EYEWITNESS TO A GENOCIDE: The United Nations and Rwanda

As a staffer on the U.S. Mission to the U.N. in 1994, Barnett observed the U.N.'s reaction to the Rwandan genocide, in which an estimated 800,000 Tutsis were murdered by Hutus over a period of about three months; at the height of the killing, 5.5 deaths occurred every minute. Though officials at the U.N. Secretariat knew the facts, the U.N. took no meaningful action other than to declare that they remained "actively seized of the matter." (Barnett was himself initially opposed to intervention.) In puzzling through the U.N.'s decisions, the author offers not a scathing indictment of its timidity in the face of mass brutality so much as a searching and nuanced moral analysis. In his attempts to explain how "those working at the U.N. approached Rwanda not as individuals but rather as members of bureaucracies," Barnett carefully examines the U.N.'s institutional values and the ways in which decent international civil servants adhered to norms that repeatedly drew their attention away from the Rwandan crisis. All too aware of their powerlessness when member states refused to commit forces and desperate to avoid repetition of the debacle in Somalia (think Black Hawk Down), U.N. diplomats ultimately concluded that nonintervention was the ethical course. Barnett by no means exonerates the U.N.; in fact he insists that member states—notably France and the U.S.—knew of the genocide, had the power to act, yet failed to do so until it was too late. This insightful, balanced book reveals an unsettling paradox: in making choices it deemed moral, the U.N. tolerated the ultimate immorality of genocide. (Apr.)