I ask this because although we have never seen another ethnic cleansing to match after the massacre in Rwanda, there have been some relevant attacks on ethical groups, even a big one happening right now in China.
Has the UN managed to prevent any ethnic (or something like that) extermination?
I think it’s important to clarify the historicity of the claim here before moving to answer it.
From what I can recall, and what I can find, the “never again” statement comes well after 1994 – in 2014, in fact. Deputy Secretary-General (at the time) Eliasson gave a wide-reaching speech identifying precisely what measures that the UN took in the 20 years following the Rwandan genocide. It’s a useful source, and one that essentially gives you the second half of the answer I’m going to give below. (edit: /u/theradbaron explains better below)
I think there are three questions inside of the claim you make:
I’m going to approach these as historic legal questions. In short, on question one: genocide as a concept was defined in the 1940s, and a consistent definition has been carried across international law (in the state and criminal senses) since. The definition is narrower than its first drafters intended. Genocide is notoriously hard to prove since it requires intent, which has made individual prosecution and triggering of State responsibility challenging. Ethnic cleansing is a more recent concept that hasn’t materialized into a crime of its own, but typically involves acts which themselves are criminalized, and can sometimes reach the level of a genocide.
This is important because it shows why not every ethnic cleansing is treated as a genocide and subject to, at least from a legal perspective, UN-led intervention.
And on question two: while limiting myself to only addressing matters over 20 years ago, the failures of the UN in Rwanda (and in Yugoslavia) led to immediate outcomes in the form of the ad hoc international criminal tribunals; an inquiry into peacekeeping, which culminated with the Brahimi report; and the establishment by Canada of the ICISS, which published in 2001 the ICISS report. These failures might also have influenced the negotiation of the Rome Statute.
On question three: this is a hard question to answer, for two reasons. First is that it asks for a causative link that is rarely clear. A state will never say “we were going to genocide you, and we would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for those pesky blue helmets” – they would fervently deny that any such state policy ever existed. As a result, you have to read between the lines somewhat to know what a state was actually attempting to do. Second, with respect for the 20 year rule, the only example that springs to mind where this claim can effectively be tested is East Timor, which I’m not an expert in - but which was also a different situation, involving the UN administrating a new state at the beginning of its existence. I don’t address this below as a result.
When does mass murder become genocide?
After World War Two, when the Holocaust was laid bare, there were two general streams of thought on how to prosecute the German regime put forward by two international lawyers: Hersch Lauterpacht and Raphael Lemkin. Lauterpacht favoured a crime focused on individuals, whereas Lemkin was concerned with the attempt to destroy entire communities. To quote Philippe Sands in East West Street:
“For Lauterpacht, the killing of individuals, if part of a systematic plan, would be a crime against humanity. For Lemkin, the focus was genocide, the killing of the many with the intention of destroying the group of which they were a part.”
In essence, the difference hinged on whether one considered that attacks on individuals or groups were more heinous. Attempting to prosecute an atrocity of this scale was entirely new, and the stakes were high– both internationally in the sense of ensuring an effective prosecution, and personally, as both men’s legal legacies were at stake. This was an opportunity to shape the beginning of modern human rights and international criminal law. Both men were also Jewish, and had a very personal stake in the effective prosecution of the Nazi leadership.
Lemkin had fled to the United States in 1941, and almost obsessively collected every scrap of information and documentation he could from Nazi Germany and its occupied territories. He was using these to identify and collate Nazi policy towards minorities, and in 1944 his research culminated in the book Axis Rule. Axis Rule contained the first notion of a crime of genocide. Lemkin argued, per Earl, that:
“genocide ‘does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction’ of a group, rather it first involves ‘different actions’ aimed ‘at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups… the objective’ of which would be ‘the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups’. … There were, of course, many ways to [physically] destroy a group besides physically killing members of the group, he noted, such as destroying national forms of self-government, killing the intelligentsia of a group, imposing the oppressor's language and education onto the targeted group, robbing targeted groups of the ability to be self-sustaining and imposing biological policies so that the group will eventually be unable to procreate.”
Lemkin’s notion of the crime of genocide was broad. It included criteria that, were we to see them today, might capture acts of ethnic cleansing, and it was well-received in the US: in fact, Lemkin was employed by the judge advocate general’s war crimes office in 1945, and tasked with helping to draft the IMT indictment for war crimes.
