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20 April 2015

Genocide Under Our Watch

BY COLUM LYNCH
APRIL 16, 2015

Newly declassified White House documents place Richard Clarke and Susan Rice at the forefront of U.S. efforts to limit a robust U.N. peacekeeping operation before and during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Nearly two weeks into the 1994 mass killings in Rwanda that would ultimately be called genocide, Eric P. Schwartz, a human rights specialist on the National Security Council, wrote a memorandum to his White House colleagues voicing alarm over reports of tens of thousands of slaughtered ethnic Tutsis.

Human rights groups were pleading for the Clinton administration to help keep 2,500 U.N. peacekeepers on the scene in the Central African country. Human Rights Watch, the New York-based advocacy group, was warning that “Rwandans will quickly become victims of genocide.”

“Is this true?” Schwartz asked Susan Rice, at the time a 29-year-old director of international organizations and peacekeeping on the National Security Council (NSC), and Donald Steinberg, then the NSC’s new director for African affairs, according to a recently declassified White House memo dated April 19, 1994. “If so, shouldn’t it be a major factor informing high-level decision-making on this issue? Has it been?”

In the end, the fate of Rwanda’s victims hardly figured at all in U.S. calculations about the international community’s response to what turned out to be the worst mass killing since the HolocaustIn the end, the fate of Rwanda’s victims hardly figured at all in U.S. calculations about the international community’s response to what turned out to be the worst mass killing since the Holocaust, according to hundreds of pages of internal White House memos.

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