Did the West lack the power or the will to intervene and minimize the Rwandan genocide?

Answer 1

It wasn't profitable.

Answer 2

I think and this is just my opinion the west lacked the will to intervene the Rwandan genocide...it could have intervened
and prevented mass genocide but it didn't. The Clinton Administration was aware of it but did nothing as did the rest of the western world which is a travesty...we could of sent the Fleet Marine Force to restore order as we did when Somalia was on the brink on mass starvation and they brought order and food deliveries to the people (months before the 'Blackhawk Down' incident)...we could of done the same in Rwanda. I never understood why the world just stood by and watched a country destroy itself and a population by genocide, ethnic cleansing whatever you want to call it. Was it because it was a black 3rd world African country? We intervened in Bosnia when they started ethnic cleansing...why not Rwanda. Good question BTW.

Answer 3

It is my impression that the U.S. only intervenes in civil unrests when it is beneficial. We typically do not intervene just for the sake of saving human lives... check the history, typically when it is about securing resources, money or gaining strategic holds in a particular region then we intervene. The West is still considered a strong political power and highly influential in the U.N., therefore the Rawandan genocide could have been minimized had there been intervention during very crucial periods. Unfortunately, lives of black people in this country and abroad have been treated as expendible... Sad but true... in my opinion.

Answer 4

Clearly, we had the means, militarily, but lacked the will to intervene.

Partly, it was a question of "who's on first?": Rwanda was a former colony of France and the French had military bases in Rwanda (maybe stiil have, don't know). The French, for all their bravado, are notoriously gunshy when it comes to doing battle. But they weren't asking anyone to help, either. So it was kind of their ball... and they dropped it... as usual.

Partly, it was a question of politics. There are four "schools" of politics on international relations that take turns being influential in the United States: fortress America isolationism, Wilsonian "world peace" multilateralism, Kissingerian realpolitick, and Theodore Roosevelt/neoconservative (what their detractors including myself would call economic imperialism). Basically, isolationism is concerned with keeping everyone else out, realpolitick is concerned with advancing our security by keeping all the other countries in the world too engaged with their own enemies to try to attack us. President Woodrow Wilson founded the league of nations after the Great War (world war 1) which became the United Nations (UN) after world war 2; this philosophy supports intervention or war only for humanitarian reasons to stop war crimes, genocide or to defend against aggression by rogue states. The neoconservative philosophy says the United States should aggressively militarily pursue its economic interests and promote our culture of democracy. Rwanda and Burundi were overcrowded economic basket cases in the middle of several tin pot dictatorships, in other words, they had no strategic or economic significance for the United States or Europe, for that matter. So the only philosophy that would promote intervention to stop the genocide is Wilsonian multilateralism which was in retreat during the genocide because of the failed intervention in Somalia.

Other contributing circumstances: the US was in an economic recession, Clinton's personal credibility was still smarting over the "Black Hawk down" incident in Somalia, Congress was controlled by Republicans (who are, by and large, not multilateralist) and Clinton either had just signed or was in the process of signing and getting NAFTA ratified which used up a lot of political capital. The genocide happened before the AIDS protease inhibitor cocktail treatment became widespread which meant that there was nothing to even slow the virus. Also, in the early nineties, funding of unsavory dictators who had been necessary allies during the cold war (realpolitick) was pulled all across latin america, asia and africa (including Somalia and Zaire, now the DRC). So, at the time, in the United States, Africa was seen as a seething mass of failed states, AIDS, tropical diseases and various other horrors too painful to contemplate. The support for intervening in Rwanda just wasn't there. I saw an interview with Bill Clinton on Charlie Rose where he said not intervening was the one thing he regretted most about his presidency.

The genocide in Rwanda was much worse than people had thought it would get. When the full scale of horror was known in the West, some soul-searching took place. I think the Rwandan genocide led to the Clinton presidency taking a hard line with Milosevich's Serbia culminating in the NATO bombing of Serbia during Serbia's attempted "ethnic cleansing" of Kosovar.

Answer 5

As it is with foreign relations the West usually prefers to stay neutral on matters that involve conflicts inside such countries. They have the power to intervene, they simply chose not to. The will? Well if you think about it, it is rather peculiar that they should try to invade Iraq who also suffers from conflicts of race and/or religion. However, as the person who posted above, there is certainly some profit to come off invading -this- country and not Rwanda. But then again, this is somewhat my biased view on the subject. It could be unfair to point this towards racism, as it is not always the case but one can suppose that maybe it could be about that.

Answer 6

Sometimes things look so easy from the outside. Most of the information that the west used to make any decisions concerning rwanda is classified secret and we will probably never know why.

Sometimes it is not a matter of power or will, but a matter of politics.

Just look at the Cuban missle crisis, it is only recently that we have been finding out about details of those days and that was 40 years ago.

Answer 7

i do no longer trust the united states of u . s . of america could could take orders from the United international locations because the united states shows more advantageous Love and Compassion to human beings global huge universal than the UN does.

Answer 8

The U.N refused to step in.Clinton could have but chose to follow the U.N.s lead.

Answer 9

no..there was nothing in it for them to intervene