Ben Poser
April 7, 2024, marked six months since the largest genocidal mass murder of Jews this century; it also was the 30th anniversary of the beginning of the Rwandan genocide. Of the various similarities any rational person can discern between the two crimes, one stands out in its repulsiveness: Just as it was a generation ago, the United Nations is perhaps the greatest facilitator of genocide on Earth.
The U.N. was established in 1945 as a means of preventing two things: a “hot” world war on the numbing scale of the Second, and the extermination of any group of human beings based upon their identity. Innovations in nuclear weapons technology made the first too catastrophic to risk (thus moot), but the U.N.’s responsibility to stop genocide, codified the year of Israel’s rebirth, still stands. Unforgivably, since that time, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide has never influenced the United Nations to stop any of the genocides which have occurred since the Holocaust.
In those postwar years, the U.N. has devoted much of its money and moral authority to attacking not Cambodia, China, Sudan, or Zimbabwe, but Israel—a country created by the survivors of genocide in the hope of preventing another. It must never be forgotten that when the General Assembly’s Resolution 3379 declared Zionism a form of racism in 1975, two genocides which had nothing to do with Jews—those in Pol Pot’s Cambodia and Idi Amin’s Uganda—were occurring simultaneously, eventually killing approximately 3.3 million people combined. Similarly, post-2000, while issuing one defamatory resolution after another against Israel, genocide was occurring in Congo, Darfur, and, more recently, throughout Iraq and Syria at the hands of ISIS. But the latter took place during Israel’s Operation Protective Edge in 2014, so, naturally, a U.N. commission later issued a report accusing Israel of committing “war crimes.”
Even more damning, though, is how the U.N.’s actions concerning Rwanda parallel its current mistreatment of Israel as it fights for its survival against jihadi armies.
Perhaps the most stunning correlation between the U.N.’s abetment of genocide in Rwanda and in Israel 30 years later is its insistence upon ‘humanitarian’ support for mass murderers and their civilian accomplices.
Three months before the genocide began, on Jan. 11, 1994, General Roméo Dallaire, commander of the U.N.’s peacekeeping force in Kigali, urgently cabled U.N. headquarters with intelligence that the Hutu-dominated government was planning to exterminate all Tutsis in the country as part of its war against rebels of the same tribe in the north. A conscientious informant told the peacekeepers of his work training young men to kill Tutsis at the rate of 3,000 per hour and of crucial arms caches. Dallaire asked New York for permission to raid the caches, neutralizing the government’s ability to arm its Interahamwe killers. Peacekeeping headquarters responded, however, by demanding that Dallaire go nowhere near the weapons, share this critical intelligence with the very Hutu gangsters planning the murders, and avoid using force at all costs. Just as the U.N. knows today that its employees and agencies work directly with Hamas, and indoctrinate children to kill Jews, now as then, they do nothing and continue to fund the terrorists.
The man who ignored the information which arguably could have saved nearly a million lives was Kofi Annan, then U.N. under-secretary general for peacekeeping operations. Annan told PBS in 2004 that he ordered Dallaire to share his intelligence with the genocide’s architects because “sometimes it is a very good deterrent” to inform rogue states that “we know what you are up to”—as if such a tactic has ever worked before or since. Not surprisingly, during Belgian government investigations into the Hutus’ murder of Belgian peacekeeping soldiers, Annan blocked Dallaire from testifying, and declined to testify himself.
Annan made another telling remark in the PBS interview. Pointing the finger at Security Council members, the former secretary general noted that, although these states had even better intelligence than his office, he knew the “mood in the council”: The members, Annan said, were not going to say, “We are going to send in the brigade” or “send reinforcements to General Dallaire.” While clearly self-serving, Annan’s remark is a reminder of the complicity of the so-called “international community,” including the U.S., which, at the time, did not wish to even utter the word “genocide.” “If we use the word ‘genocide’ and are seen as doing nothing,” Susan Rice, then director for international organizations and peacekeeping at the National Security Council, said, “what will be the effect on the November [congressional] election?”
The author who later excoriated Rice for this comment was none other than Samantha Power, who, two decades later, would nevertheless join Rice in government as ambassador to the U.N., when the Obama administration was abetting the mass slaughter in Syria. In her current role as USAID administrator, Power, in order to advance the Biden administration’s obscene policy of “surging” aid to Gaza, has falsely claimed that Israel is causing a “famine.”
Annan’s boss during the genocide, then-Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, was the one responsible for covertly selling the Rwandan government much of their weapons stockpile in the first place. That $26 million worth of weapons, approved by Boutros-Ghali while still Egyptian foreign minister in 1990, made up a large part of the supplies the U.N. blocked Dallaire from seizing. Boutros-Ghali later dismissed Dallaire’s original fax as merely one among many “alarming reports from the field,” thus not worth serious consideration at the time. Once the genocide was in full flood, however, all Boutros-Ghali and Annan allowed Dallaire to do was attempt to negotiate an impossible cease-fire between the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front and the very government slaughtering their kin. Though he admitted to PBS in 2004 that “I failed in Rwanda,” he never truly took personal responsibility. When he traveled to Rwanda in 1995 and reluctantly visited the site of the barbaric Nyarubuye church massacre, he toured the untouched mounds of putrefied innocents for 18 minutes, told the living to be of good courage, and then left.
Current U.N. secretary general, Antonio Guterres, did something arguably worse 28 years later. Barely two weeks after Oct. 7, he appeared to give subtle justification to Hamas’ own Nyarubuye massacre of Jews, saying that it “did not happen in a vacuum.”
Still, perhaps the most stunning correlation between the U.N.’s abetment of genocide in Rwanda and in Israel 30 years later is its insistence upon “humanitarian” support for mass murderers and their civilian accomplices. A less-remembered side effect of the Rwandan civil war was the exodus of around a million Hutus into Tanzania and Zaire, whom the U.N. and international community aided lavishly. Many of these refugees were known at the time to have either supported the genocide’s aims or personally been part of the Interahamwe death squads, but they were given food, medicine, and shelter anyway. The thousands of killers among them became community leaders within the refugee camps and then, when the genocide was over, returned to their villages to live in sight of those few who had survived their butchery.
Today, the U.N. demands that Israel supply food, medicine, and shelter to people who passionately support Hamas and their genocidal exploits. Under severe U.S. pressure—including threats of stopping arms supplies, sanctions, and support for ICC prosecution of Israeli officials and IDF soldiers—Israel has been forced to oblige, even though they know that Hamas will steal the aid for itself, as it habitually does. The Biden administration has even begun constructing a $320 million pier to supply the terror group’s enclave, and is demanding Israel protect the aid convoys replenishing its enemy.
Nevertheless, there is one difference between the U.N.’s perfidy in Rwanda and hostility toward Israel. In Rwanda, the U.N.—even while often refusing to use the word—did understand that Hutus were, in fact, committing genocide against Tutsis. Today, however, the same U.N. actually accuses the victims of an act of genocide of being the murderers, while blessing the act’s perpetrators as the true victims.
It is only fitting, then, that one U.N. official reportedly described pointless cease-fire talks between the RPF and Hutu killers as “rather like wanting Hitler to reach a cease-fire with the Jews.” No observation could better encapsulate three decades of moral depravity dressed up as idealistic decency.
