In his
article, “Rwanda’s Shrouded Nightmare.” Published in New York Times, author Michael Dobbs explains whether or not the
Rwandan Genocide could have been prevented. Jean Pierre sent a warning called
the genocide fax which told the UN officials about the upcoming massacre.
However, the UN decided to ignore it. No one knows for sure if it could have
been prevented based on the genocide fax. The UN is trying to figure out what
they can learn from their mistake so this tragedy will never happen again. One
reason why they didn’t listen to Jean-Pierre, who was working both sides of the
war, was because they didn’t trust him. The reason why they didn’t trust him
was because he could have been a spy on either side. Another reason the UN didn’t
react to the fax was because he didn’t provide strong proof. It was only his
instinct. No one will know the real story for sure because “Records that could
shed light on whether it could have been prevented are still classified in
Washington, New York, Paris, Brussels, Geneva, Arusha and Kigali—unavailable to
the public despite pledges by international leaders to fully investigate the
tragedy."
After reading
this, I think that somebody is still trying to hide something because the genocide
was so horrible. How can someone just not react to the warning that was given
ahead of time? Now, the UN has to answer why they didn’t do anything to help
Rwanda and the records they have are all hidden. This makes it harder to prove
that the UN was wrong. Something that shocked me was that records could still
be kept secret twenty years after the incident. The only problem about reading
this article was that there were a lot of terms that I didn’t understand. I had
to look them up.
