The United Nations could have halted the 1994 genocide in Rwanda had it committed sufficient troops and given them the authority to pursue aggressively those carrying out ethnic massacres, according to the former commander of the UN peacekeeping force.
Maj Gen Romeo Dallaire, from Canada, told the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda this week that if the UN had taken such steps, the peacekeepers "would have been able to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of Rwandans".
Instead, 100 days of massacres by Rwanda's Hutu majority led by the army and militias resulted in the deaths of at least 500,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
The legacy of this bloodletting lives on in present-day Rwanda, where the bright, shiny estates newly perched on so many hilltops should be symbols of hope for the future. Instead, these houses, so many of them empty, illustrate the failure to achieve reconciliation since the genocide in 1994.
Built for Tutsi genocide survivors, they remain mostly empty because their intended occupants are afraid to move in. They fear the return of their Hutu persecutors and believe living in a village will only facilitate attacks.
The remarkable achievement of reabsorbing more than one million Hutu refugees who came back at the end of 1996 cannot disguise the fact that the two main groups in Rwanda seem to have learned nothing from the experiences of recent history.
The historian, Dr Gerard Prunier, has characterised their states of mind as follows: "For the Tutsi it is: `We have our backs to the wall. Unless we maintain absolute control they will finish us next time.' And for the Hutu: `We only have to wait, numbers will play in our favour and the socalled international community will neither want nor be able to stop us'."
Few observers demur from this depressing analysis of the situation, which increasingly resembles that of Burundi. In both countries now, a Tutsi minority of about 15 per cent is in firm control of the army and, by extension, the political apparatus. Hutus are margin alised, hostile and, in some regions, in direct conflict with the regime.
Already, the Rwandan army has lost control of large parts of the Gisenyi and Ruhengeri provinces in the north-west, where the local population is highly sympathetic to the Hutu rebels. Dr Prunier claims the military behave as if all Hutus were "fair game" in operations carried out after rebel attacks.
According to the UN's human rights field operation in Rwanda, the army is responsible for the majority of the 6,000 or so killings documented last year. The actual number is probably much higher.
Psychologically, relations between the returnees and the regime are disastrous, says Dr Prunier. "Many refugees are still denying that any genocide occurred at all. They only say that it was `war', refusing to discuss the issue of murdered women and children." Their brutal treatment at the hands of the army is felt to absolve them from any guilt.
As for the Tutsis, "they talk about national reconciliation but in practice act as if all Hutu were genocidaires and bore a collective guilt".
The towns are increasingly Tutsi preserves. Educated Hutus who have returned find it difficult to obtain employment, and some prefer to go to the land rather that endanger their lives through social visibility. Aid agencies with Hutu staff have been pressed to employ more Tutsis.
Many Tutsis received a good education abroad but are finding it hard to come by well-paid employment in Rwanda. Rivalries between between "Ugandan" and "Tanzanian" Tutsis, who are English-speaking, and Francophone "Burundian" Tutsis is intense.
Dr Prunier, who was the foremost chronicler of the genocide but has grown more critical of the regime, has analysed recent shifts in power within the regime, which claims to be a coalition of both Hutu and Tutsi.
The effect of these changes has been to demote Hutus and moderate Tutsis and to place more power in the hands of hardline Tutsi elements within the army. The result has been the creation of a de-facto collegial military dictatorship, he says.
More recently, control of the military campaign in the northwest has been given to three or four hardline generals. Rumours persist that the Vice-President and army commander, Maj Paul Kagame, is no longer in full control of the regime. The gap between city and country in Rwanda has also widened. The Hutu elite of the former regime had deep rural roots, but the Tutsis who run Rwanda today have few links with the country. "They are not only Tutsi, they are `aliens' in the double sense of being foreign-born and educated and of being urban people in a land where 92 per cent of the population are peasant farmers," says Dr Prunier.
The hardening of Hutu and Tutsi opinion over the past year makes the prospect of reconciliation and power-sharing less likely. Aid agencies are keenly aware of the deterioration; their plans to move from emergency and rehabilitation work to development projects have mostly been put on hold because of the instability of the situation.
However, western governments seem strangely unaware of, or indifferent to, the growing problems of Rwanda, in spite of the warnings that are starting to come from UN agencies. Part of the problem lies in the scale of the genocide; in a country where up to a million people were killed only four years ago, it seems the world will only sit up and listen when very large numbers start dying again.
