the UN violate its moral responsibilities, but also that many in New York believed that they were "doing the right thing" as they did so. Barnett addresses the ways in which the Rwandan genocide raises a warning about this age of humanitarianism and concludes by asking whether it is possible to build moral institutions.
Superb Account of the UN Role in Rwanda As stated above, Barnett was a staffer on the U.S. Mission to the U.N. in 1994 and thus had a first hand view of the workings/failure of the Secretariat, the Security Council, the United Nations and the international community as a whole.
Unlike so many other books about Rwanda, Barnett refuses to simply write off the UN or the international community as uncaring or unconcerned about the unfolding genocide in Rwanda. Rather, he shows that those involved were deeply concerned but trapped by their own rules and internal bureaucratic logic, leading eventually to paralysis and inaction.
Coming fast on the heels of Somalia and Bosnia, Rwanda was left to implode because everyone involved operated on a logical/ethical plane seemingly far removed from the actual humanitarian crisis on the ground. With the UN overstretched and concerned about its reputation/survival, the members states of the security council unwilling to send troops or supplies into a raging anarchy, and UN rules dictating when peacekeeping and intervention were justified, Rwanda was left to fend for itself.
Barnett does a great job of presenting the facts and their corresponding arguments and explaining just how impossible a situation the UN was facing. As he says, none of this justifies UN inaction, but it does help us to understand how and why the world stood by as nearly 1 million people were slaughtered.
This book would not serve as a good introduction of the genocide itself, as the focus is really on the United Nations and its handling of the situation. If it is the actual genocide you want to learn about, read another book ("We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families" is a great introduction, as is Fergal Keane's "Season of Blood.") But if you want to understand how and why the international community so gravely failed Rwanda, this is the best book available.
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