by Michael Clough

About the author: Michael Clough is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City.

Editor’s note: On April 6, 1994, in the African country of Rwanda, following the death of President Juvenal Habyarimana, renewed fighting broke out in a civil war begun in the fall of 1993. During this new outbreak of hostilities between a rebel army of the Tutsi ethnic minority (14 percent of Rwanda’s population) and government forces of the Hutu ethnic majority (85 percent of population), Hutu militias killed at least 200,000 Tutsi civilians and caused an estimated 2 million refugees to flee to neighboring countries. A UN observer force stationed in Rwanda to observe a previous cease-fire in the civil war was forced to retreat in April 1994 in the face of the renewed...