“Fundamental to Jacksonville University’s mission is support for an environment where divergent ideas, theories, and philosophies can be openly exchanged and critically evaluated. Consistent with these principles and the concept of Academic Freedom, this course may involve the discussion of ideas that you find uncomfortable, disagreeable, or even offensive. These ideas are intended to be presented in an objective manner, they are not intended to persuade and are not an endorsement of what you should personally believe.”
-This guide is meant to serve as a basic introductory tool. The questions that follow are not meant to be central to the debates in this course but rather to serve as basic points of departure. I intend to provide a neutral presentation of the material, recognizing that the very approach to the material is not and cannot be neutral. Prof. Jorge Majfud.
Table of contents
- Questions
- Genocide and International Failure: Rwanda
- Colonial Roots
- Divide and rule: the myth of race and supremacy
- Non-Intervention and the Global Standstill
- Failed States and “Humanitarian Intervention”
- Somalia
- Liberia
- Sierra Leone
- Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs)
- Private Military Companies
- Key Takeaway
- Rwanda Today
- Back to courses: Syllabi
Questions
- How did colonialism contribute to the Rwandan Genocide?
- Why did the UN fail to stop the Rwandan Genocide?
- What is the doctrine of non-intervention?
- What makes a state a failed state?
- What role do NGOs play in humanitarian crises?
- What are the advantages and disadvantages of private military companies (PMCs)?
Genocide and International Failure: Rwanda (1994)
Colonial Roots
To fully grasp the genocide that took place in Rwanda in 1994, it is necessary to examine the history that allowed for such extreme violence. Before the arrival of the Europeans, the Hutu, Tutsi and Twa shared the land, language and even culture. There were differences between people based on their wealth and social standing, often measured in cattle, but people could move from one group to another.
In 1897 Germany became the colonial power in Rwanda. After Germany’s defeat in the First World War the Treaty of Versailles robbed Germany of its colonies. In 1916 Belgium took over control of the country and in 1923 the League of Nations approved Belgium’s administration of Rwanda and Burundi (then known as Ruanda-Urundi) on behalf of Germany. Belgium governed Rwanda for almost forty years until the country achieved independence in 1962.
Divide and rule: the myth of race and supremacy
The colonial authorities would spend the next few decades converting the previously fluid social boundaries into fixed ethnic identities —a system which lasted right up until Rwanda achieved independence in 1962. It is a well-documented practice we can see throughout the Americas and on other continents during the period of European imperial power. The Belgian authorities used these social categories as weapons based upon then current racial theories, viewing the Tutsi minority as inherently superior. As such, they provided exclusive opportunities for the Tutsi (education, governmental positions, economic control) while effectively denying those same opportunities to the Hutu majority.
The «Hamitic hypothesis» was fully accepted by Belgian authorities. This pseudoscientific theory, which was debunked decades ago, claimed that certain African groups, such as the Tutsi, were superior to other African groups, such as the Hutu. In the case of the Tutsi, it was believed that they had distant «European-like» origins and were the descendants of Ham, a figure from the Bible’s Book of Genesis. Because the Tutsi were on average taller than the Hutu, held different roles in Rwandan society, and for centuries had occupied the highest positions of authority in Rwanda’s monarchy, the Belgians believed that they were a separate and superior race.
After the Second World War, when Africa began to recall that it belonged to itself, Belgium discovered, with the sudden clarity of those who are about to lose something, that the Hutu majority had been subjugated all along. The same colonial administration that had spent decades gauging noses and issuing identity cards to certify who was superior now shifted sides, not out of remorse but out of expedience. Empires do not atone; they simply realign themselves.
Belgium’s change of heart healed nothing. It only tore open every old scar at the same time. By 1962, when Rwanda became independent under a Hutu administration, violence against Tutsis had stopped being an accident and had become a language, and thousands escaped across the borders with no luggage but the knowledge that the nation had been seized from them. The colonial officials went home, but their classifications did not. Classifications, like flags, outlive the hands that raised them.
No one is born despising. Hatred is a harvest: it is planted, irrigated, logged in registries, and endorsed by the proper authorities. Decades of fabricated difference produced what every carefully planned work produces: an architecture. Here it was an architecture of mistrust, built so well that it looked like nature, like something that had always been there. So when the zealots came to commit genocide, they introduced nothing new. They merely followed a manual that others had composed long before, and that history had stored in a drawer, waiting.
