Imagine the multitude of lives that may have been saved had the international community heeded the warnings given by Dallaire's informant. .
Despite this knowledge of an approaching slaughter, "the foreign-aid money poured into Habyarimana's coffers, and weapons kept arriving - from France, from Egypt, from apartheid South Africa" (94). When donors occasionally showed concern over the killings of Tutsis, people were arrested, soon released, and never brought to trial. "To soothe foreign nerves, the government portrayed the killings as "spontaneous" and "popular" acts of "anger" or "self-protection"" (94). It is unbelievable that countries continued their support of the Hutu government when there were so many signals that these activities were taking place. .
The United States was very careful in their use of words when describing the situations in Rwanda. The word genocide did not seem to be in their vocabulary. When asked why she could not say that genocide had happened in Rwanda, Christine Shelby, a State Department spokeswoman, stammered the reply that "there is a reason for the selection of words that we have made, and I have - perhaps I have - I"m not a lawyer- (153). If the United States had admitted that genocide was taking place in Rwanda, they would have had legal responsibility to intervene and stop the killings. .
After the events in Somalia in the early 1990s, the United States was tentative about involving their troops peacekeeping missions. In fact, the Presidential Decision Directive 25, a document drafted by the White House, was more or less a "checklist of reasons to avoid American involvement in United Nations peacekeeping missions" (150). "Washington didn't want to act so Washington pretended that it wasn't a genocide" (53). It is obvious that the international community failed in recognizing the potential problem in Rwanda and stopping it before it started.
