UN strongly criticised

RWANDA:

An independent enquiry into the UN's role during the 1994 genocide has found the organisation lacking in leadership and decision-making. The enquiry team, headed by former Swedish premier Ingvar Carlsson, on Wednesday presented its report to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who commissioned the probe. "By the time the genocide started, the [UN] mission was not functioning as a cohesive whole in the real hours and days
of deepest crisis," the report stated, according to news organisations.

There was a "lack of political leadership, lack of military capacity, severe problems of command and control, and lack of coordination and discipline". The mission, with 2,500 troops, should have been able to limit the massacres, it added. The report blamed the mission's poor mandate on the-then secretary-general Boutros Boutros Ghali and the UN Security Council "for its delay in identifying the events in Rwanda as a genocide". It also blamed the peacekeeping department, headed by Annan.

"While the presence of UN peacekeepers in Rwanda may have begun as a traditional peacekeeping operation...the onslaught of the genocide should have led decision-makers in the UN from the secretary-general and the Security Council to secretariat officials and the leadership of UNAMIR [the UN mission in Rwanda] to realise that the original mandate, and
indeed the neutral mediating role of the UN, was no longer adequate and required different, more assertive response, combined with the means necessary to take such action," the report said.