The case of Rwanda poses endless challenges to the human rights movement.
Genocide leads the list.
Since the adoption of the 1948 Convention on Genocide, intended to respond to awful contingencies raised by Nazi attempts to exterminate the Jews during World War II, the UN Security Council has made no timely attempt to apply this term to subsequent instances of mass killings, such as those inflicted upon the residents of East Timor by the Indonesian government, the citizens of Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge, or the citizens of Ethiopia in Mengistu's reign of Red Terror. For the Convention on Genocide to apply, there has to be firm evidence that an effort exists to eliminate a population on the basis of its ethnicity, religion, or distinct communal status. Killings for political reasons, no matter how numerous these deaths may be, do not constitute genocide. If the Security Council determines that genocide does in a given instance exist, then the international community, acting through the Security Council, is obligated under international law to intervene and put a stop to the killing. Within a few weeks, hundreds of thousands of people of Tutsi ethnicity were killed by organized Hutu extremists and their followers.