Britain's Hidden Role in the Rwandan Genocide
Britain’s Hidden Role in the Rwandan Genocide examines
the role of the United Kingdom as a global elite bystander to the crime of
genocide, and its complicity, in violation of international criminal laws
during the Rwandan genocide of 1994. As prevailing accounts confine themselves
to the role and actions of the United States and the United Nations, the full
picture of Rwanda’s genocide has yet to be revealed. Hazel Cameron demonstrates
that it is the unravelling of the criminal role and actions of the British that
illuminates a more detailed answer to the question of ‘why’ the genocide in
Rwanda occurred. In this book, she provides a systematic and detailed analysis
of the policies of the British Government towards civil unrest in Rwanda
throughout the 1990s that culminated in genocide. Utilising documentary
evidence obtained as a result of Freedom of Information requests to the Foreign
and Commonwealth Office, as well as material obtained through extensive
interviews - with British government cabinet members, diplomats, Ambassadors to
the United Nations Security Council, prisoners in Rwanda convicted of being
leaders and organisers of genocide, and victims and survivors of genocide in
Rwanda – the author finds that the actions of the British and French
governments, both before and during the Rwandan genocide of 1994, were
disassociated from human rights norms. It is suggested herein that the
decision-making of the Major government during the period of 1990 – 1994 was
for the advancement of the interrelated goals of maintaining power status and
ensuring economic interests in key areas of Africa.
This account of the legal culpability of the powerful within the corridors
of government, in both London and Paris, shows that these behaviours cannot be
conceptualised under existing notions of state crime. This book serves to
illuminate the inadequacies and limitations of a concept of state crime in
international law as it currently stands, and will be of considerable interest
to anyone concerned with the misuse of state power.
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