That the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi of Rwanda was allowed to proceed in the face of near universal indifference will remain one of the greatest scandals of the 20th century. The failure to act to protect human life, a decision taken by the UN Security Council at the outset, has defined for a generation the cost of inaction in the face of massive human rights abuses.

In the years since, the enquiries and reports have shown that the genocide of the Tutsi could have been entirely prevented, and once allowed to start could have been significantly impeded by decisive action. No warnings were heeded and once the massacres of civilians began, all that had been required was a reasonably sized militarized force with a strong mandate and sufficient means.

Even a modest show of force by the Security Council at an early stage would have prevented the terror from spreading. Nothing of the kind was authorized. Had the Council acted early, the génocidaires may have calculated differently.

Genocide is not a sudden and an abominable aberration. It does not begin with mass killings but with racism, with atrocity speech, and hate propaganda and careful planning. It requires the demonisation of the target group. It requires fear and terror. The genocidaires had even practised how to kill large numbers of people at speed and based on early reactions to these ‘rehearsals’ they knew they would get away with the crime.

A deliberately weakened UN peacekeeping mission on the ground, the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), proved to the racist ideologues of Hutu Power, that they had nothing to fear from the outside world. The genocide against the Tutsi, a deliberate government policy, a planned political operation, with the intent of eliminating a minority people, resulted in a death toll of one million people.  

As those days unfolded in 1994, and as more evidence emerged, the more reluctant Western politicians and their officials were to acknowledge a genocide was underway and that they should officially recognize it. Instead, their failure undermined every one of the founding principles of the United Nations, rendered useless the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the 1948 Genocide Convention. It is right to recall the indifference that existed twenty-eight years ago.  

Ignorance was no excuse, said Kofi Annan afterwards. He was then the UN under-secretary-general, and head of the UN’s Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) and he said no one should have a clear conscience.  "If the pictures of tens of thousands of human bodies rotting and gnawed on by dogs … do not wake us up out of our apathy, I don’t know what will.’  

Annan said it was difficult to accept that member states on the Security Council with more intelligence-gathering capabilities than the UN did not know what was happening. Was it really a lack of understanding of something so totally unbelievable? He thought that everyone involved would be harshly judged by history – something that has clearly yet to happen.

While in the intervening twenty-eight years whole bureaucracies and systems have been condemned for inaction, the blame has simply slipped away from the individuals who made the decisions. The UK ambassador, Lord David Hannay, who in an interview with me, explained how unsighted the UK was without an embassy in Kigali. After all, Rwanda was in the "French sphere”.  

Hannay said Rwanda had been an ‘orphan of the international community’ and he could not recall any Foreign Office reports on Rwanda at all. When arguing to withdraw the bulk of the peacekeeping mission from Rwanda, Hannay had argued that there was no magic keeping troops in Rwanda ‘if there is nothing useful that they can do.’

The French ambassador, Jean-Bernard Mérimée, whose government was intimate with the genocidaires, and who represented a country with the most complete information of anyone, did not share what it knew. France had its own agenda.

There was doubt cast afterwards by the US ambassador Madeleine Albright on the very idea of robust military action. In any event, "it had been difficult to get critical information about the grave risks of genocide or mass atrocities to key decision-makers before they were full blown”. The official US records show a different story. Declassified government documents reveal significant intelligence in the US at all levels concerning a huge civilian death toll.

Not one government called on the perpetrators, the génocidaires, to stop the genocide. Not one UN member state severed diplomatic ties with Rwanda and expelled Rwandan ambassadors. Not one government called for the representative of Rwanda’s genocidal Interim Government, with a non-permanent seat in the council, to be suspended from the chamber. For three months, the Council recognised as legitimate a government who was busy exterminating a part of its population.

Only in July was the decision made to eject the Rwandan representative from the council. Only after the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) had successfully driven the genocidal army and its militia out of the country, and only after Washington closed the Rwandan embassy and expelled the ambassador for representing a ‘genocidal regime’. The Security Council’s negligence and inexcusable apathy was never more apparent than in allowing a representative of this government to remain at the famous horseshoe table.

What a stroke of luck that this Council seat was for the génocidaires. As their crime got under way in April it proved an ideal location to launch their information war, their strategic use of disinformation to cover-up their extermination program.  The foundation stones of the genocide denial campaign that we see today first emerged in the false claims first outlined to the Council in 1994. The idea of "spontaneous slaughter” can be found in UN documents, in the transcripts of speeches to the Council, in the diplomatic language of cables and letters. It can be verified in UN archives open to the public.

In 1994, the Interim Government had wasted no time using the Council for its own ends and its UN ambassador, Jean-Damascène Bizimana had sat in all the Council’s daily informal and secret discussions. He carefully explained to his colleagues that the large civilian death toll resulted from the ‘spontaneous’ action of the population and ‘general insecurity’.  The Interim Government was ‘giving hope to the people’ and was profoundly committed to peace. Bizimana told them there were two sides in this civil war, and each one as guilty as the other. By all accounts, he was a dutiful and a constant presence.  

Their greatest diplomatic coup came in May with the appearance of Rwanda’s Foreign Minister, Jérôme Bicamumpaka, who, while addressing the council denied to the world that genocide was taking place and spoke one falsehood after another. He spouted the racist ideology of the Hutu Power movement, claimed Rwanda was seeing ‘hatred on display’ that was forged over four centuries of cruel and ruthless domination of ‘the Hutu majority’. Bicamumpaka said events in Rwanda were ‘complex and difficult to grasp’. An ‘inter-ethnic war’ of unbelievable cruelty was underway. No one seemed persuaded. The New Zealand Ambassador, Colin Keating described Bicamumpaka as odious, the mouthpiece of a faction who provided a shameful distortion of the truth.

In their later trials for the crime of genocide at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) the perpetrators blamed the population of Rwanda for the ‘spontaneous killing’. They told the courts they were the true victims, as though the defenceless families they killed had somehow threatened their existence.  The killing was self-defence and there had been mutual violence. Oblivious to the devastation they caused, and once serving their prison sentences they promoted their delusional thoughts in books and articles, still seeking to alter history, spreading falsehoods.

The facts that they seek to challenge are capable of immediate verification. There is overwhelming evidence the extermination of the Tutsi had been premeditated and planned well in advance. The official story of the genocide of the Tutsi rests today on a mass of official evidence and documentation.  Most important are the memories of survivors, those crucial witnesses who show the intent behind the lies, and their accounts are the rocks upon which the lies of the deniers will flounder.  

The blueprint for this campaign of genocide denial is to be found in UN documents, for the Security Council was central to the plans of the génocidaires. In 1994 they used the Council to promote denial of their crime even as it was underway as Rwandan diplomats in New York spread disinformation among diplomats, promoting fake news about what was really happening.