Historical General Assembly, 1994

Dear Delegates,

Welcome to Harvard National Model United Nations 2010! My name is Jo Osborn, and I’m very excited to be your director for the Historical General Assembly!

A bit about myself: I’m a sophomore at Harvard concentrating in Archaeology, with a probable secondary in Spanish. My passport says I’m American, but I’ve grown up around the world, living in the US, Japan, Spain (my true home) and most recently Germany, where my family is still located. I was introduced to MUN as a senior in high school, and here at Harvard I have had the opportunity to really get into it through the travelling MUN team, our high school conference HMUN, and of course HNMUN.

During this session of the Historical General Assembly, we will be discussing the Situation in Rwanda in 1994. I’m very excited about the debate that will take place, and I hope you all feel the same. Our debate is a chance for us to analyze what happened, what action the UN did (or didn’t) take, and ask ourselves, what would we change if we could? By answering these questions about the past, we teach ourselves lessons for the future. We cannot change the events that began on April 6th, 1994, but we can learn from them and make sure that such a tragedy is never repeated.

I look forward to meeting all of you and seeing where our debate leads us.

Sincerely,

Jo Osborn
Director, Historical General Assembly, 1994
Harvard National Model United Nations 2010

Topic Area: The Situation in Rwanda

From 6 April 1994, until mid July of the same year, an estimated 800,000 people were slaughtered in the Rwandan genocides. In October of 1993, the Security Council established the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), but did not give it the power to intervene. UNAMIR stayed in Rwanda for three years, and the main goal of this mission was to help implement the Arusha Peace Agreement signed earlier that year.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan said several years later that the United Nations failed in its obligation to “prevent and punish” acts of genocide, which was after all one of the prime objectives of the United Nations when it was established in the wake of World War II. Imagine, however, that the United Nations had another opportunity to go back to early April of 1994 and fix its mistakes and save millions of lives.

What could the international community have done differently? What would the General Assembly recommend with regard to intervention and the humanitarian crisis that would arise in the aftermath of this tragedy? How can the arm sales to the region be more closely monitored? What regional partners should be consulted in the decision making process? What can the United Nations do to stop the tragedy in Rwanda? Although we cannot change the events of the past, the lessons we learn from it are valuable today.