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The Shallow Graves of Rwanda
How does the world community, and particularly the United Nations, deal with genocide? "The Shallow Graves of Rwanda" is an account of the UN Secretary-General's Special Representative in Rwanda in the mid-1990s. Shaharyar M. Khan's tenure began in the immediate aftermath of the downing of President Habarimana's plane on 6 April 1994 and the massacres that followed. Khan details his encounters with the region's leading actors - Rwanda's soldiers and politicians, victims and survivors, as well as some of the perpetrators of the massacres. He also dealt with people involved in international relief and humanitarian relief efforts, trying to revive the stricken villages and towns and tackle the floods of refugees and orphaned children. Setting everyday events in Rwanda against the backdrop of international politics, this book reveals how the UN works on the ground and at headquarters and explores the problems of peacekeeping. The author backs up his conclusions on the phenomenon and nature of genocide with documentary evidence and shows how the lessons of Rwanda can provide valuable guidance for the future.
220 pages, Hardcover
First published January 6, 2001
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December 19, 2024
3.25 / 5 Stars | 65 / 100
Shaharyan Khan’s The Shallow Graves of Rwanda is a tedious but nonetheless eloquent examination of the failures of the United Nations (U.N.) and international community in the wake of the Rwandan Genocide.
I would advise readers to jump to this text immediately after General Dallaire’s Shake Hands With The Devil due to Gen. Dallaire’s work highlighting the events leading up to and during the Genocide, and Khan’s work highlighting the immediate aftermath of the Genocide and the process of trying to stabilize a devastated nation-state.
Although Khan was not in Rwanda during the course of the Genocide (April - July 1994), he still arrived in country within a time span that enabled him to obtain first-hand knowledge of the gruesome acts of depravity that had taken place.
He describes this experience in the following passages:
“The fact is that never in living history has such wanton brutality been inflicted by human beings on their fellow creatures. Not in the Hindu-Muslim riots of 1947 in India, nor in the murderous conflict in Afghanistan, even the Killing Fields of Cambodia and Bosnia pale before the gruesome, awful, depravity of the massacres in Rwanda. I give the following examples only to give an idea of the unbelievable horror that my colleagues in UNAMIR lived through.”
- p. 15
“The Interahamwe made a habit of killing young Tutsi children, in front of their parents, by first cutting off one arm, then the other. They would then gash the neck with a machete to bleed the child slowly to death, but, while they were still alive, they would cut off the genitals and throw them at the faces of the terrified parents who would then be murdered with slightly greater dispatch. Radio Mille Collines and the frenzied genocide perpetrators would call on ‘patriotic’ Hutus to “Kill Tutsis in their homes, their parents, their grandparents, and their children; and don’t forget the unborn foetus.” Civilized people cannot believe such depravity, but I have heard the tapes myself. Friends murdered life-long friends, Hutu husbands of mixed marriage killed Tutsi wives, and venerable priests betrayed thousands of refugees who sought sanctuary in their churches. The dean of the faculties of Butare University personally murdered five of his fellow professors.”
- p. 16
Although Khan’s vivid descriptions of the brutality on the ground in Rwanda are important, perhaps even more important (particularly due to his position as a U.N. affiliated diplomat) is his honesty about the overwhelming ineffectiveness of U.N. involvement in Rwanda. Khan could have easily tried to make excuses for the drawbacks and failures of the U.N. in the periods before, during, and after the Genocide, yet he remains pertinacious in the criticisms he levies against the U.N. This willingness to speak earnestly about the outcome of these situations lends a strong credence to this work, and demonstrates that Khan is not espousing a biased view of his sponsor institution.
“Turf preservation is perhaps the most obvious factor that inhibits hierarchical control and effective inter-agency [U.N.] coordination. Each specialized agency jealously guards its own turf and resents any suggestion of possible encroachment. These territorial lines are usually drawn via funding programmes that aim to control, for example, orphanages and childcare units (UNICEF), medical centers (the WHO), training institutes for magistrates (UNDP), or the setting up of refugee camps (UNHCR). It follows that the larger the funding capability of a particular agency, the greater the territory controlled. This, in turn, leads to turf wars, as for instance in the case of training the Rwandan judiciary which both the UNDP and the Human Rights Commission claimed the right to sponsor.”
