Customer Reviews

The United Nations and Rwanda 1993-1996

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This weighty tome comprises a 100-page overview, a detailed chronology and the texts of about 180 source documents including UN Resolutions, the Arusha Peace Agreements, reports from UNAMIR and other UN agencies, correspondence from a number of key players and an index of further material held in UN libraries. This book will be important to students of African history, international politics and of the UN's way of doing business but it is by no means faultless or complete. In sticking to the strategic level of decision making, Boutros Boutros-Ghali's history of the crisis remains detached to the point that many of his "primary sources" are, in fact, hearsay. (A significant proportion of his sources are actually his own reports to the Security Council and, since he was not on the ground, were self-evidently compiled from reports and submissions made by UN staff in Rwanda.) This is not to say that Boutros-Ghali is personally detached: in diplomatically-modest language, he makes plain his very great frustration at the time-consuming bureaucracy of his own organization and the inaction of the international community in the face of one of the most vicious and unsparing tragedies of recent times. At every turn, he reports the Security Council selection of the smallest and cheapest option open to it and even then, potential donors and contributors being unwilling to act. His problem must, however, be considered in the light of other operations and the vast number of blue berets serving around the globe in 1994/5. With the benefit of having served in UNAMIR and having witnessed some of the incidents reported by Boutros-Ghali at third or more distant hand, it is not surprising that this reviewer finds some imperfection. In particular, one of the printed texts outlines a situation from which he seems to have extracted the figure of 80,000 which he applies to the break out from Kibeho during the tragedy of 22 April 1995. The fact is that a much smaller number tried to break out from a crowd that had been 80,000 not long before. Notwithstanding this and other criticisms, Boutros-Ghali and the UN are to be commended for making this material accessible: it must, overall, prove of immense value to serious students of its subject.