However, his notion of genocide wasn’t well received by all those involved in the Nuremberg Charter. The British delegation objected to the term. Ultimately it appeared in count three of the IMT indictment, but not in the London/Nuremberg Charter itself, where Lauterpacht’s concept of crimes against humanity was preferred. The concept of genocide was repeatedly referenced by prosecutors throughout the IMT, although not mentioned in the judgment of the International Military Tribunal. Attempts at applying it did occur in some Nuremberg trials, including in the SS–Einsatzgruppen case, where there was an extraordinary amount of supporting evidence available. The judge in that case attempted to define it as the “scientific extermination of a race”, which is very different from the framing we have today.
The Genocide Convention itself, negotiated against the backdrop of the ongoing tribunals but with the involvement of several states, evolved a narrower concept of the crime. It drew from the phrasing of a UN resolution, A/RES/96(I):
“genocide is a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to live of individual human beings”.
The Secretariat’s first draft of the Convention included a purported exhaustive list of genocidal acts, which summarize as intentional killing, the prevention of births, and the destruction of characteristics of a group, including its culture. State delegations, led by the then Republic of China, put forward a narrower draft of genocidal acts:
- Killing members of the group
The Convention itself says that genocide involves:
(a) Killing members of the group (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
All this to say, the idea of genocide has drifted over time. It began broad, failed to be systematically incorporated into the Nuremberg Charter or the successive trials, and then was narrowed by states. The other key point is that the Convention requires a state have an “intent to destroy” a group, in whole or in part.
In practice, this has created an environment where identifying and prosecuting genocide is hard. Intent is hard to prove because (with the exception of Nazi Germany) murderous regimes rarely keep comprehensive records of the policy decisions behind their actions. The International Court of Justice, in a case on the Genocide Convention, only identified the killings in Srebrenica as a genocide –specific intent had not been proven for other acts in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Ethnic cleansing
Genocide is different to ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing, including forced displacement, is a relatively new term that only came into the international mind in around 1992. It includes several subsidiary acts, some of which – such as massacres and sexual violence – might fall clearly within the Genocide Convention, and others – such as forced displacement, or the destruction of personal and cultural property – do not. The narrowing of the crime of genocide means that while these are crimes against humanity, they aren’t necessarily genocidal.
In sum on this part, genocide and ethnic cleansing are not the same. Genocide is hard to prove, and intervention without proof is hard to justify. Ethnic cleansing is not an independent crime, and intervention on its basis is hard to justify.
In part 2 below, I take a look at how Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia drove change in the UN system, from 1994-2001.
Your question frames the issue as though the UN blames the lack of response to insufficient measures in place prior to the genocide, while the U.S. blamed a lack of both veritable reporting on the extent and nature of the genocide and the willpower to take it on as it unfolded. Bill Clinton went so far as to employ the ‘never again’ rhetoric in 1998, visiting Rwanda on the 4th anniversary of the genocide, stating:
“All over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror. We in the United States and the world community did not do as much as we could have and should have done to try to limit what occurred in Rwanda in 1994… And never again must we be shy in the face of the evidence.''
Let us be clear about something here, and this is a point /u/loudass_cicada missed, but it’s absolutely crucial to understanding why no one intervened: If Bill Clinton genuinely did not know about the depth and speed of the genocide as it unfolded, it is because he chose not to. As Samantha Powers notes in her book A Problem From Hell, not once did Clinton call a meeting of senior officials to discuss the genocide as it was occurring. Concomitantly with the senior administration’s apathy to the genocide was a policy in place within the State Department to actively avoid using the word ‘genocide’ publicly, instead resorting to verbal gymnastics such as ‘acts of genocide’ (a phrase officially sanctioned for public use by the US State Department on May 21st, well into the genocide). We will return to that in a moment, but we need to ask: when was the violence recognised as genocide by the US?
On April 19th a National Security Council (NSC) staff member named Eric Schwartz sent a classified memo to more senior NSC officials Susan Rice and Donald Steinberg, stating he learned from an NGO that UNAMIR was protecting 25,000 Rwandans, and that if UNAMIR is pulled, those Rwandans “will quickly become victims of genocide.” He asks if the information is accurate and if it has been conveyed to more senior administration officials, believing it should be a “major factor” in how to proceed. A response never materialises, but it is evidence that the word “genocide” was beginning to be floated around behind the scenes. On April 23rd the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) distributed a Top Secret document called the National Intelligence Daily (NID) to hundreds of policymakers. The since declassified section pertaining to Rwanda states that the RPF may be willing to negotiate with Hutu military officers “in an effort to stop the genocide.” That same day an article in The New York Times published an article which opened with the following: “What looks very much like genocide has been taking place in Rwanda.” Romeo Dallaire- commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) would later state that he realised he was a witness to genocide a couple of weeks into April as well.
