UN Inaction and the Rwandan Genocide: World's Failure
This essay examines how the international community's inaction contributed to the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, arguing that the world effectively turned its back on Rwanda. Drawing on sources including accounts of UN Force Commander Roméo Dallaire, the paper identifies three key failures: the UN's decision to withdraw its peacekeeping troops rather than provide protection; its choice to restrict engagement to the narrow terms of the Arusha Accord; and the broader refusal by the UN and the United States to authorize or pursue peace enforcement measures. Together, these failures allowed ethnic violence between Hutus and Tutsis to escalate into a 100-day genocide.
- Introduction: The World Turns Its Back on Rwanda: Thesis and three arguments previewed
- Dallaire's Role and the UN Troop Withdrawal: UN withdrew troops despite capacity to protect
- Restriction to the Arusha Accord: UN limited engagement to narrow peace agreement
- Refusal to Extend the Mission to Peace Enforcement: UN and US declined to authorize force
- Conclusion: Genocide result of ethnic war and global inaction
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What makes this paper effective
- The essay establishes a clear, arguable thesis in the introduction and returns to it consistently in each body paragraph, giving the piece strong structural coherence.
- Each argument is grounded in specific cited evidence — Dallaire's knowledge of weapons shipments, the UN's rejection of his interception request, and the U.S. reluctance after Mogadishu — rather than relying on generalizations.
- The conclusion effectively synthesizes all three arguments and ties them back to the central claim without introducing new material.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates effective use of a multi-point argumentative structure: the author signals each new argument with an explicit transition ("Secondly," "Thirdly"), states the sub-claim, provides textual or historical evidence, and then reasserts how that evidence supports the thesis. This signposting technique makes the logical progression easy to follow and helps readers track the accumulation of evidence across the essay.
Structure breakdown
The essay follows a classic five-paragraph structure scaled to a short academic essay: an introductory paragraph that previews three supporting arguments, three body sections each addressing one failure of international response, and a conclusion that restates and synthesizes the thesis. The structure maps cleanly onto the PEEL (Point, Evidence, Explanation, Link) pattern common in undergraduate humanities writing.
Introduction: The World Turns Its Back on Rwanda
The Rwandan Genocide is the greatest massacre of human beings since the Holocaust. Most victims were murdered with machetes and would likely have known their killers. While the war was mainly fueled by ethnic tensions between Hutus and Tutsis, it escalated into genocide because the world turned its back on Rwanda. Several arguments support this claim: the failure by the United Nations to offer protection and its decision to withdraw troops; the UN's choice to restrict its engagement with Rwanda to the Arusha Accord, which promoted inaction; and the failure of the UN and the international community to initiate peace enforcement efforts when Rwanda needed help. The escalation of the ethnic war between Hutus and Tutsis into a genocide that lasted 100 days was partly the result of the world abandoning Rwanda.
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