Rwanda on Monday marked 60 years of membership to the United Nations, a day that coincided with the global body marking 77 years of its establishment in 1945. Rwanda and the UN have had a love-hate relationship over the years. During the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, the UN leadership chose the easier way, abandoning Rwandans at their neediest time. At the time, at least 10,000 Rwandans were being killed every day during the Genocide. The highly outnumbered and outgunned UN peacekeepers in Rwanda at the time, through their commander, petitioned the leadership in New York for reinforcement but all the pleas fell on deaf ears. Instead, that leadership chose to completely pull out even the few peacekeepers, leaving Rwandans on their own. Fast-forward 28 years later, many things have happened. Rwanda in its own ways, has managed to use its experience during that critical time to resolve that whatever happened here does not happen elsewhere, especially on the African continent. Yet in some of these interventions, Rwanda has been working with the United Nations through peacekeeping missions. Indeed, like mentioned by the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Cooperation, this shows Rwanda’s resolve to focus on the future, instead of dwelling on the past. This is why the country found it necessary to work with the UN to bring peace where populations are threatened – like the Tutsi were in 1994 – with annihilation and this has yielded results. This is not to mention the role the UN, through its different agencies, has played in the rebuilding of Rwanda for close to three decades now. However, while Rwanda has decided to use her past and resolved not to look on when vulnerable populations are threatened, it is important wonder where the UN itself drew any lessons from their experience in Rwanda. The good place to start would be in DR Congo - Rwanda’s neighbours to the west – where for months, a genocide has been brewing, with systematic hate targeting mainly Kinyarwanda-speaking Congolese citizens reigning supreme, even coming from national leaders. Incidentally, this is happening with the world’s most expensive UN peacekeeping mission, MONUSCO, on watch.