Returning to semantics then and why the US didn’t publicly call the violence ‘genocide’. A declassified discussion paper on Rwanda from the office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East/Africa region dated May 1st raises the possibility of calling for a legal investigation into possible violations of the UN Geneva Convention on Genocide, to which a legal warning from the State Department is given, stating, “genocide finding could commit USG (US Government) to actually do something.” Eight days later a Defense Intelligence Report (DIR) was published in classified channels by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) that notes parallel activity taking place, both murders occurring at random but also an organized “effort of genocide being implemented by the army to destroy the leadership of the Tutsi community.” These classified intelligence reports and behind-the-scenes talking points stands in stark contrast to President Clinton’s remarks of feigned ignorance of the severity of the situation to survivors of the genocide years later.
A significant driving force behind this policy of inaction and evasive semantics was Presidential Decision Directive (PDD-25) signed by President Clinton on May 3rd which outlined the U.S. policy on peacekeeping operations. One of the key factors the directive stated in deciding whether to engage in peacekeeping operations was, “UN involvement advances U.S. interests, and whether there is an international community of interest in dealing with the problem on a multilateral basis.” This sentiment of public apathy is captured well in a Washington Post article from 1994:
“SUCH IS THE violence in the streets in Rwanda that in barely a week the name of this central African country has become the new metaphor for self-inflicted internecine horror. Observers now publicly wonder what if anything might be done about it by more favorably situated international organizations, states and persons.
Unfortunately, the immediate answer to the last question appears to be: not much. A United Nations mission sent in a while back to monitor a precarious tribal peace is being recalled, unable to protect its own armed members -- 10 Belgian soldiers were killed -- let alone the defenseless Rwandan citizenry. The three groups that traditionally connect foreign attention to a local crisis -- humanitarian organizations, resident foreign nationals and the foreign press -- are all being forced to evacuate. The United States has no recognizable national interest in taking a role, certainly not a leading role.”
A primary reason for this apathy on the part of the USG was, as Kurt Mills notes in his chapter Rwanda: The Failure of “Never Again” from his book International Responses to Mass Atrocities in Africa : Responsibility to Protect, Prosecute, and Palliate was the failure of the U.S. and the UN in Somalia the year prior. I would recommend this book to you OP, as it specifically delves into the devastating consequences of the UN/US’s inaction in Rwanda for neighbouring Zaire. As Mills notes, the lack of US resolve to confront the Rwandan genocide strongly influenced other UN nations responses, who also chose not to get involved, with the exception of France late in the genocide to support the Hutus (the ones committing genocide) in Opération Turquoise, directly undermining United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR).
I will write a part 2 later about the impact on Zaire and the failure of the ICTR, which was mentioned previously in this thread.
Sources for this post:
James Bennet, "Clinton Declares U.S. and the World Failed Rwandans," New York Times, March 26, 1998, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/world/032698clinton-africa.html.
Samantha Power, A Problem From Hell (London: Harper Perennial, 2007), 366.
Mills Kurt, International Responses to Mass Atrocities in Africa: Responsibility to Protect, Prosecute, and Palliate (Philadelphia: Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc, 2015)
Memo to the U.S. Secretary of State from George Moose, John Shattuck, Douglas Bennet, and Conrad Harper, (May 21 1994), https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB53/rw052194.pdf
NSC Memo From Eric Schwartz to Susan Rice and Donald Steinberg, (April 19 1994), https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB511/docs/DOCUMENT%2018.pdf
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, National Intelligence Digest (April 23 1994), https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB117/Rw34.pdf
"Cold Choices in Rwanda," The New York Times, April 23 1994
Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Middle East/Africa Region, Discussion Paper on Rwanda (May 1 1994), https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB53/rw050194.pdf
Defense Intelligence Report, (U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, May 9 1994), https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB53/rw050994.pdf
"The Clinton Administration’s Policy on Reforming Multilateral Peace Operations." https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB53/rw050094.pdf