Sir, Yugo Kovach (letter, Sept 6) is wrong to state that Britain should have helped France to support the government of Rwanda before the genocide. In 1994, when I was accredited both to the Government of Uganda and, on a non-resident basis, to the Government of Rwanda led by Habyarimana, the little information we had gave us little confidence in Habyarimana’s good faith.
Our little leverage was directed to supporting the Arusha process, which would have led to establishing a broader-based government including the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and other opposition fragments. For us to have given military support to the Habyarimana Government would have destroyed the credibility of our policy, and subsequent events which we could not have prevented — such as Habyarimana’s murder (probably by his own side), the genocide this triggered and the subsequent victory of the RPF — would have made such action indefensible in hindsight. We would have associated ourselves with a monstrous regime and the planners and executors of a genocide.
We have much to regret about 1994. Lack of information was a major handicap, as was acceptance that French policy might be competent and benign, and a lack of interest over the years in a small country far away. But arguing that our intervention would have stopped a host of later unpleasantnesses is hard to sustain, particularly if you don’t believe that our policy in Rwanda would have succeeded.
The larger consequence from Rwanda is that national sovereignty is no longer an overriding reason for rejecting outside interference if a government practises genocide on its own people. But the idea that we should have intervened to prop up a discredited government with poison at its heart is a bad one — and I don’t see how it gets us any farther with the complicated issues of Darfur.
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EDWARD CLAY
British High Commissioner to Uganda, 1993-97
Epsom