- p. 88
“For all development, humanitarian, or emergency aid, the donor community provided ‘voluntary contributions’ to be distributed across the UN specialized agencies. The UN system kept a careful watch on operations to ensure that assessed peace-keeping funds were not diverted to domains which were the preserve of voluntary contributions. The end result of this rigid compartmentalization was that while half a million dollars a day of assessed contributions could be spent on sustaining peace-keepers, none of these funds could be diverted to post-conflict repair and emergency relief functions. UN military peace-keepers, who had no peace to keep in Rwanda [at that time] but with their engineers, technicians, logistics, and communications units were capable of providing immediate repair and relief, but were prevented from doing so because it was not part of their mandate; and even if the mandate were stretched, their were no funds to be diverted for such a cause.”
- p. 90
“My frustration grew every day when I saw millions of dollars of humanitarian aid being spent in the refugee camps on jerrycans, blankets, medicines, and baby food, and not a penny available to repair the power, water, telecommunications, or the services that would set the country on the move again. I was also embarrassed at the significant financial outlays on UNAMIR Staff - their food, vacations, vehicles of every kind, communications, air travel - not a cent of which could be diverted to improve the lot of the Rwandan people because assessed funds for peace-keeping could not be diverted for development use for which funding came from voluntary contributions.”
- p. 94
“The international community’s failure to respond to the threat of planned massacres has deservedly drawn fierce criticism in the media and by inquiry commissions in Belgium, France, Canada, the U.S. Congress, and the Scandinavian countries. In my opinion, a combination of the factors outlined above led to the Security Council turning away from adopting proactive measures. I believe that if General Dallaire had been given a fully equipped force (2548 peacekeepers) as sanctioned in his October 1993 mandate, let alone the 5500-strong force approved in May 1994 for UNAMIR II, he would have been able to constrain the massacre that followed the 6 April plane crash.”
- p. 200
“The issue was simple: Rwanda and its people had been totally devastated by the genocide. The country and its population cried out desperately to be revived, like a critically wounded patient needing a blood transfusion to survive and to enable its basic organs to start functioning again. UNAMIR II had been mandated to keep the peace, but by the time it arrived in full-strength, the crisis was over. The [RPF] had won the war and formed a broad-based government UN peacekeepers could, of course, help keep the peace and prevent revenge-killings, but in addition to this limited peace-keeping role, UNAMIR II was the only entity with the capacity and the wherewithal to help revive the people and repair the devastated infrastructure of the country. Regrettably, UNAMIR II was given neither the mandate nor the minimal finance to perform this essential post-conflict, peace-building role.”
- p. 202
The reason that The Shallow Graves of Rwanda does not rate higher than it does for me is Khan’s sanguineness about the status of operational effectiveness on the ground in Rwanda.
“In describing Rwandan resentment at some of the main failures of the international community and the United Nations in Rwanda, I do not wish to convey an impression of a litany of failures. The fact is that UNAMIR’s successes far outweighed its failures. Examples of these successes were UNAMIR’s role in the peaceful takeover of the HPZ after the conclusion of Operation Turquoise; the remarkable success of Operation Retour which saw 500’000 internally displaced persons [IDPs] return safely home; UNAMIR’s building of bridges and roads; its efficient settling of refugees forcibly returned from Zaire; its inoculation of over 47,000 children; its reassurance of security and calm across the country through the presence of its peace-keepers; its transportation of Rwandan leaders in its aircraft, and refugees and IDPs in its vehicles; its support in restructuring and reviving the economy, in building refugee camps, in distributing seeds and agricultural implements, in opening schools and starting a new currency, in training Rwanda’s police and gendarmerie, in rebuilding schools and Parliament buildings so that these essential institutions could begin functioning again, in restarting the airport through the supply of a generator, and in extending prison space. All these actions were taken out of the deep sympathy and goodwill that UNAMIR personnel felt for the traumatized people of Rwanda which, despite a limiting mandate and no funds, made them go the extra mile.”
