The Organization of African Unity (OAU) July report on the Rwandan genocide, while affirming the responsibility of its planners, blamed the UN Security Council, the United States, France and Belgium for their failure to prevent the genocide and called for reparations to be paid to the victims. It denounced the double standard which allowed the UN to stretch its mandate to rescue westerners in Rwanda but not to save Rwandan victims.

The OAU report surveys the history of Rwanda from the colonial period onward and the events and political decisions since independence that led to the 1990 invasion by the Rwandan Patriotic Front and the evolution of organized government and collective massacres against Rwandan Tutsis, death squads, militia, and hate media preceding the genocide. "Virtually everyone in Rwanda associated with the UN, the diplomatic community, or human rights groups, knew about death lists, accelerating massacres, and threats to opposition politicians" (Exec. Summary 30).

It declares that in Rwanda the Catholic and Anglican hierarchies and the French government bear the heaviest responsibility. "Church leaders failed to use their unique moral position among the overwhelmingly Christian population to denounce ethnic hatred and human rights abuse." Church leaders also "played a conspicuously scandalous role" in supporting the new interim government during the genocide, a stance "easily interpreted by ordinary Christians as an implicit endorsement of the killings..." (E.S. 34).

The French government not only supported the Rwandan government uncritically before the genocide, but its intervention in June (Operation Turquoise) enabled the genocidaires to flee to Zaire where they resumed war against the new RPF government in Kigali, a war which spread to engulf the (formerly Zaire) Democratic Republic of the Congo since 1994.

The report faults the UN under US leadership for not either preventing or intervening to stop the genocide and rebuts the statement of President Clinton that the US failure was due to ignorance--"the American government knew precisely what was happening..." (ES 34). "The facts are not in question. A small number of major actors could directly have prevented, halted, or reduced the slaughter. They include France in Rwanda itself, the US at the Security Council; Belgium, whose soldiers knew they could save countless lives if they were allowed to remain in the country; and Rwanda's church leaders. In the bitter words of the commanders of the UN's military mission, the 'international community has blood on its hands'" (ES 45).

Further, it said that while several states and organizations had apologized for their failure (such as Pres. Clinton, UN Secretary-General Annan, the Belgian Prime Minister and the Anglican Church), neither the French Government nor the Roman Catholic Church had apologized.

Belgium alone among the states implicated has acknowledged its foreknowledge of the genocide. The Belgian Prime Minister, Guy Verhofstadit, during a visit to Rwanda in April asked forgiveness for the 1994 genocide, affirming that the international community "carries a huge and heavy responsibility in the genocide." A Belgian Senate study in 1997 said that Brussels had advance knowledge of the genocide plan.

The report, commissioned by the OAU, was prepared by a seven- member International Panel of Eminent Personalities, including former diplomats and officials from Algeria, Botswana, Canada, India, Liberia, Mali and Sweden. The full text is available on the web at: http://www.oau-oua.org/Document/ipep/ipep.htm.

Alison Des Forges, in Leave None to Tell the Story (see review in this issue), also describes in detail the layers of international responsibility (pp. 14-30, 595-691): in tolerating discrimination and violence, putting economy before lives in shrinking the needed force level for UN peacekeepers (UNAMIR) earlier, ignoring and diminishing the import of warnings such as the January 1994 "genocide fax," obscuring what was happening, confusing genocide with war, withdrawing UNAMIR and tolerating genocide once it began. She also observes that Rwandan leaders were listening at every stage: "International censure, timid and tardy though it was, prompted Rwandan authorities to restrict and hide killings. If instead of delaying and temporising, international leaders had immediately and unambiguously called the genocide by its awful name, they would have shattered the masquerade of legitimacy created by the interim government and forced Rwandans to confront the evil they were doing" (p. 26). No single leader nor the bureaucracy could ensure cooperation to kill. "The genocide was not a killing machine that rolled inexorably forward but rather a campaign to which participants were recruited over time by the use of threats and incentives. The early organizers...had to capture the state....As the new leaders were consolidating control over military commanders, they profited enormously from the first demonstration of international timidity" (p. 6).