Survivors Sue UN for "Complicity" in Rwanda Genocide
The United Nations is being sued, for the first time in its history, for alleged complicity in the crime of genocide. Lawyers are instituting a case on behalf of two Rwandan women whose families died during the 1994 genocide in which 800,000, mostly Tutsi people, were slaughtered by Hutus.
The women, the widow of a former Rwandan supreme court judge and the sister of a Tutsi former cabinet minister, accuse UN soldiers who were meant to defend their families of either handing them over to their killers or running away.
The UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, has expressed regret, and admitted UN failings in responding to the genocide.
--Karen MacGregor
In its preamble, the U.N. Charter says it was formed to "save succeeding generations from the scourge of war." The truth is, that the U.N. has done more to prevent peace, than to prevent war. In its entire history, the U.N. Security Council has voted to authorize military intervention only three times: in Korea, in the 1991 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and in the 2002 intervention in Afghanistan – all at the request of the United States.
While hundreds of thousands of people were being hacked to death in Rwanda, the U.N. talked, but did nothing. While ethnic cleansing was occurring in the Balkans, the U.N. talked, but did nothing. The chronology of slaughter during the life of the U.N. is inescapable evidence of the U.N.'s abject failure to "save succeeding generations from the scourge of war."
--Henry Lamb