- p. 208
Although the altruism of UNAMIR personnel should not be understated, to try to conflate the immense dedication and sacrifice of UNAMIR personnel and volunteers with U.N. effectiveness as a whole is morally disingenuous and unfairly skewed. No amount of success by these personnel or volunteers should in any way be used as a counterbalance against the unjust deaths of over 800,000 innocent men, women, and children; and despite Khan’s willingness to acknowledge the failures of the U.N., this naively optimistic outlook of the situation is why this text only merits three-and-a-half stars from me.
Shaharyan Khan’s The Shallow Graves of Rwanda is a tedious but nonetheless eloquent examination of the failures of the United Nations (U.N.) and international community in the wake of the Rwandan Genocide.
I would advise readers to jump to this text immediately after General Dallaire’s Shake Hands With The Devil due to Gen. Dallaire’s work highlighting the events leading up to and during the Genocide, and Khan’s work highlighting the immediate aftermath of the Genocide and the process of trying to stabilize a devastated nation-state.
Although Khan was not in Rwanda during the course of the Genocide (April - July 1994), he still arrived in country within a time span that enabled him to obtain first-hand knowledge of the gruesome acts of depravity that had taken place.
He describes this experience in the following passages:
“The fact is that never in living history has such wanton brutality been inflicted by human beings on their fellow creatures. Not in the Hindu-Muslim riots of 1947 in India, nor in the murderous conflict in Afghanistan, even the Killing Fields of Cambodia and Bosnia pale before the gruesome, awful, depravity of the massacres in Rwanda. I give the following examples only to give an idea of the unbelievable horror that my colleagues in UNAMIR lived through.”
- p. 15
“The Interahamwe made a habit of killing young Tutsi children, in front of their parents, by first cutting off one arm, then the other. They would then gash the neck with a machete to bleed the child slowly to death, but, while they were still alive, they would cut off the genitals and throw them at the faces of the terrified parents who would then be murdered with slightly greater dispatch. Radio Mille Collines and the frenzied genocide perpetrators would call on ‘patriotic’ Hutus to “Kill Tutsis in their homes, their parents, their grandparents, and their children; and don’t forget the unborn foetus.” Civilized people cannot believe such depravity, but I have heard the tapes myself. Friends murdered life-long friends, Hutu husbands of mixed marriage killed Tutsi wives, and venerable priests betrayed thousands of refugees who sought sanctuary in their churches. The dean of the faculties of Butare University personally murdered five of his fellow professors.”
- p. 16
Although Khan’s vivid descriptions of the brutality on the ground in Rwanda are important, perhaps even more important (particularly due to his position as a U.N. affiliated diplomat) is his honesty about the overwhelming ineffectiveness of U.N. involvement in Rwanda. Khan could have easily tried to make excuses for the drawbacks and failures of the U.N. in the periods before, during, and after the Genocide, yet he remains pertinacious in the criticisms he levies against the U.N. This willingness to speak earnestly about the outcome of these situations lends a strong credence to this work, and demonstrates that Khan is not espousing a biased view of his sponsor institution.
“Turf preservation is perhaps the most obvious factor that inhibits hierarchical control and effective inter-agency [U.N.] coordination. Each specialized agency jealously guards its own turf and resents any suggestion of possible encroachment. These territorial lines are usually drawn via funding programmes that aim to control, for example, orphanages and childcare units (UNICEF), medical centers (the WHO), training institutes for magistrates (UNDP), or the setting up of refugee camps (UNHCR). It follows that the larger the funding capability of a particular agency, the greater the territory controlled. This, in turn, leads to turf wars, as for instance in the case of training the Rwandan judiciary which both the UNDP and the Human Rights Commission claimed the right to sponsor.”
- p. 88
“For all development, humanitarian, or emergency aid, the donor community provided ‘voluntary contributions’ to be distributed across the UN specialized agencies. The UN system kept a careful watch on operations to ensure that assessed peace-keeping funds were not diverted to domains which were the preserve of voluntary contributions. The end result of this rigid compartmentalization was that while half a million dollars a day of assessed contributions could be spent on sustaining peace-keepers, none of these funds could be diverted to post-conflict repair and emergency relief functions. UN military peace-keepers, who had no peace to keep in Rwanda [at that time] but with their engineers, technicians, logistics, and communications units were capable of providing immediate repair and relief, but were prevented from doing so because it was not part of their mandate; and even if the mandate were stretched, their were no funds to be diverted for such a cause.”
