Annan: Never again like Rwanda

2004-04-08 11:28

Geneva - UN chief Kofi Annan led a global admission of guilt on Wednesday over the failure to stop the genocide in Rwanda when up to a million people were hacked, burned, shot or tortured to death and said the world must act to stop it happening again.

"The genocide in Rwanda should never have happened. But it did," Annan said, announcing an action plan to prevent such horrors happening again.

"Neither the UN, nor the Security Council, nor member states in general, nor the international media, paid enough attention to the gathering signs of disaster," said Annan, who was head of UN peacekeeping at the time.

The United Nations and top Security Council members Britain, France and the United States have all come under fire for failing to intervene to stop the 100 days of ethnic bloodshed in the tiny central African state.

Prevent it in Sudan

And Annan, who has admitted he personally should have done more to sound the alarm, called for possible military intervention to prevent similar bloodletting in western Sudan, where the army and militiamen are accused of systematically killing and raping local ethnic groups in Darfur.

The United Nations says the Darfur conflict, believed to have claimed more than 10 000 lives in little more than a year, is now the world's greatest humanitarian and human rights catastrophe, although the major powers have stopped short of calling it genocide.

President George W Bush called for justice against the perpetrators and aid for the victims.

"The United States supports the people of Rwanda as they commemorate this horrific chapter in history," Bush said in a statement.

The prime minister of Belgium - Rwanda's former colonial power and the only Western government leader to attend the ceremonies in Kigali - said the international community "failed in its most basic duty to intervene."

"Instead of assuming our responsibility, we preferred to ignore the horror," Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt said, declaring that world now had a "moral obligation" to finance massive development in Africa.Deliberate failure

Rwandan President Paul Kagame this week took aim at the world's "deliberate failure" to stop the genocide as Kigali appealed for fugitive masterminds to be brought to book, saying there could never be reconciliation without justice.

"How could the lives of one million Rwandese be considered so insignificant?" Kagame said.

- AFP