That the UN was warned about the Rwanda massacre and told the peacekeepers not to intervene.
Rwanda’s president said the country had become “a family once again”, while marking the 25th anniversary of the genocide that killed 800,000 people.
BBC
Paul Kagame, who led a rebel force that ended the slaughter, lit a remembrance flame in the capital Kigali.
Rwandans will mourn for 100 days, the time it took in 1994 for about a tenth of the country to be massacred.
Most of those who died were minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus, killed by ethnic Hutu extremists.
The UN did nothing.
In late 1993, Dallaire received his commission as the Major-General of UNAMIR, the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda. UNAMIR’s goal was to assist in the implementation of the Arusha Accords, a peace agreement intended to end the Rwandan Civil War. The UN attempted to negotiate with the Hutus in the Rwandan army and with Juvénal Habyarimana, a Hutu who was president at the time, and with the Tutsis, as represented by the rebel commander Paul Kagame, who led the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). (He later was elected as President of Rwanda as of September 2017.) When Dallaire arrived in Rwanda, his mandate was to supervise the implementation of the accords during a transitional period in which Tutsis were to be given some positions of power within the Hutu-dominated government.
Romeo Dallaire
There were early signs that something was amiss when, on January 22, 1994, a French DC-8 aircraft landed in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, loaded with ammunition and weapons for the Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR). (FAR was the Hutu army under Habyarimana’s control.) Dallaire notified the UN by telegram, suggesting he seize these weapons to prevent violence, but the UN deemed this action to be beyond his UN mandate.[citation needed] In addition to the arms deliveries, he learned that troops from the Rwandan government began checking identity cards, which identified individuals by ethnicity as Hutu or Tutsi.
The UN had an efficiency problem. In an effort to achieve results they eventually hired mercenaries.
The other problem was that they won. EO soundly beat back the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), complicating the peace deal that the U.N. was trying to broker. EO was enough of a threat that its ouster was a precondition for the rebels agreeing to the accord. Some Sierra Leonean military officers openly resented the presence of foreign advisors and quietly accused them of human rights violations, while privately colluding with the rebels. And, as everyone from EO predicted, the peace deal fell apart the moment they left.
What followed was a series of horribly bungled interventions, first by the Economic Community of West African States, then the U.N., that accomplished little beyond confirming its critics’ worst prognostications about the wisdom of such endeavors. The RUF restarted its brutal campaign with renewed enthusiasm. The war that EO had largely won continued for several more years at the cost of thousands more innocent lives. What became the largest U.N. intervention in the world almost became its biggest failure. The British Army would eventually enter the conflict to quell the violence, but separate from the U.N. peacekeeping mission.