Mr Brooks: The UN contacted [Executive Outcomes] and said, “Could you end the genocide in Rwanda?” This was probably about two weeks into the genocide when nobody else in the world was willing to go in there, to deploy their military. And so EO is sort of between assignments… They said, “Yea, we could do that.” …They got the tickets and were about to head to New York and got another phone call saying the deal’s off.
Shortly afterwards Kofi Annan would famously say, “Maybe the world’s not ready to privatize human security.”
So could the Rwandan genocide have been stopped by Executive Outcomes? I think so, given EO’s track record in the region, but we will never know. It is shameful that the UN and the leading nations of the world did not do all it could to prevent this tragic loss of life, and EO could have been a solution to stop it. Shameful….
Anyways, this was an excellent interview, and some of the points that really jumped out at me was the discussion about the rules for the use of force and the IPOA’s work on developing a set of rules for that. That and the fateful decision of the UN not to use Executive Outcomes to stop the genocide in Rwanda(which is not new, but it still needs to be mentioned over and over again).