After the genocide, we failed to push hard enough to expel genocidal killers from refugee camps, and we shrank from the truth that it was worth risking bloodshed to force a separation between killers and legitimate refugees. As the head of a refugee policy agency, I feel this failure acutely. In retrospect, my agency should have made clear to policymakers that military action was worthwhile to resolve the problem. Inside Rwanda, the international human rights community failed for more than a year to mount an effective human rights monitoring program because we never before had insisted that the U.N. Human Rights Center have real world capabilities beyond issuing occasional reports and ritual condemnations. The human rights community mistakenly assumes that it alone has the best interests of the population at heart.
Some leaders despise their own citizens.
But sometimes governments are more inexperienced than evil. Central Africa's new leaders have the enormous task of reassembling nations that are among the poorest on earth, ethnically divided, riven with corruption and saturated with arms and shadowy groups willing to use those arms to gain power. National armies are usually untrained and unrepresentative, national treasuries are virtually bare and the political systems have limited experience with democracy. The shooting may have stopped, but a practical state of emergency persists. They appear serious about stamping out corruption and improving the lives of their fellow-citizens, if only they could actually grasp the levers of government.