Hotel Rwanda Essay
Hotel Rwanda
John Breymaier
Comparative Criminal Justice
Strayer University
Steven Holeman
January 30th, 2013
From watching the movie, why do you think the international community allowed the massacre to occur? The decision of the international community not to intervene in the Rwandan conflict was result of many different factors. Firstly, no country felt like they could justify sending their men and women into harm’s way in order to settle a “local conflict” in a part of the world that most people had probably never heard of and was not important to anyone’s national interests. Secondly, at the time of this conflict Rwanda had a seat on the Security Council and the Hutu led government did all it could to minimize reports of …show more content…
An army is designed to influence events through force and the threat of force, whereas the UN Peacekeepers are designed more of like a police force that is supposed to protect the interests of the United Nations. With that in mind, peacekeepers were sent to Rwanda with the purpose of aiding the fledgling government and protecting foreign nationals, and as such were not equipped to handle the job of fighting of a country wide insurgency even with the help of the Rwandan military. It literally took everything that had just to protect themselves and the foreign nationals they were charged with. Next, we see that their rules of engagement were so strict that you practically had to be dead before you could fire back, and even then you could not use that force to protect anybody who wasn’t a fellow Peacekeeper or a foreign national. Unfortunately, the Peacekeepers were not adequately trained or supplied to deal with this type of situation and with the political situation being what it was in the international community they were unlikely to get what they needed to fight the militia. It should be clear that the Peacekeepers who were there did all they could with the supplies, manpower, and mandate they were given and what was really needed at the time, as stated in later years by President Clinton, was 5,000 US
John Breymaier
Comparative Criminal Justice
Strayer University
Steven Holeman
January 30th, 2013
From watching the movie, why do you think the international community allowed the massacre to occur? The decision of the international community not to intervene in the Rwandan conflict was result of many different factors. Firstly, no country felt like they could justify sending their men and women into harm’s way in order to settle a “local conflict” in a part of the world that most people had probably never heard of and was not important to anyone’s national interests. Secondly, at the time of this conflict Rwanda had a seat on the Security Council and the Hutu led government did all it could to minimize reports of …show more content…
An army is designed to influence events through force and the threat of force, whereas the UN Peacekeepers are designed more of like a police force that is supposed to protect the interests of the United Nations. With that in mind, peacekeepers were sent to Rwanda with the purpose of aiding the fledgling government and protecting foreign nationals, and as such were not equipped to handle the job of fighting of a country wide insurgency even with the help of the Rwandan military. It literally took everything that had just to protect themselves and the foreign nationals they were charged with. Next, we see that their rules of engagement were so strict that you practically had to be dead before you could fire back, and even then you could not use that force to protect anybody who wasn’t a fellow Peacekeeper or a foreign national. Unfortunately, the Peacekeepers were not adequately trained or supplied to deal with this type of situation and with the political situation being what it was in the international community they were unlikely to get what they needed to fight the militia. It should be clear that the Peacekeepers who were there did all they could with the supplies, manpower, and mandate they were given and what was really needed at the time, as stated in later years by President Clinton, was 5,000 US