United Nations Peacekeeping Operations: A Case Study of Rwanda Peace Support Operations (2004 – 2012)

Despite the failure of the United Nations (UN) to stop the 1994 Genocide, Rwanda has been actively participating in peacekeeping operations under the African Union (AU) and United Nations (UN) efforts in Sudan and troubled countries since August 2004. This study will mainly focus on three important variables through which Rwandan Defence Forces (RDF) largely originate its great success in peacekeeping missions. This study examines the role of UN peacekeeping mission in Rwandan conflict which resulted in genocide. The research systematically investigates how wandan under RPF government overcame the 1994 genocide and emerged as the top contributor to peacekeeping mission. As a small country which was abandoned during horrible genocide, the study clearly establishes her driving force behind engaging in peace support operations from 2004 to 2012, the study analyzes the challenges and intervention of United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR). Precariously, the doctrine of Peace Support intervention therefore, sits in between realism and idealism in the study of international relations. During the Rwanda Genocide of 1994 the international community failed to intervene to prevent the killing of nearly a million people. No one can say with certainty how many Tutsi were killed between March and July of 1994 in Rwanda. In the fateful one hundred days that followed the downing of the presidential plane and the cout d’etat thereafter- a section of the army and civilian leadership organized the Hutu majority to kill Tutsis, even babies. In the process, they also killed not only the Hutu political opposition, but also non political Hutu who showed reluctance to perform what was touted as a “national” duty. The estimates of those killed vary: between ten and fifty thousand Hutu, and between 500,000 and a million Tutsis. Whereas the Hutu were killed as individuals, the Tutsi were killed as a group, recalling German designs to extinguish the country’s Jewish population. This explicit goal is the killing of Tutsi between March and July of 1994 must be termed “genocide.” this single fact underlines a crucial similarity between the Rwandan genocide and the Nazi Holocaust. In the history of genocide, however, the Rwandan genocide raises a difficult political question. Unlike the Nazi holocaust, the Rwandan genocide was not carried out from a distance, in remote concentration camps beyond national borders, in industrial killing camps operated by agents who often did no more than drop Zyklon B crystals into gas chambers from above. The Rwandan genocide was executed with slash of machetes rather than the drop of crystals, with all the