Lessons from the Rwandan Genocide

David Scheffer

During the first Clinton administration, I served as senior adviser and counsel to Ambassador Madeleine K. Albright, the U.S. Permanent Representative to the UN and later Secretary of State. I worked mostly in the shadows of the bureaucracy and represented Albright and the U.S. Mission to the UN in meetings of the Deputies Committee of the National Security Council and in other Washington settings where foreign policy was crafted. I occupied a unique "insider" seat as events propelled policymakers into decisions that would have a lasting impact on world affairs. One such event was the Rwandan genocide during the second year of our watch.

Over a period of about 100 days commencing on 6 April 1994, an estimated 800,000 women, children, and men- mostly of Tutsi identity, but also moderate Hutus-were massacred. That averages 8,000 murders per day planned by top Rwandan government, military, and media leaders and carried out by thousands of machete-wielding Hutus. Such a phenomenon was unimagined at the time and remains almost surreal one decade later. If anyone had speculated that such a daily low-tech killing rate was even possible or probable, we would have thought the question absurd-even though there was some forewarning, which no one in Washington appeared to focus on or take seriously. As it turned out, no other atrocity quite compared to the intense savagery of Rwanda during this period. Resurgent genocide plagued the countryside for years thereafter.

David Scheffer is Visiting Professor at Georgetown University Law Center. He served as the first U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues from 1997 to 2001.