Silence in Rwanda: Rationalizing International Response 20 Years Later (2015)
Undergraduate: Jon Tostoe
Faculty Advisor: Neal Caren
Department: Sociology
In the spring of 1994 the world largely stood by as Hutu extremists slaughtered an estimated 800,000 Tutsi citizens in the small central African country of Rwanda. Although the slaughter in Rwanda captured the attention of media and people worldwide, many of those external to the genocide attributed the violence to being part of an ¿¿¿ongoing civil war¿¿¿, offering little to no action on behalf of the international community outside of Africa to stop or slow the killings. This lack of a meaningful response to the Rwandan genocide has widely been considered to be a blatant and devastating humanitarian failure. Many scholars and records point out that the United States and the United Nations were in the best position to help, and that they could have and should have stepped in to stop the murders in Rwanda, but not only did they not intervene, they removed any available troops in Rwanda, and ignoring requests for backup, left a nation to defend for itself in the face of genocide. General Romeo Daillaire, the UN official in charge of the peacekeeping mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR) was simply told by U.S and U.N officials to ¿¿¿stay out of it¿¿¿ and ¿¿¿stick to the U.N mandate¿¿¿ as he pleaded for reinforcements to stop the massacre. Scholars and people alike wonder why, in the dark shadows of the Holocaust and Cambodia, was the international community (In this case mainly the U.S and the U.N) so unresponsive, and in many ways, directly opposed to responding at all? In my research, I examine how the world, after the promise of ¿¿¿never again¿¿¿, was so unresponsive in the face of the mass-murders in Rwanda. I turn to current and past research regarding international relations and I draw from rhetorical strategies in analyzing the lack of response. Both U.S and international government documents serve as primary sources that I use to show how the international communities rationalized their lack of response. By examining the international reaction through the lens of relat