The Spark and the Gasoline
On the evening of April 6, 1994, a plane conveying President Juvénal Habyarimana was shot down above Kigali. Burundi’s head of state, Cyprien Ntaryamira, perished with him. Both were Hutus. It was a catalyst, but catalysts only matter where someone has already dispersed the gasoline. Within hours, Hutus accused the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front, erected roadblocks, and commenced killing Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The next day, Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana was among the dead. Massacres of this magnitude are not improvised. They are only declared.
The conflict had begun four years earlier, when the RPF crossed the frontier in 1990. In 1993, the Arusha Accords promised to share authority, and for the extremists, sharing was a synonym for rout. So while diplomats endorsed papers, others were stockpiling machetes, training the Interahamwe militia, and compiling lists of names. The radio station RTLM did the rest, teaching a nation to see its neighbors as jerks. When the plane fell, the scheme did not need to be written. It only needed to be read aloud.
Who fired the missile remains, to this day, a question without an official owner. Some investigations point to Hutu extremists who wanted to bury the peace; others point to the RPF. No one has been definitively held responsible. History, which is so precise when it comes to counting the dead, often becomes strangely vague when it comes to naming those who pulled the trigger.
The genocide did not commence in 1994. It began when Belgian administrators decided that Rwandans should be measured, classified, and stamped on identity cards, first to privilege the Tutsis, then, when convenient, the Hutus. Independence inherited the categories, and the categories produced persecution and exile. In 1990, the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front invaded from Uganda, and extremists found the adversary they needed.
Within hours after the missiles were fired at the president’s airplane, the slaughter began. In a hundred days, some 800,000 people were murdered.
Non-Intervention and the Global Standstill
The sacred rule of non-intervention holds that no nation should interfere in the domestic affairs of another. It is a noble principle, and like all noble principles, it is applied with extraordinary precision: it is respected meticulously whenever there is nothing to gain. No gold, no diamonds, no emeralds. No oil. Where there is oil, sovereignty becomes debatable. Where there is only blood, it becomes inviolable.
In the spring of 1994, that principle became a death warrant. The warnings turned into dispatches, and the reports turned into detailed accounts of a systematic slaughter, but the governments of the world and their international institutions opted to walk slowly. They labeled it a civil war, because a civil war is a calamity among equals, and a tragedy among peers demands nothing from those who observe it from afar. A genocide, on the other hand, compels. And no one wished to be obliged.
The United Nations mission in Rwanda, UNAMIR, under the leadership of the Canadian general Roméo Dallaire, was left with its hands restrained. It had neither the authorization nor the resources to stop the slaughter. Dallaire alerted headquarters, in writing and in time, that an annihilation was being prepared. The Security Council responded with silence, which in diplomacy is also a response. Then ten Belgian peacekeepers were slain, and several countries, instead of reinforcing the mission, withdrew their troops. Sovereignty was safeguarded. The people were not. In a hundred days, some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were massacred.
In Washington, the administration of Bill Clinton chose not to intervene. The memory of the American soldiers slain in Somalia a few months earlier weighed more than the corpses accumulating in the present. Resolute to avoid another uncomfortable war, the officials conducted a delicate linguistic exercise: for weeks they avoided the word genocide, because words, unlike people, carry legal obligations. They spoke of «acts» of genocide, as if genocide could be administered in installments. And instead of reinforcing the peacekeepers who were already there, the United States advocated reducing the mission. When it is convenient, the most powerful army in the world discovers the virtues of austerity.
Years later, Clinton expressed his remorse and acknowledged that his nation and the global community had failed the Rwandan people. Apologies are always cheaper than interventions, and they have the advantage of arriving when the deceased can no longer reject them.
Rwanda lacked Iraq’s petroleum reserves, nor Libya’s strategic position and energy riches. It possessed only human beings, and human beings, as everyone knows, usually are not a strategic resource. That is why the world gazed elsewhere. Not out of ignorance, but out of calculation and indifference. Morality, when it depends on geopolitics, is not morality. It is bookkeeping.