- p. 90
“My frustration grew every day when I saw millions of dollars of humanitarian aid being spent in the refugee camps on jerrycans, blankets, medicines, and baby food, and not a penny available to repair the power, water, telecommunications, or the services that would set the country on the move again. I was also embarrassed at the significant financial outlays on UNAMIR Staff - their food, vacations, vehicles of every kind, communications, air travel - not a cent of which could be diverted to improve the lot of the Rwandan people because assessed funds for peace-keeping could not be diverted for development use for which funding came from voluntary contributions.”
- p. 94
“The international community’s failure to respond to the threat of planned massacres has deservedly drawn fierce criticism in the media and by inquiry commissions in Belgium, France, Canada, the U.S. Congress, and the Scandinavian countries. In my opinion, a combination of the factors outlined above led to the Security Council turning away from adopting proactive measures. I believe that if General Dallaire had been given a fully equipped force (2548 peacekeepers) as sanctioned in his October 1993 mandate, let alone the 5500-strong force approved in May 1994 for UNAMIR II, he would have been able to constrain the massacre that followed the 6 April plane crash.”
- p. 200
“The issue was simple: Rwanda and its people had been totally devastated by the genocide. The country and its population cried out desperately to be revived, like a critically wounded patient needing a blood transfusion to survive and to enable its basic organs to start functioning again. UNAMIR II had been mandated to keep the peace, but by the time it arrived in full-strength, the crisis was over. The [RPF] had won the war and formed a broad-based government UN peacekeepers could, of course, help keep the peace and prevent revenge-killings, but in addition to this limited peace-keeping role, UNAMIR II was the only entity with the capacity and the wherewithal to help revive the people and repair the devastated infrastructure of the country. Regrettably, UNAMIR II was given neither the mandate nor the minimal finance to perform this essential post-conflict, peace-building role.”
- p. 202
The reason that The Shallow Graves of Rwanda does not rate higher than it does for me is Khan’s sanguineness about the status of operational effectiveness on the ground in Rwanda.
“In describing Rwandan resentment at some of the main failures of the international community and the United Nations in Rwanda, I do not wish to convey an impression of a litany of failures. The fact is that UNAMIR’s successes far outweighed its failures. Examples of these successes were UNAMIR’s role in the peaceful takeover of the HPZ after the conclusion of Operation Turquoise; the remarkable success of Operation Retour which saw 500’000 internally displaced persons [IDPs] return safely home; UNAMIR’s building of bridges and roads; its efficient settling of refugees forcibly returned from Zaire; its inoculation of over 47,000 children; its reassurance of security and calm across the country through the presence of its peace-keepers; its transportation of Rwandan leaders in its aircraft, and refugees and IDPs in its vehicles; its support in restructuring and reviving the economy, in building refugee camps, in distributing seeds and agricultural implements, in opening schools and starting a new currency, in training Rwanda’s police and gendarmerie, in rebuilding schools and Parliament buildings so that these essential institutions could begin functioning again, in restarting the airport through the supply of a generator, and in extending prison space. All these actions were taken out of the deep sympathy and goodwill that UNAMIR personnel felt for the traumatized people of Rwanda which, despite a limiting mandate and no funds, made them go the extra mile.”
- p. 208
Although the altruism of UNAMIR personnel should not be understated, to try to conflate the immense dedication and sacrifice of UNAMIR personnel and volunteers with U.N. effectiveness as a whole is morally disingenuous and unfairly skewed. No amount of success by these personnel or volunteers should in any way be used as a counterbalance against the unjust deaths of over 800,000 innocent men, women, and children; and despite Khan’s willingness to acknowledge the failures of the U.N., this naively optimistic outlook of the situation is why this text only merits three-and-a-half stars from me.
Displaying 1 of 1 review