15th ALNAP Meeting (June 2004)
One abiding image of post-Genocide Rwanda is the disjunction between the activities of the humanitarian community and the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda [UNAMIR]. This separation between late 1994 and the end of 1995 was reflected in many ways. There were instances when UNAMIR took operational decisions that placed the safety, security and objectives of humanitarian organizations directly at risk. There were all too many instances when both sides – the humanitarian and the peacekeepers – failed to share information, and where each undertook initiatives with little consideration for the impact that such initiatives might have upon the other.
Post-genocide Rwanda reflected not only the operational and conceptual gaps between peacekeepers and the humanitarian community in general, but also demonstrated the perceptual and operational schisms between the peacekeepers and humanitarian organizations within the UN, itself. Rwanda in that sense was an important stage of an emerging awareness within the UN and amongst various member-states that the institution had to change the way it dealt with complex and multifaceted missions. Kigali in that sense was an institutional step down the road to Kabul, where the latter witnessed the first full blown UN effort to initiate an integrated mission – a concept that was articulated in the Brahimi Reort.
The Brahimi Report and subsequent efforts to define and to operationalise integrated missions have brought into greater clarity the tensions that exist between two broad issues that go to the core of much of the UN’s raison d’etre: collective security and humanitarian intervention. The extent to which one could reconcile the contending principles of each was and continues to be an issue that emerged so clearly in the aftermath of Rwanda’s tragedy.