"In confronting these incidents, [Kofi Annan] and his cowriter and former aide, Nader Mousavizadeh, have decided that when a reputation is under scrutiny, candor is the best defense. The result is a resolute, detailed, and unflinching review of his most difficult hours. They quote in full the now notorious fax that the UN force commander in Rwanda, Romeo Dallaire, sent in January 1994 to UN headquarters seeking Annan's authorization for military action to arrest prospective genocidaires. Annan turned Dallaire down, and neither he nor the secretary-general at the time, Boutros Boutros Ghali, ever communicated Dallaire's request for action to the Security Council.
Dallaire, Power, Philip Gourevitch, and other close observers of the Rwanda catastrophe believe that preventive military action by the UN at that point might have averted the horrendous events that unfolded months later in April, May, and June, leaving 800,000 people dead. Annan's answer to these charges—it has not varied in a decade—recalls that the Americans had just been driven from Somalia after the disastrous Blackhawk Down episode and Dallaire's proposed intervention risked a similar debacle:
In Dallaire's cabled request to raid, we saw the ingredients of a disaster akin to the failed raid on Aidid in Mogadishu three months earlier—but with a force that was a thousand times weaker in military capabilities and entirely isolated from any possibility of reinforcement.
In an astonishing admission, Annan adds that Dallaire's force was "a peace-keeping force, sent in a deliberately weak and vulnerable form to engender the trust of both sides." Deliberately weak and vulnerable… When moral prestige deludes itself into thinking it need not arm itself, it can make itself an accomplice of evil."
- Michael Ignatieff
- Ikhide
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