Turns out, quite a lot more than it let on...
This week marks 21 years since the onset of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, in which more than 500,000 people, mostly members of the Tutsi ethnic minority, were slaughtered. While the Rwandan genocide has become an iconic symbol of the need for international humanitarian intervention, at the time, governments were very slow to react. In the aftermath of the genocide, as the extent of the devastation become clear, governments said they were unaware of what was happening. A growing body of evidence, however, demonstrates what those of us living in Rwanda in the period before the genocide saw clearly — there were ample warnings that violence was approaching. The lack of political will, rather than the lack of information, prevented the world from acting to stop the killing.