KEY DECISION MAKERS AND EYEWITNESSES GATHER IN THE HAGUE TO CONSIDER
THE FAILURE OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY IN THE 1994 RWANDAN
GENOCIDE
Posted May 29, 2014
For more information contact:
202/994-7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu
See additional media information at end of posting
Washington, DC, May 29, 2014 – Leading decision makers from the United
Nations, Africa, the United States, and Europe will gather in The
Hague from June 1 to 3 to consider the failure of the international
community to prevent or effectively respond to the 1994 genocide in
Rwanda and to explore whether and how the tragedy might have been
averted.

UNAMIR commander General Romeo Dallaire in 1994. Photo credit: UN
Photo/Milton Grant.
This rare convening of former officials and eyewitnesses, jointly
sponsored by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and The Hague
Institute for Global Justice, in cooperation with the National
Security Archive (George Washington University), coincides with the
20th anniversary of the genocide, a deliberate campaign of killing
that took the lives of as many as one million Rwandans, predominantly
Tutsis, between April and July 1994. Thousands of pages of newly
declassified documents have been made available online by the
conveners as part of a broader initiative to shed new light on the
failed response to the genocide.
Participants in the conference, International Decision Making in the
Age of Genocide: Rwanda 1990-1994, include architects of the 1992-93
Arusha Accords; the leadership of UNAMIR, the UN peacekeeping force in
Rwanda; four former members of the UN Security Council; senior
officials from the United Nations, Africa, the United States, and
Europe; and former diplomats, human rights activists, academics, and
journalists present in Kigali before and during the genocide.
Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire, leader of the ill-fated UN
peacekeeping mission in Rwanda and recipient of the 2014 Elie Wiesel
Award — the Holocaust Museum's highest honor — for his bravery and
moral courage in helping save some 30,000 lives, will also
participate.
"Ongoing crises in Syria, Sudan, and the Central African Republic
highlight the urgent need to improve the international community's
efforts to prevent genocide and other forms of mass violence," said
Cameron Hudson, acting director of the Museum's Center for the
Prevention of Genocide. "While there have been a number of previous
inquiries into the Rwandan genocide, few have gathered in one place so
many former officials and eyewitnesses in a collective search for
knowledge and understanding.
ned this conference, and worked to get declassified and made
accessible thousands of previously secret documents, in the hope that
by understanding more about the past, we will be able to help
governments everywhere improve their efforts to prevent and halt
future threats of genocide," he added.

International Humanitarian Aid, Rwanda, circa September 1994. Photo
from personal collection of Prudence Bushnell.
Abi Williams, president of The Hague Institute, said, "The Hague
Institute is pleased to host this important conference on the 20th
anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. It will afford some of the most
senior national and international actors from the period an
opportunity for reflection and debate and will-we hope-provide us with
a better understanding of how international decision making affected
how the calamitous events of 1994 unfolded, with a view to ensuring
that such horrendous crimes are never repeated."
The initiative has collected, applied to get declassified, and made
accessible-in many instances for the first time-significant documents
from a wide variety of sources relating to many aspects of the Rwandan
genocide. Most recently, declassification requests that the National
Security Archive and the Holocaust Museum made in four countries have
resulted in the release of nearly 300 formerly secret diplomatic
cables that provide fresh insights into closed UN Security Council
sessions in the days and weeks leading up to the genocide.
These newly released documents, which will be available on the
National Security Archive and Holocaust Museum websites starting
Monday, June 2, include reporting from key players in the Security
Council debates, in addition to previously withheld US diplomatic
traffic. They include cables from three officials who will attend the
conference: New Zealand envoy Colin Keating, president of the Security
Council in April 1994; Sir David Hannay, the British permanent
representative to the UN; and Karel Kovanda of the Czech Republic, who
was the first UN ambassador to use the term "genocide" to describe the
events in Rwanda.
raneous diplomatic cables offer a glimpse into the debates in the
so-called "informal sessions" of the Security Council, which took
place behind closed doors without the presence of official note
takers. It was at these meetings that the international community
shaped its response to the genocide in Rwanda in the days and weeks
after the April 6 assassination of Rwandan president Juvénal
Habyarimana, which triggered the start of the killing.

"Eglise Famille 1932" – Church for Tutsi refugees, Rwanda, circa
September 1994. Photo from personal collection of Prudence Bushnell.
The conference is modeled on a series of "critical oral history"
gatherings co-organized by the National Security Archive over the past
25 years that have dramatically expanded public and scholarly
knowledge of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, the end of the
Cold War, and US-Iran relations, among other topics.
Tom Blanton, director of the Archive, said, "The remarkable new
documentation obtained by our project pulls back the curtain over UN
deliberations in 1994 and goes right to the question of why and how
the international community failed to respond and to protect Rwandans.
Now, thanks to the Holocaust Museum and The Hague Institute, this
remarkable group of former officials and eyewitnesses is coming
together to learn from each other, and from the new evidence, to
prevent future catastrophes like Rwanda."
The conference will focus on three themes. The first, "Failure to
Prevent," will address the lead-up to the genocide between October
1990 and April 1994, and ask such questions as whether the
international community might have been able to foresee and prevent
the gathering catastrophe in Rwanda. The second, "Failure to Protect,"
will focus on the international response to the genocide, with special
attention to the role of the UN Security Council. The third will be a
"lessons learned" session that will examine the similarities and
differences between Rwanda and other contemporary mass atrocities.
This conference is made possible in part by the generous support of
the Sudikoff Family Foundation, which funds the Holocaust Museum's
Sudikoff Annual Interdisciplinary Seminar on Genocide Prevention, and
by the support of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
for the National Security Archive's genocide documentation efforts.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
A living memorial to the Holocaust, the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum seeks to inspire citizens and leaders worldwide to
confront hatred, prevent genocide, and promote human dignity. The
Museum's Center for the Prevention of Genocide works to make the
prevention of genocide and related crimes against humanity a national
and international priority. Find out more about the Museum's work on
Rwanda and the International Decision Making in the Age of Genocide
initiative at ushmm.org/rwanda20.
The Hague Institute for Global Justice
The Hague Institute for Global Justice is an independent, nonpartisan
organization established in 2011 by the city of The Hague and key
Hague-based organizations and with support from the Dutch government
to conduct interdisciplinary policy-relevant research, develop
practitioner tools, and convene experts, practitioners, and
policymakers to facilitate knowledge sharing to contribute to, and
further strengthen, the global framework for preventing and resolving
conflict and promoting international peace. Visit
thehagueinstituteforglobaljustice.org.
The National Security Archive
The National Security Archive, founded in 1985 by historians and
journalists and based since 1995 at The George Washington University,
opens governments at home and abroad by using and advocating freedom
of information laws, challenging unnecessary national security
secrecy, and analyzing and publishing former secrets. Supported by
donations from foundations and individuals and by library
subscriptions, the Archive has published more than a million pages of
primary sources through ProQuest and the award-winning website
nsarchive.org.
FOR THE MEDIA:
Working sessions of the conference are not open to the press. A record
of the proceedings will be released for scholarly and public education
purposes at a later date.
For information about the conference contact:
Michael Abramowitz: mabramowitz@ushmm.org + 1 (202) 817-5498
Cameron Hudson: chudson@ushmm.org +1 (202) 817 -4723
There will be an opportunity to speak with a panel of key participants
on Tuesday, June 3 from 8:30 - 9:30 a.m. at The Hague Institute,
Sophialaan 102514 JR.
For more information about this opportunity contact:
Marie-Laure Poiré: m.l.poire@TheHagueInstitute.org +31 (0)70 - 30 28 133
http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20140529/
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