Tracing the Rwanda `Genocide Fax'
January 14, 2014 By Karel Kovanda NYT http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/15/opinion/tracing-the-rwanda-genocidefax.html?hpw&rref=opinion&_r=0

Regarding "The shroud over Rwanda's nightmare" (Opinion, Jan. 10): The crucial January 1994 "genocide fax" to which Michael Dobbs refers -- warning of an "anti-Tutsi extermination" plot -- was never shared with the United Nations Security Council in any way. But, in his preface to a major volume of Rwanda-related documents published by the United Nations in 1995, Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali asserted that the fax actually had been shared with the council. Since I was president of the Security Council when the fax arrived, I confronted the secretary general on this issue toward the end of 1995. In a subsequent meeting also attended by Chinmaya Garekhan of the United Nations Secretariat, a right-hand man of Mr. Boutros-Ghali's, the secretary general stuck to his position. In the end, however, Mr. Boutros-Ghali conceded that the Americans, at least, had been informed -- which in his view should have been enough as far as the Security Council was concerned. It wasn't.

Engaging in "what-if" history is rarely fruitful. But if the Security Council had been aware of Brig. Gen. Roméo Dallaire's views on the impending genocide, it would at least genocide, it would at least have had a chance to react -- and chance to react -- and history might have taken a vastly

taken a vastly different turn. Karel Kovanda, Brussels The writer was the Czech ambassador to the United Nations from 1993 to 1997.