Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

OPERATION TURQUOISE
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hundred air sorties into the area, in conjunction with the United Nations, providing
water, food, and other relief and humanitarian supplies. The success of Operation Support
Hope could be measured quantitatively; within a month of being set in motion, the daily
death rate at the immense refugee camp at Goma, Zaire, as a result of malnutrition, starvation,
and thirst, had been reduced to less than five hundred per day. Despite this, however,
it must be noted that Operation Support Hope was not carried out in order to halt
the genocide. Rather, it came after the genocide, when Western countries could appear as
good global citizens without having had to get their hands dirty through intervening in
stopping the killing while it was taking place. Further, by assisting those in the refugee
camps—many of which served as a refuge for the very Hutu killers who had carried out
the genocide—Support Hope failed to assist in any way to locate the perpetrators or help
in bringing them to justice. Indeed, the Hutu killers frequently used the refugee camps as
bases from which to continue their anti-Tutsi activities, launching raids back into
Rwanda to either kill witnesses to their activities during the months of April-July 1994,
or to “encourage” (i.e., to force) Hutu still living in Rwanda to continue the killing
process. The irony of Operation Support Hope lies in the fact that by its very existence it
showed what the countries of the world were prepared to do—help the survivors and the
killers, after the fact—rather than what they should have done, that is, stop the genocide
while it was taking place.
Operation Turquoise. As the 1994 Rwandan genocide was being perpetrated by
extremist Hutu against Tutsi and moderate Hutu, the United Nations Security Council
passed Resolution 918 of May 1994, which called for the strengthening of the United
Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) via the deployment of troops under
a Chapter VII mandate. The French government, which had until then done little worthwhile
in the way of intervention, took up Resolution 918 and offered to deploy troops.
Subsequently, under UN Security Council Resolution 929, dated July 22, 1994, Operation
Turquoise was set in motion, with an initial deployment of two thousand five hundred
French troops and approximately five hundred others, mostly from African nations, along
with one hundred armored personnel carriers, ten helicopters, four fighter bombers, and
two reconnaissance planes. These troops set up a block of so-called safe areas in the southwest
of Rwanda, claiming that this was the best way to prevent vast numbers of refugees
moving into northern Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) while at the same
time safeguarding the refugees’ lives. The area under its jurisdiction became known as the
“Turquoise Zone” and comprised approximately 20 percent of the country.
Much speculative comment has been made regarding the ulterior motives of the French
in establishing such “safe areas” where they did, given that nearly all of those who fled to
them were Hutu rather than Tutsi, and that among the Hutu were substantial numbers of
genocidal killers. It has also been suggested that France decided to defend these Hutu from
the advance of the army of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), an organization that was
largely English-speaking but operating in a Francophone country. An important consequence
of Operation Turquoise was that the Hutu were not disarmed satisfactorily by the
French troops. Extremist Hutu still possessing arms were able to operate effectively within
the so-called safe zone; indeed, they continued the killing of any Tutsi they could find,
unhindered by any fears of being caught by the RPF. French troops did step in between Hutu
killers and Tutsi victims whenever contact was obvious, but such occurrences were infrequent.
Operation Turquoise troops were gradually withdrawn throughout August 1994, as