Annan legacy complicated by genocide in Rwanda
In a 2004 interview with PBS’s “Frontline,” Kofi Annan called the Rwandan genocide “a very painful and traumatic experience,” both for himself and the United Nations.
“It’s not something that you forget,” said Annan, then-UN secretary general. “It’s an experience that, if you go through, becomes part of you, and part of your whole experience as a human being.”
In 1994, at least 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered in a 100-day genocide, when Hutu soldiers and militias slaughtered members of the Tutsi ethnic group. At that time, Annan was chief of UN peacekeeping.
Annan left behind a complicated legacy when he died Saturday at age 80. A Ghanaian national, he would go on to become the first UN secretary general from sub-Saharan Africa. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate managed to, in some ways, make progress in Africa in his time leading the UN and after. But many saw his failure to intervene in Rwanda beforehand as inextricably intertwined with his later accomplishments. (He also oversaw peacekeeping during the Srebrenica massacre that left thousands of Muslims dead during the Balkan War.)
In 1994, the UN instructed Canadian Lt.-Gen. Roméo Dallaire, who headed the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda, not to intervene. Dallaire wanted more troops to quell the escalating violence, but instead most were withdrawn. In 2014, Dallaire wrote in a Washington Post column that “preventing this genocide was possible; it was our moral obligation. And it’s a failure that has haunted me every day for the last 20 years.”
As Stanley Meisler wrote in Annan’s obituary in The Washington Post: “He and his aides worked behind the scenes to prevent the widespread killing in Rwanda, but they said the forces of ethnic hatred were too strong to temper. When the massacres erupted in the mid-1990s, the UN Security Council, led by the United States, did little to stop them; hundreds of thousands were killed. “
Carl Wilkens was working for the humanitarian arm of the Seventh Day Adventist Church in Rwanda when the genocide began. He said the UN initially provided a false sense of security for many Rwandans, who may otherwise have run. It was “an enormous failure that has always been a very, very difficult thing for me,” said Wilkens, who wrote a book about the genocide, called “I’m Not Leaving.”
“Every time, I thought, are you kidding me? The person in charge of this enormous failure then gets made the secretary general of the UN,” Wilkens said. “That just really was a bitterness inside of me. I think it blinded me from any other positive contributions and achievements and reasons that he may have been selected for that position, and then what he was able to accomplish.”
Annan acknowledged the UN’s shortcomings, saying in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, in 1998 that “the world failed Rwanda at that time of evil.” Meisler wrote in Annan’s obituary that he later “published long reports, chock full of classified cables, that detailed the United Nations’ mistakes in dealing with the massacre in Srebrenica during the Balkan War and Rwanda in the 1990s.”
In 2001, Annan shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the UN “for having revitalized the UN and for having given priority to human rights,” the prize’s website says, in addition to his work on “the struggle to contain the spreading of the HIV virus in Africa and his declared opposition to international terrorism.”