ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, February 28, 1996 TAG: 9602280075
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: PARIS
SOURCE: MORT ROSENBLUM ASSOCIATED PRESS
AN EVALUATION of the international community's response to the genocide is nothing less than damning.
Many thousands of Rwandans died because the outside world ignored early warnings of genocide and then botched its vast relief efforts, a scathing international evaluation concludes.
``Humanitarian action cannot substitute for political action,'' said the report, which blamed the vacillation of world leaders for encouraging genocide and triggering a mass exodus across Rwandan borders.
The full report, an unprecedented exercise in self-criticism formally titled the ``International Response to Conflict and Genocide: Lessons From the Rwanda Experience,'' is to be released March 12; an 80-page summary was obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press.
Denmark initiated the project, with support from the United States, the 15-member European Union, 18 other countries, U.N. agencies, private aid groups, the Red Cross, the World Bank and others.
While praising donors and aid agencies for an ``impressive and, on the whole, effective relief operation,'' the report said poor coordination, rivalries and waste caused many needless deaths. Furthermore, it said, timely international action would have made the relief action unnecessary.
Clear warning signs of building ethnic tensions, evident in early 1994 and proclaimed by various observers, were ``ignored, discounted or misinterpreted,'' the report said. To those responsible for the eventual genocide, the hesitation and indecision was a signal of unwillingness to intervene.
``The international community failed to stop or stem the genocide, and in this regard shares responsibility for the extent of it,'' the report said bluntly.
From April through July 1994, some 500,000 to 800,000 minority Tutsis were shot, hacked and clubbed to death in Rwanda by majority Hutus. The murderous frenzy by the army and Hutu-dominated militias was unleashed when the nation's president, a Hutu, died April 7 in a still-unsolved plane crash.
International aid began only in June, when hundreds of thousands of Rwandans fled their bloody country and burdened neighboring Tanzania and Zaire. The report says 100,000 of 3 million displaced people died of cholera, dysentery or violence in the squalid, chaotic refugee camps, which lacked water and sanitation.
Faced with overwhelming numbers and impossible conditions, relief workers tried to persuade the refugees, mostly Hutus, to return home. But that put those who ventured back at severe risk from the new Tutsi-led government.
LENGTH: Medium: 55 linesby CNB