The U.N.’s Role in the Rwandan Genocide
Or the role they unwittingly occupied by doing nothing.
My senior thesis course focused on the atrocities committed in war and their devastating effects. We studied international conflicts that occupied the largest impacts on human history. This included the Nazi occupation of Germany and the burning of a millennium of books by Mao Ze Dong. In both events, they are examples of the cataclysmic erasure of entire peoples, which directly affects the very existence of the victims’ cultures, religions, and languages.
For a third of the course, this is what we honed in on. Genocides.
The United Nations defines genocide as an international law crime.
“In the present Convention, genocide (are) acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
This U.N. definition says that genocides are the systematic elimination of a group of people to raze their culture, language, and religion from planet Earth. To qualify for this term, there must be an intention present to systematically murder the members of a group.
The Rwandan Genocide
In our focus on genocides, a major event we learned about was the Rwandan genocide. Or more like…