Failed States and «Humanitarian Intervention»
The Ghosts of Mogadishu, Somalia
After seizing authority in a 1969 coup, Mohamed Siad Barre declared
“Scientific Socialism” in 1970, a Marxist doctrine cloaked in Somali nationalism and the aspiration of a Greater Somalia, a dream he endeavored to realize by invading Ethiopia’s Ogaden province in 1977. Like every ideology in the grasp of a dictator, it ultimately ended up serving a single clan and a single man. He asserted that socialism and Islam could coexist, and when ten clerics objected to equal inheritance for women in 1975, he had them executed.
Moscow armed him until 1977, when it favored Ethiopia, and Barre expelled the Soviets that November. Washington assumed their place in 1980, in exchange for the port of Berbera. Italy, the old colonizer, dispatched aid throughout the 1980s. Ideologies changed; the weapons kept arriving, until his fall in 1991.
Since 1988, Siad Barre’s regime has massacred tens of thousands of Isaaq civilians. As the Cold War concluded, Somalia forfeited its strategic value. In 1990, the United States and other Western donors reduced aid over alleged human rights abuses, and without that funding Barre could no longer compensate his army or purchase loyalty. Debt, inflation, and reliance on foreign aid left the state hollow.
In 1991, Somalia’s central government collapsed, and the experts quickly found a term for what remained: a failed state. It is a convenient expression. It suggests that states fail the way students fail an exam, alone, through their own fault, without the assistance of the Cold War powers that spent years arming whoever was useful at the moment. Rival warlords partitioned the country among themselves, and violence, famine, and the breakdown of everything that holds a society together arrived together, as they usually do. With millions on the brink of starvation, the United Nations and the United States intervened with humanitarian missions that, at first, managed to secure the routes through which food reached the hungry.
Somalia did not disintegrate on its own. From 1969, Mohamed Siad Barre ruled with the loyalty of a clan and the terror of an army, repressing those who did not belong, as the Isaaq discovered when Hargeisa was bombarded in 1988. The Cold War paid the price: first Moscow armed him, then Washington from 1979 on. Autocrats switch benefactors more easily than habits. In January 1991, the insurgents expelled him from Mogadishu and immediately realized that sharing power is harder than seizing it. Aidid and Ali Mahdi turned the capital into ruins, and the north proclaimed itself Somaliland —only recognized by one UN member state, Israel. Then came the drought, and the famine killed hundreds of thousands. The weapons the superpowers left behind did the rest.
Gradually, the distribution of food transformed into a hunt for militia commanders. The breaking point surfaced in October 1993, in the Battle of Mogadishu, the episode Hollywood would later memorialize as Black Hawk Down. Eighteen American soldiers died in the streets of the city. Hundreds of Somalis also perished, perhaps more than a thousand, but their names did not reach the headlines, nor the film. In the arithmetic of empires, some deaths are a national calamity and others are a statistic.
Shaken by its losses, Washington withdrew its troops and, with them, any desire to put boots on the ground in the name of humanitarian causes. The lesson it drew was not that it should intervene better, but that it should not intervene at all, at least not where there was nothing to win. Barely six months later, when the machetes began to fall in Rwanda, the ghosts of Mogadishu were already sitting at the table where decisions are made. Africa, once again, paid the bill for a war it had not chosen and a trauma that was not its own.
Liberia: When Africa Saved Itself
Between 1989 and 2003, Liberia, a nation founded by liberated American slaves with the dream of a free land, endured two successive civil wars. It all commenced on Christmas Eve of 1989, when Charles Taylor initiated a rebellion to depose President Samuel Doe, a sergeant who had seized power in a 1980 coup and had ruled, like so many others, with the blessing of Washington and the tolerance of the Cold War. The rebellion soon fragmented into a war of all against all, where factions no longer fought for an idea but for diamonds, timber, and territory. As always, it was civilians who paid the price: massacres, systematic rape, and children handed rifles before they had learned to read. When a war needs children to persist, it has already confessed what it is.
Then something unusual occurred: the neighbors arrived before the empires. In 1990, the Economic Community of West African States dispatched a peacekeeping force, ECOMOG, led by Nigeria, to enforce a ceasefire in 1996. It was not a mission of saints; its soldiers were also accused of violations and plundering. But they were present, which is more than the great powers could claim.
