By Alexia Gardner, Policy Analyst, and Benjamin Leong, International Programs Intern (Fall and Winter 2026)
Despite clear evidence of genocide in Rwanda, the United States failed to act. Today, this failure echoes.
Content Note: This piece includes descriptions of violence and atrocities related to the Rwandan Genocide, including firsthand accounts from a former staff member who was in Rwanda for a two-week period to report on events as they unfolded. These details are difficult to read. We highlight this piece because we believe it is still essential to remind the scale of what occurred, learn from the past, and to honor the experiences of those affected, including all those who were harmed.
By June of 1994, between 800,000 and 1,000,000 Tutsis died in the Rwandan Genocide. Radio waves across Kigali blared calls to massacre: “If we exterminate all the cockroaches, nobody will judge us.” In photos captured in Kigali, genocidaires carried a blade in one hand and a transistor radio in another, with Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines helping Hutu extremists find Tutsis in hiding.
Two months earlier, Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, was assassinated, his plane shot out of the sky by an unidentified assassin. Although Habyarimana’s killer was unknown, it stoked extremist leaders of the country’s Hutu majority, who blamed the Tutsi minority.
Roger Winter, a former Executive Director at the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI), was one of the few American eyewitnesses to the genocide that followed. In May 1994, Winter traveled to Rwanda, documenting the atrocities he saw. Shortly after his experience, he published an op-ed in the Washington Post, calling upon the U.S. government to intervene.
Yet, despite such calls from Winter and other human rights organizations, the United States did nothing to stop the death toll from mounting. The U.S. refused to even call what was happening in Rwanda a genocide, out of fear they would then be expected to intervene.
Even the U.S.’ own intelligence reported a bloodbath, a targeted murder of Tutsis for being Tutsis—a genocide, not a war. But officials feared that our involvement would mirror failed interventions in Somalia and Haiti, that the political cost for the U.S. was too high.
Winter’s accounts of atrocity, including the op-ed in the Washington Post, paint an explicit picture of genocide. So frank is his account that it is hard to imagine where anyone within the U.S. Government or international community found the imagination to maintain that Rwanda was simply ‘civil strife.’
“Go deep inside Rwanda today and you will not find gas chambers or massive crematoria. But you will find genocide. And if you linger amid the bodies and stench at Rwanda’s human slaughter sites long enough, you will gain — as I did — a horrified sense that in some ways this frenzied attempt to annihilate an entire population contains scenes eerily reminiscent of the “Final Solution” attempted 50 years ago. “
“Clearly visible at other locations is the newly turned dirt indicating the existence of mass graves, where the victims will never be counted. The killers in Rwanda, however, are discovering what the Nazis discovered half a century before them: The truth of this ultimate crime against humanity can be difficult to keep buried.”
“One personal letter I recovered, written with neat penmanship by a female named Josephine in the local language Kinyarwanda, described “going through difficult times of terrible sadness and pain,” and asks, “are the children all right?” I do not believe she had a chance to send the letter, and I doubt that the children are all right.”
Roger Winter in
Dehumanization is often a precursor to mass atrocity. Genocide is possible when we put our humanity aside, when ordinary people see their neighbors not as people, but as the other. The dehumanization of Tutsis in Rwanda is the legacy of colonial rule. The Germans, and later the Belgians, privileged Tutsis over Hutus. Claiming that Tutsis were lighter-skinned and taller, they created ethnic division out of what was once an occupational and wealth divide related to the number of cattle owned. As independence movements swept Africa, Belgian officials saw the writing on the wall and shifted their support towards the Hutu majority. Although the Belgians left Rwanda, the divisions they sowed became the basis of the 1994 genocide.
The U.S.’ choice to do nothing in Rwanda reflects a similarly selective humanity, a refusal to see Rwandan lives as worth saving. In private, U.S. officials called Rwanda “tribal warfare,” racialized language that dismissed the scope of violence and our obligation to act.
In the decades since, the choice to favor domestic and global political calculations over human life has haunted the international community, and the American conscience. Rwanda exposed the veneer of the promise of “never again.” Our failure to intervene showed the cruel inequity in which we value human life, the macabre cost of allowing political calculus to matter more than moral obligation.
Fully capturing the devastation that followed inaction—the cost of doing nothing—is impossible. What happened in Rwanda was so horrific that even the word genocide, as important as it is, feels insufficient: by 1995, seventy-five percent of Tutsis in Rwanda were dead. Reporters who visited the country the following year told the stories of survivors: of the widows, orphans, and amputees who all wondered how they were even alive.
It is hard not to study the Rwandan genocide without thinking of similar tragedies unfolding today. The United States’ and international community’s reluctance not just to intervene, but to provide even basic humanitarian aid or refugee protection to the victims of severe human rights violations, seems in stark contrast to the lessons learned from the past. Going through papers and notes written by USCRI staff during the 1990s, we were struck by their resolve to confront officials’ inaction. Their work insisted that the United States, and the world, not look away from Rwanda. Their tenacity calls upon us to bring that same vigor to advocating against human rights violations today, including, but not limited to, the genocide of the Rohingya and the killing of civilians in Sudan.
Today marks 31 years since the genocide in Rwanda began. Then, Roger Winter wrote that, “If America and its leaders do not act to stop the genocide, they at least should have the decency to shed hypocrisy and never again utter the noble words, ‘Never again.’”
Remembering what happened in Rwanda is not passive. “Never again” is not a catch phrase. It is a promise to act; both today, tomorrow, and always.
Roger Winter’s full article, “Journey into Genocide: A Rwanda Diary,” was originally published in The Washington Post on June 5, 1994. Read it here.
