EDITORIAL: Burundi crisis: Is the UN really powerless?

When in 1994, at the height of the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, French President Francois Mitterrand said: “In that part of the world, Genocide is not very important”, little did one expect to come across similar attitudes more than two decades later. A United Nations internal memo on the situation in Burundi, leaked this week, unveiled the fact the same lethargic demon is still alive. In the memo, Herve Ladsous, head of UN peacekeeping, was skeptical that any peacekeeping mission to Burundi would succeed if bad came to worst: it would not be prepared to act. He instead recommended that a Security Council delegation visit the country next week. The question is: what will the Security Council mission achieve if all peaceful means have been flushed down the drain by the Burundian government? This kind of dilly-dallying is what cost Rwanda dearly in 1994 because “genocide in our part of the world was not very important”. Incidentally, Ladsous was deputy head of the French Mission at the UN during the Genocide; therefore, he should know better. Is he still reading from the same 1994 script? If this kind of discouraging message is coming from the UN’s top echelon, then there is reason to worry for Burundi. If the UN is scared of deploying troops on the ground, the least it could do is to compel Burundi to accept the deployment of African Union peacekeepers. AU is more than willing to deploy, so the Security Council should support that initiative, whether Burundi wants or not. Otherwise it should be ready to take the responsibility of whatever happens to Burundians. But as Rwanda learnt the hard way, accepting responsibility and apologising after the fact does not bring back the dead.

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EDITORIAL: Burundi crisis: Is the UN really powerless?