In the eight months before ECOMOG arrived, between December 1989 and August 1990, Liberia lost perhaps 10,000 to 20,000 people, most of them in ethnic massacres and the siege of Monrovia. Then the peacekeepers came, and the dying did not stop; it only changed address. Between 1990 and 1996, well over 100,000 more perished, many not by bullets but by hunger and disease, in the rebel territories where no peacekeeper set foot.
After the 2003 peace accord, when Taylor departed for exile in Nigeria, a larger United Nations force arrived to hold together what remained of the nation, and it stayed for fifteen years.
Liberia demonstrated that rebuilding a shattered state is slow, patient, and thankless work, the kind that does not fit in a news cycle or an election campaign. But it also showed something that Rwanda had already learned at the cost of 800,000 lives: intervention is possible when someone decides that the dead matter. The problem was never a shortage of means. It was always a lack of resolve.
Sierra Leone: Diamonds Are Forever
Between 1991 and 2002, Sierra Leone lived through a war that became famous for its cruelty, as if cruelty were a local product and not an export. The Revolutionary United Front, led by Foday Sankoh and sponsored by Charles Taylor from neighboring Liberia, financed its campaign with diamonds, those stones the world calls eternal and that Sierra Leoneans paid for with their hands. Literally. The rebels amputated arms and legs to sow terror, and they recruited children because children obey, do not ask questions, and cost nothing.
The diamonds, meanwhile, crossed borders with an ease that no refugee ever enjoyed and ended up in the windows of London, Antwerp, and New York, where no one asked about their origin. Elegance has no memory. And a government rotted by corruption, more skilled at stealing from its people than at defending them, allowed the war to drag on for more than a decade.
In the end, it was force from outside that broke the deadlock. The United Nations deployed its peacekeepers across the country, until in May 2000 the rebels took hundreds of them hostage, as if to remind the world that blue helmets do not stop bullets. That same month, Britain, the old colonial power, sent its troops and, with a targeted intervention, helped the government recover control. This time the former empire returned not to take but to stay its hand, and history, which is rarely generous, should at least take note.
Afterward came justice, or something resembling it. The UN and the government created the Special Court for Sierra Leone to judge those responsible for war crimes, and in 2012 it convicted Charles Taylor, the first former head of state condemned by an international court since Nuremberg. Sierra Leone proved that when military force arrives on time and justice arrives at all, a country can be pulled back from the abyss. It also proved something less comfortable: the diamonds were never on trial.
Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs): Doctors in the Middle of the Fire
When a state collapses, the first to leave are usually those who govern it, and the last to arrive are those who could have prevented the collapse. In between, in that no man’s land where there is neither law nor bread, remain the non-governmental organizations. In Rwanda, Somalia, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam, and CARE kept millions of people alive with medicine, food, and shelter, doing with tents and stretchers what governments and armies refused to do with all their power.
But charity has its own wars. Aid workers operate in the middle of the fighting, where armed groups see a truck of rice not as a humanitarian gesture but as loot, and a kidnapped doctor not as a tragedy but as a bargaining chip. In Somalia, aid had to pay warlords for the right to feed the hungry. In the camps of Goma, after the Rwandan genocide, food meant for refugees also fed the killers hiding among them. And as if that were not enough, these organizations depend on the generosity of donors, a generosity that rises with the headlines and falls as soon as the cameras move on. Compassion, too, has its seasons.
That is why, as indispensable as they are, NGOs can only treat the symptoms of a disease whose causes lie elsewhere. They cannot replace a government, nor stop a war, nor disarm a militia with bandages. In June 1994, in the middle of the genocide, Doctors Without Borders said it plainly: genocide cannot be stopped with doctors. It was not a confession of failure. It was an accusation against those who had the means to stop it and preferred to send condolences.
Private Military Companies
Peace for Hire
In the 1990s, while the blue helmets were still debating mandates and budgets, a faster and more efficient solution appeared on the market: war for hire. Companies like Executive Outcomes, founded in South Africa and staffed largely by veterans of the apartheid army, offered their services to governments in Angola and Sierra Leone to crush rebel forces. History has its ironies: the same soldiers who had fought to preserve white rule now sold their skills to Black governments. In Sierra Leone, in 1995, they drove the RUF back from Freetown in a matter of weeks, and they were paid, in part, with diamond concessions. The disease and the cure were paid in the same currency.
