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The lack of international involvement is perhaps one of the most notable circumstances of the Rwandan Genocide with a lot of attention being focused on the United States’ failure to intervene to halt the killings. A common claim is that President Bill Clinton and his administration were unaware about the true extents of the massacres at the time they were occurring; however, according to recently declassified United States Department of State documents, government officials were warned that the Hutus were intending to perform an ethnic cleanse against the minority Tutsis in an attempt to eliminate the Rwandan population more than a year before the murders commenced. One example of this warning in advance was a diplomatic cable penned by Joyce Leader, the United States Embassy’s Deputy Chief of Mission in the Rwandan city of Kigali that was delivered to Washington in August 1992.|[1] The cable contained intelligence that Hutu extremists with connections to the Hutu-led government were said to be disseminating information calling for the complete extermination of the Tutsis.|[2] More than this, as part of the material discussed during a 2014 oral conference at The Hague, it was made clear that President Clinton’s envoys in Rwanda understood the significance of the killing of the Rwandan president and the civilian murders that were initiated in its wake.|[3] This means that many American government officials believed that the killings in the first few days were not isolated events, but rather the initiation of a plan.

In further discussion of this conference concerning the international community’s failure to intervene, the disregard and reluctance of the world powers, with special attention being dedicated to the United States, was a major point of debate. The central argument of these critics was that another warning had been released in January 1994, just three months before the start of the killings, and the United Nations had failed to adequately and appropriately respond.|[4] On top of this, some government officials testified that they believed President Clinton and his administration on a whole were simply disinterested in the Rwandan situation. On the assertion of Roméo Dallaire, the former Major-General of UNAMIR known for writing the “genocide fax,” “President Clinton did not want to know…He can excuse himself as much as he wants to the Rwandans, but he established a policy that he did not want to know.”|[5] In response to the murder of eighteen American soldiers in the 1993 Somalian intervention, the Clinton administration proposed the Presidential Decision Directive 25, also known as PDD-25.|[6] This was an executive order that was meant to reduce peacekeeping’s centrality in the United States’ foreign policy agenda by increasing restrictions on the necessary terms for the nation’s participation in peacekeeping missions. In this way, the American government made moves to restrict its possibilities of being involved in foreign conflicts.

In addition to this new principle, when discussion in the White House addressed the killings in Rwanda, the conversation only revolved around what steps should be taken to evacuate Americans and the UN. Little to no attention was paid to brainstorming on how to help Rwandans. According to Thomas S. Blanton, the director of the National Security Archives, an analysis of the declassified documents and logs from a task force that was created to track the genocide showed that eighty percent of the files were about evacuating American citizens.|[7] The remaining portion concerned how to draft a ceasefire and to restart the conversation on sharing power within the Rwandan government rather than intervention or evacuation strategies for the Rwandans.|[8]

Within the discussion of the United States’ role in the international community’s failure to intervene in Rwanda, another point of contention has been the Clinton Administration’s reluctance and refusal to classify the murders as a genocide. In a New York Times article published two months into the killings, it was revealed that the Clinton administration’s spokesperson was advised not to describe the killings as a genocide even though many highly ranked officials believed otherwise.|[9] This was a stark contrast to major figures like the Secretary General of the United Nations, along with experts in the field, who asserted that they were certain that the murders were part of an effort to systematically exterminate the Tutsis.|[10] It has been stated that the administration’s reluctance was out of fear that labeling the Hutus’ attack on the Tutsis as a genocide would bring about public protests for American soldiers to intervene. This was not a decision that the administration wanted to be forced into, so spokespersons were instructed by the Department of State and the National Security Council to say that “acts of genocide may have occurred.”|[11] This decision was heavily critiqued because at least 200,000 people had been massacred by this point with some estimates ranging to 400,000.|[12] According to the 1948 Genocide Convention that was created after the Holocaust and signed by the United States, nations were expected to adequately respond to accusations of genocide by opening an investigation into the perpetrators and by punishing the responsible parties.|[13] Critics argued that this expectation deterred the United States government from describing the Rwandan situation for what it truly was out of fear that they would be forced to get involved. White House officials claimed that the signing of the 1948 Genocide Convention did not make the United States obligated by law to intervene, but they still waited to use the word "genocide."|[14]

Furthermore, global attention has also been focused on how the United States government led the effort to deter the United Nations from working to its full extent to intervene in the genocide. On April 20, 1994, led and anchored by the United States, the United Nations Security Council voted to disengage the majority of the troops that had been deployed to Rwanda in 1993, leaving only 270 peacekeepers.|[15] American officials had originally proposed that all United Nations troops be withdrawn. The Clinton Administration decided both not to send American troops in as a part of UNAMIR as well as to not support a United Nations initiative to deploy a troop of over 5,000 African soldiers. |[16] |[1] Colum Lynch, “Exclusive: Rwanda Revisited,” Foreign Policy. April 5, 2015. http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/04/05/rwanda-revisited-genocide-united-states-state-department/.

|[2] Ibid.

|[3] Ibid.

|[4] Ibid.

|[5] Ibid.

|[6] Ibid.

|[7] Ibid.

|[8] Ibid.

|[9] Douglas Jehl, “Officials Told to Avoid Calling Rwandan Killings ‘Genocide,’” The New York Times. June 10, 1994. http://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/10/world/officials-told-to-avoid-calling-rwanda-killings-genocide.html.

|[10] Ibid.

|[11] Ibid.

|[12] Ibid.

|[13] Ibid.

|[14] Ibid.

|[15] Colum Lynch, “Exclusive: Rwanda Revisited,” Foreign Policy. April 5, 2015. http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/04/05/rwanda-revisited-genocide-united-states-state-department/.

|[16] Douglas Jehl, “Officials Told to Avoid Calling Rwandan Killings ‘Genocide,’” The New York Times. June 10, 1994. http://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/10/world/officials-told-to-avoid-calling-rwanda-killings-genocide.html