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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 1, 2024

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I don't think that's true but I'm not much of an expert. Certainly the UN sheltered many Tutsis in its mission's headquarters. Overall they did not do much though.

...The wiki article on the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda is tough reading.

The original UNAMIR mission was given a mandate under Chapter VI, meaning its role was exclusively to maintain a demilitarized zone and to negotiate peace after the earlier civil war. When the genocide began, the UN ignored the urgent requests of the force commander to expand its mandate (it waited 40 days before providing the go-ahead to "provide security" to refugees) but instead withdrew 90% of its local forces (drawing down from 2500 to 270) and ordered the remaining soldiers to prioritize the evacuation of foreign nationals.

UNAMIR also assisted with the evacuation of foreign nationals; a group of Belgian soldiers, who had been sheltering 2,000 Rwandans at the École Technique Officielle, were ordered to abandon their station to assist in the evacuation. After the Belgians left, Hutu militants entered and massacred everyone inside.

The protection of Tutsi refugees in Amahoro Stadium seems almost entirely incidental to the UN soldiers defending their own HQ.

On the other hand, the UN Security Council did authorize a French army (officially a 'multilateral force' with 2468 French soldiers and 32 Senegalese soldiers) to set up a 'safe zone' in SW Rwanda under the name Operation Turquoise. This military mission was officially intended to stop the bloodshed, but mainly served to delay the advancing RPF (Tutsi) army from ending the genocide in the 'safe zone', as well as providing supplies for the mass migration of Hutus into eastern Zaire, which set up the humanitarian crisis (and ongoing border conflict) that resulted in 'Africa's World War' a few years later.

At some point I really need to write up an effortpost about France and the Rwandan Genocide. Where the UN and US can be shamed as merely feckless, France was astonishingly brazen in their embrace of villainy. It takes a special kind of moral monster to sit next to Tutsi refugees fleeing a genocide as you evacuate the country, only to kick them out at a Hutu border checkpoint so you can watch them be butchered mere yards away from freedom. Appalling is far too weak a word.