Khan's book is also likely to fuel speculation that it was the Interhamwe and the Hutu extremists in Rwanda who shot down President Habyarimana's plane with a rocket on April 6, writes PAUL REDFERN

While much has been written about the events leading up to and during the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, there has been little from the main organisation responsible for keeping the peace at the time, the United Nations.

Now in a very moving and personal account of his time as the UN Secretary General's Special Representative in Rwanda in the mid-1990s, Shaharyar Khan has written a detailed account of what happened at the UN at the time as well as giving specific recommendations for peacekeeping operations in the future.

While much of what is written in The Shallow Graves of Rwanda is already well known, some new and disturbing facts have come to light.

Khan himself says that one of the main purposes of the book is to address accusations of tardiness levelled against the United Nations and the international community in dealing with Rwanda in 1994. Having himself arrived in the country in July 1994 – he stayed for two years until April 1996 – Khan was on the spot immediately to try and find out what had gone wrong and why.

The critical moment of failure came, he writes when Unamir (the UN Armed Mission in Rwanda) was reduced on the orders of the Security Council from 2,658 to just 270 after 10 Belgian soldiers – assigned to protect Prime Minister Agatha Uwilingyimana, were –murdered along with Uwilingyimana, by the former government's presidential guard in April 1994.

He states that the cutback came despite the UN Secretary General's own wishes and despite the requests of the UN commander on the ground, Gen Dallaire.

While the Security Council subsequently acceded to the UN Secretary General's request to increase the Unamir contingent to 5,500 on April 21, by then the damage had been done.

"The international community failed to distinguish between the moral responsibility of stopping a deliberate crime and staying neutral in a civil war," Khan writes.

He also says that the UN was comparatively well-briefed about the potential dangers of what did eventually happen during late 1993 and early 1994. In January of 1994, the Security Council had as a result agreed to increase the military personnel in Rwanda by a battalion.

Khan's book is also likely to fuel speculation that it was the Interhamwe and the Hutu extremists in Rwanda who shot down President Habyarimana's plane with a rocket on April 6.

He says that the president was in the early part of 1994 "torn between opposing pressures" from his own family and the hardline extremists on the one hand, and the international community, the Security Council and the OAU on the other, all of whom were demanding that the Rwanda leader honour the Arusha accords.

"President Habyarimana went to Tanzania for a regional summit, where he eventually committed himself to implementing the power-sharing accord signed at Arusha," Khan writes.

As the killings started, the UN commander on the ground had little chance to halt the massacres though Khan believes the efforts of the small contingent of troops who were left, "were nothing less than heroic."

"Unamir's failure to prevent the massacres or to mediate in the civil war was not through lack of effort or courage. It simply did not have the mandate, the personnel or the logistic back-up to fulfil its task.

I am convinced that, if General Romeo Dallaire had been given the full complement of peacekeeping troops to which he was entitled, he would have prevented the worst of the massacres."

The lessons of what happened in Rwanda for the international community are profound, the book says.

"Until recently, the role of peacekeepers was conceived in the rather narrow military terms of restraining belligerents, engaging in peace negotiations and maintaining sufficient order to enable humanitarian relief to reach the beleaguered population," he wrote. "The lessons of Rwanda – and indeed of other peacekeeping operations – indicate that peacekeeping needs to be redefined and conceived as a much broader and multifunctional role.

"Peacekeeping must be taken out of the straitjacket of performing a basically militaristic role (which) severely inhibited the UN from playing an effective preventative and peace-building role in Rwanda."

Critical issues that exacerbated the Rwandan crisis included the fact that UN mandates did not keep pace with events on the ground; information was inadequate, because of the withdrawal of most diplomatic missions and was "too reliant on media imagery to form an accurate assessment of the crisis"; recent political events in Somalia tended to shape Western reaction and the UN Security Council turned down the Secretary General's request for a doubling of the peacekeeping force.

Khan has a number of very clear and precise recommendations for future peacekeeping operations in Africa as a result of the Rwandan genocide, possible the most important of which is to ensure that the UN commander on the ground must be given the primary responsibility for co-ordinating UN peacekeeping and humanitarian and development actions.

He also proposes the setting of a "peacekeeping fire engine" to be on duty to deal with any future kind of brutal civil conflict, a force that is constantly in a state of readiness to enable it to meet crisis at very short notice."

Khan proposes clear chains of command headed by the UN commander on the ground, extensive training of peacekeeping troops – such as with the Recamp recently in Tanzania – and critically "in cases of extreme violence," the ability to use UN troops as a peacekeeping force to restore peace in a crises area.

While acknowledging that there "can be no single, perfect antidote for all the crisis of peacekeeping" and that "each crisis needs to be dealt with on its merits," Khan, nevertheless, states clearly that broad not narrow parameters for peacekeeping operations need to be set in the future.

The UN special representative is also deeply critical of the manner in which the international community dealt with the situation after the genocide in 1994 and in particular contrasts the huge amounts of money spent on helping the refugees with the tiny amounts spent on the survivors of the genocide.

"While the donor community gave $2 million a day in humanitarian aid to the refugees, the total amount of aid actually disbursed in a whole year to assist people who had been devastated by genocide amounted to only $68 million."

Moreover, Khan says that much of the aid to the refugee community was under the control of the Hutu extremists and he acknowledges that a part of the funds given was converted into military training, re-arming and cross-border sabotage that has led to further tension and conflagration in the region.

But it is not only the international community which stands condemned over Rwanda. Khan says that regional leaders – and he singles out Kenya as a case in point – were extremely reluctant to help track down, apprehend and bring to trial the known  high-profile leaders who had masterminded the genocide.

"Security Council resolution number 978 placed a moral, if not legal responsibility on member states (to act). Most countries extricated themselves from this responsibility, either by claiming that they first needed to pass enabling domestic legislation, or by saying it was not for them but for the UN to distinguish who were criminals and who the ordinary refugees. None of the neighbouring countries responded positively."