The Anonymous Member of the Interhamwe: Bill Clinton's Complicity in the Rwandan Genocide

Ranked as one of the great human rights tragedies since World War II, the Rwandan genocide, which left 800,000 dead in its wake, is commonly understood in the context of a tribal internecine conflict between the Hutus and Tutsis. The event that triggered the genocide is imputed to the shooting down of a plane carrying the President of Rwanda and Burundi, responsibility for which has been attributed to Paul Kagame, current President of Rwanda and leader of an army comprising Tutsi refugees based in Uganda called the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF). Before examining the author's claim that former President Clinton was complicit in the genocide, he first examines the meaning of "complicity" and also the obligation of states to prevent genocide as stated in Article 1 of the Genocide Convention. In this paper, the author proves that not only did the United States fail to act on its own or collectively with other states but deliberately took actions to prevent the United Nations from acting on a number of different occasions or to undermine operations already underway. The U.S. pressured the Security Council into reducing its peacekeeping force to an inefficacious number of troops, eschewing the use of the word "genocide" to abrogate the legal obligation to act under the Genocide Convention. An important issue in assessing whether or not former President Clinton shares complicity in the Rwandan genocide is the question of when and how much did he know about the slaughter of Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The author stresses that not only did Clinton know about the genocide, he either was aware or should have reasonably been aware of the genocidal intentions of the extreme Hutus.