In 1946, the United Nations declared genocide a crime under international law. In 1948, the UN adopted Resolution 260A(III), the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which obliged the "contracting parties to undertake to prevent and punish... acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group."
After the horrors of World War II, the world said "never again" to horrific mass killings. But, due to the Cold War tensions, idealistic ideas such as this one were abandoned in favor of realist politics and fighting for self-interests. "Never again" does not mean "we will do everything to stop genocides from happening anywhere in the world." The Western world in particular considers stopping genocides only in countries where they have economic or other interests.
That is why in 1994 the American government did not want to use the term "genocide" to describe the fastest genocide in recorded human history that took over 800,000 lives in Rwanda in only 100 days. This was "the most efficient mass killing since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki," as Philip Gourevitch puts it. Or, as George W. Bush calls it, Rwanda was a "wholesale slaughter."
Calling the mass slaughter "genocide" would obligate the US and other governments, signatories of the Resolution 260A(III), to intervene and stop it. But the US and other Western countries did nothing because they had no interests in the small, overpopulated, and poor African country. That a whole ethnic group was being exterminated in front of the whole world was not enough.
So the American officials said they knew that the "acts of genocide" were taking place in Rwanda but this was not enough to compel them to intervene. Blocking UN Security Council decisions concerning Rwanda, they even prevented other countries from acting.
Article comments
1 - Anh-khoa Tran
I'm a bit late on this response but I stumbled across your blog while writing a paper and I just had to chime in and correct you. If you actually read the UN Genocide Convention, there is no legal obligation to act at all. International action to prevent genocide is optional under the
Convention. Article 8 says "any contracting party may call upon competent organs of the United Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide." If you notice, the charter says 'any contracting party "may"' implying that they can choose not to act. Furthermore, the degree in which they respond is "as they consider appropriate" which could very much entail writing a letter or making a phone call.
I'm not saying that US response has been adequate because we know it hasn't. I just wanted to dispel the myth that there is actually any legal obligation to act.