姆巴耶·迪亚涅的照片——一名联合国维和人员违抗命令留在卢旺达保护平民

I mean we also have a unicorn as our national animal.

psst you know lions used to be in europe too right?

Weird gate keeping, but ok. The unicorn on our passports is still cool, right?

After reading this, I started wondering the nationalities of the people in the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR). They were a mix of people from Cameroon, Pakistan, Canada, India, Ghana, Bangladesh, Tunisia, and Belgium. The Belgium involvement is kind of surprising, because Rwanda had previously been a Belgian colony and the UN usually bans colonial powers from being a part of peacekeeping missions in their former colonies. I also wonder if the deaths of U.N. Peacekeepers has been used by countries in the past as a justification for invading or going to war (like a peacekeeper who was a U.S. citizen gets killed while on a mission in Mexico, so the U.S. government uses that as a justification to invade Mexico).

Obviously since the UN is not a nation if it has the opposition of all the worlds governments it can’t do anything. But it can make independent decisions with the resources already committed to it. I’m not the expert but I believe Samantha Power, previous ambassador to the UN and writer of the book “A Problem from Hell” is. In it she elaborates on what the UN could have done to suppress the genocide: The UN had ample warnings that genocides were about to take place, Rwanda bought about 90% of the worlds machetes leading up to the event The UN had direct warnings from Hutu leaders that they needed to control the country, directly in the UN HQ. With out that there would be obvious Hutu response once Habyarimana's plane was shot down. The UN threatened to withdraw peace keepers if the killing didn’t stop. Which is exactly what the Hutus wanted The UN focused on withdrawing foreigners alone instead of Tutsi as well, essentially shutting the eyes of the world to the genocide The UN also refused to shut down the “Hutu Radio” which was being used to coordinate the attacks, this was well after the killings were well known. I’m not gonna summarize all of it but that’s a good start. The Rwandan genocide was a massive failure of both the UN and the US who has the power maybe not to prevent the start but to stop further escalation. If you’re interested in more I would suggest reading power’s book. It won’t make you an expert but at least it might help you shut down random strangers on the internet who think no one knows anything about this. If you don’t wish to buy and read the book, there is a summary here, chapter 10 focusing on the topic above. http://nurembergtothehague.info/Genocide/Study%20Guide%20for%20A%20Problem%20from%20Hell.pdf Edited for spelling and grammar

What happened in 1994 in Rwanda was not a failure of the UN it was a failure of humanity. I read Romeo Dallaires book about his time in Rwanda during the genocide and its absolutely horrific. This man is a hero to so many

To provide some context, the Rwandan genocide was about a few months after the Battle of Mogadishu. The latter was such a disastrous engagement that it not only led to the termination of the UN mission in Somalia years later, but also forced a reexamination of US foreign policy at that time. Having a lot of your own country’s soldiers dying in some shithole across the world is very unpopular domestically, a message that spread from the US government to everybody else. It was only further reinforced by what happened to the ten Belgian UNAMIR peacekeepers in Rwanda. To the governments of the world, the lives of their own soldiers, their own citizens, mattered more than that of the Tutsi.