Eyewitness to a Genocide
The United Nations and Rwanda
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher 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.
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As a staffer on the U.S. Mission to the U.N. in 1994, Barnett observed the U.N.'s reaction to the Rwandan genocide, in which an estimated 800,000 Tutsis were murdered by Hutus over a period of about three months; at the height of the killing, 5.5 deaths occurred every minute. Though officials at the U.N. Secretariat knew the facts, the U.N. took no meaningful action other than to declare that they remained "actively seized of the matter." (Barnett was himself initially opposed to intervention.) In puzzling through the U.N.'s decisions, the author offers not a scathing indictment of its timidity in the face of mass brutality so much as a searching and nuanced moral analysis. In his attempts to explain how "those working at the U.N. approached Rwanda not as individuals but rather as members of bureaucracies," Barnett carefully examines the U.N.'s institutional values and the ways in which decent international civil servants adhered to norms that repeatedly drew their attention away from the Rwandan crisis. All too aware of their powerlessness when member states refused to commit forces and desperate to avoid repetition of the debacle in Somalia (think Black Hawk Down), U.N. diplomats ultimately concluded that nonintervention was the ethical course. Barnett by no means exonerates the U.N.; in fact he insists that member states notably France and the U.S. knew of the genocide, had the power to act, yet failed to do so until it was too late. This insightful, balanced book reveals an unsettling paradox: in making choices it deemed moral, the U.N. tolerated the ultimate immorality of genocide.