Their defenders argue that private contractors act faster and fight harder than the slow bureaucracies of the United Nations. It is true. Efficiency has never been the problem of mercenaries. The problem is that they answer to a contract, not to a conscience, and that their legal accountability dissolves somewhere between the shareholders and the jurisdiction of no one. A soldier who kills for his country can at least be judged by it. A mercenary who kills for a fee is judged only by his invoice.
A private army can secure an oil field or push a rebel column back into the jungle. What it cannot do is build institutions, plant trust, or leave behind anything more lasting than the end of its contract. When Executive Outcomes left Sierra Leone in early 1997, the peace it had bought lasted barely four months, until a military coup brought the rebels into the capital. Peace, it turns out, can be rented. But it cannot be bought.
But what about the Cobre Effect? In colonial Delhi, the tale goes, the British paid a reward for every dead cobra. Soon the locals were breeding cobras, and when the reward ended, they set them free. The city had more serpents than before. In 1902 in Hanoi, Vietnam, the French paid for every rat tail, and soon rodents without tails were running through the sewers, released to keep reproducing. The colonizers called it a problem of discipline. It was a problem of reasoning: whoever pays for the deceased will always find someone willing to raise them. The same is true of war. A mercenary compensated to fight has little interest in peace.
Key Takeaway
The horrors in Rwanda exposed the fatal flaws of strict non-intervention, forcing the world to rethink what sovereignty means and eventually leading to the «Responsibility to Protect» (R2P) framework. At the same time, crises in Somalia, Liberia, and Sierra Leone proved that saving a state requires far more than dropping off food or sending in a temporary force—it takes unified political will, massive resources, and a long-term commitment to rebuilding.
Here is a natural, human rewrite of that passage, keeping the tone smooth, balanced, and engaging:
Rwanda Today
The Order of Silence
Since the tragedy of 1994, Rwanda has achieved one of the most remarkable recoveries in modern history. A country that the world abandoned to its machetes decided to rebuild itself from the ground up, and it began with the most difficult task of all: unlearning the categories that the colonizers had taught it. Today, the words «Hutu» and «Tutsi» have largely disappeared from public life, replaced by a single identity: Rwandan. What Belgium wrote on identity cards, Rwanda is trying to erase from memory. The results are visible. Rwanda is considered one of the safest and cleanest countries on the continent, and Kigali is praised for its order, its low crime, and its strict environmental policies, including a ban on plastic bags that many rich countries still consider a utopia.
Politically, the country has a name: Paul Kagame, who led the Rwandan Patriotic Front that ended the genocide and has been its defining figure since 2000. His government receives credit for fighting corruption, restoring stability, and driving impressive economic progress. But human rights organizations and international observers also accuse it of silencing the opposition, restricting the press, and crushing dissent. In 2024, Kagame was re-elected with more than 99 percent of the vote, a figure that in any democracy would be cause for celebration and in this one is cause for suspicion. Analysts describe Rwanda as remarkably stable but far from a full democracy. It is a familiar dilemma: order can be built on consensus or on fear, and from the outside, both look equally clean.
Economically, the last two decades have brought rapid growth. Investments in technology, tourism, infrastructure, and education have reduced poverty, raised life expectancy, and expanded access to health care. Rwanda is also a world leader in gender equality, with the highest percentage of women in parliament on the planet, a lesson that the old democracies of the North have yet to learn. Still, real challenges remain: rural poverty, high youth unemployment, and a heavy dependence on foreign aid, that generosity which arrives late and always with conditions.
Modern Rwanda is a powerful model of post-conflict recovery. A country that was told it was condemned to hatred proved that hatred can be dismantled. What remains to be seen is whether a nation can heal its wounds while keeping its mouth closed, or whether, someday, peace will also have to learn to speak.
Rwanda, Somalia, Liberia, and Sierra Leone did not share a language, a religion, or a single enemy. They shared a history. All four inherited (1) borders, (2) categories, or (3) elites designed by others, and all four were armed during the Cold War by powers that cared more about loyalty than about the people. When the Cold War ended, the patrons left, the weapons stayed, and states that had been propped up from abroad collapsed from within. Then came the warlords, the diamonds, the children with rifles, and the radio stations teaching neighbors to hate. And in every case, the world arrived late, or not at all, because there was no oil to protect. These were not tribal wars, as the headlines said. They were the bill for a century of other people’s interests, paid in African lives.
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