Prime among those failures was his perceived inaction to stop the genocide of 800,000 Rwandans in 1994 when he ran the UN’s peacekeeping operations, and, a year later, the Srebrenica massacre in which 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were murdered by Bosnian Serb forces. As Samantha Power, later the U.S. ambassador to the UN, wrote in Chasing the Flame, her biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN diplomat who was killed in Iraq, Annan’s “name would appear in the history books beside the two defining genocidal crimes of the second half of the twentieth century.”
An independent investigation in 1999 into the 1994 genocide found the UN had failed Rwanda. Annan, by that time secretary-general of the UN, said: “All of us must bitterly regret that we did not do more to prevent it.” He said the UN force in Rwanda at the time “was neither mandated nor equipped for the kind of forceful action” needed to prevent the genocide. But he added: “On behalf of the United Nations, I acknowledge this failure and express my deep remorse.” Five years later, in a speech marking the 10th anniversary of the genocide, Annan said that if the UN, various governments, and the media had paid more attention to what was unfolding in Rwanda, the massacres might have been averted. [...]
At the UN, Annan, a Ghanian who spent his entire career at the institution, oversaw a period of reform, outlined an ambitious agenda to reduce global poverty, and set up a global fund to combat HIV/AIDS. But the experiences of Rwanda and Srebrenica prompted Annan in 1999 to question the role of the international community in protecting civilian populations.
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