World could have stopped genocide, says study

The Rwandan genocide could have been stopped with tougher action from outside powers, according to a new study released on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the slaughter. US, French and Belgian authorities, as well as the UN, received dozens of warnings in the months before the genocide but failed to act effectively, according to the 800-page study by Human Rights Watch. And once the killings began, foreign leaders reacted timidly and tardily.

"The Americans were interested in saving money, the Belgians were interested in saving face, and the French were interested in saving their ally, the genocidal government," says Ms Alison Des Forges, author of the study. "All of that took priority over saving lives."

Between 500,000 and 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus died in a 100-day frenzy of killing five years ago. The slaughter was sparked on April 6th 1994, when the plane carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi was shot down as it approached the airport at Kigali, Rwanda's capital.

Unwilling to call genocide by its name, foreign leaders treated the outlaw government as legitimate and even allowed it to remain a member of the UN Security Council. The killers used their legitimacy abroad to buttress their authority at home and sought to cover the genocide with a cloak of legality, according to Ms Des Forges.

Hutus account for 85 per cent of Rwanda's population, but the minority Tutsi group has traditionally held power. The 1990s saw Tutsi rebels based in Uganda drawn into a civil war with an increasingly extremist Hutu administration. Plans by extremists to massacre Tutsis were drawn up several years before the genocide started in 1994.

A team of historians, political scientists and lawyers spent four years working on the study, Leave None to Tell the Story, interviewing hundreds of Rwandans and gaining access for the first time to diplomatic and government records. The Irish agency Trocaire, part-funded this work.

While the genocide has been widely depicted as a spontaneous outburst of ethnic violence, the study asserts that a relatively small group of determined killers planned the mass murder for months. "The world has been saying for five years now that the Rwandan genocide was a terrible thing," says Ms Des Forges. "But that's not enough. We need to know how such killing campaigns work, if we hope ever to prevent them."