When the former Hutu-led government of Rwanda was busy organizing the butchery of some 800,000 ethnic Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu, the Security Council looked the other way.
The man who encouraged them to do so was Jean Damascène Bizimana, a 36-year old Rwandan Ambassador, who by chance was presiding over U.N. Security Council deliberations while the slaughter was taking place.
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In today's Washington Post, David L. Bosco, a scholar at American University and a former senior editor at Foreign Policy, tracks down Bizimana to a plastics factory in rural Alabama. Bosco reveals how Bizimana disappeared when his government fell, only to show up years later as a US citizen
"It seemed that the ambassador, along with his wife and two small children, had simply vanished -- until he turned up living quietly in a small town of Opelika, Ala., a few miles up the road from Auburn University. He's an American citizen now. He works for a plastics company. And he doesn't want to talk about genocide," Bosco says.
Bizimana aggressively defended his government's actions and lobbied against every effort by to intervene to stop the genocide.
"Bizimana, a rising star in Rwanda's diplomatic corps, told his fellow ambassadors that the violence was due to spontaneous public outrage over the president's death on April 6 and that the interim government he now represented would quickly reestablish order," Bosco writes.
"He blamed rebel forces from the country's Tutsi ethnic minority for all the trouble, insisting to the council on April 21 that the rebellion 'must be made responsible for its attitude in wishing to continue hostilities, to perpetuate the current violence and to continue to perpetrate massacres.' In May, he voted against an arms embargo against Rwanda that every other member of the council supported."
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