Heinze, Eric. "The Rhetoric of Genocide in U.S. Foreign Policy: Rwanda and Darfur Compared". Political Science Quarterly, Vol.122, No.3 (2007): 359-383.

Heinze, Eric. "The Rhetoric of Genocide in U.S. Foreign Policy: Rwanda and Darfur Compared". Political Science Quarterly, Vol.122, No.3 (2007): 359-383.

• The crisis in Darfur has challenge the moral conscious of all actors who pledged to prevent genocide in the aftermath of the failure to intervene in the Rwandan Genocide (359).
• The ceasefire signed in May 2006 in Abuja has not been signed by all relevant actors in the Darfur conflict and has not been enforced with appropriate forces, as the small force of AU and UN monitors has been insufficient to stop violence in the region (359).

• The Rwandan Genocide is the first unequivocal crime of genocide committed since the Holocaust, confirmed and internationally recognized as fitting the legal definition of attempting to destroy, in whole or in part, the existence of an ethnic group (363).
• The conflict was first termed as a genocide on 19 April 1994, when the commander of UN peacekeepers in Rwanda, Romeo Dallaire described the violence in the country as a genocide (363).
• Wider recognition of the conflict as a genocide began around 21 April, when several NGOs and major news outlets started discussing the conflict in these terms (364).
• Only in late April 1994 did national governments start seriously considering that a genocide might be occurring in Rwanda. New Zealand and Czechia were among the first countries to discuss the possibility of genocide, while the US was the most prominent of countries arguing against the application of the term (364).
• On 21 April 1994, the UNSC voted to withdrawal the majority of UN peacekeepers from Rwanda, reducing the force of 2,100 soldiers to only 270 men. The mandate of this force was also reduced, from peacekeeping to negotiating a ceasefire between belligerent groups (364).
• The fact that governments only starting considering the possibility of genocide after the UN force in Rwanda had already been decimated increased official incentives to deny that a genocide was taking place, as no UN force now existed to act effectively to stop it, and recognizing a change in the nature of the conflict would necessitate abandoning the enforcement of the Arusha Accords that underpinned the contemporary ceasefire plan (364).

• The Clinton administration did not want to declare that the conflict in Rwanda was a genocide, despite considerable knowledge in the administration across departments of the nature and motivation of mass killings throughout April 1994, because they believed that declaring the conflict a genocide would force the administration to intervene as per obligations under the 1948 Genocide Convention, a situation that President Clinton wanted to avoid because of public opposition to intervention in Somalia several months earlier (360).
• In the aftermath of the failed US intervention in Somalia, President Clinton issued presidential decision directive 25, which severely limited the degree to which the USA would participate in future peacekeeping operations, authorizing deployment only in circumstances where UN operations furthered US interests (363).
• This directive had a major influence on US policy towards Rwanda. When informed about the potential for violence in early 1994, US officials declared that the US would not act because there were not relevant US interests in Rwanda. It also influenced the American decision to withdraw diplomatic staff in May (364).
• The official US line during April 1994 was that the violence in Rwanda was a continuation of the earlier civil war and thus precluded the intervention of UN peacekeepers (365).
• The Clinton administration believed that discussions of genocide were being used by the UN to push for a military intervention. The US believed that this intervention would be a failure, like Somalia, leaving the US trapped in an unpopular quagmire in which it had no national interest (365).
• There was no significant political group in 1994 that was pressuring President Clinton to intervene in Rwanda, and he believed that he would not gain any support by intervening, whereas failure to do so seemed costless since the American public did not seem to care about Rwanda (365).
• The US first used the term genocide on 21 May 1994, several weeks after the majority of the killings of Tutsis had already taken place in Rwanda (360, 366).
• The use of the word 'genocide' to describe the Rwandan conflict would commit the US to actually respond to the violence, committing it to an intervention it believed would be costly and unpopular (366).
• Interestingly, contemporary interpretations of the 1948 Genocide Convention do not actually create a legally-binding duty on countries to militarily intervene to stop genocide after it is identified. What is more important is that many members of the Clinton administration believed that the Convention created these obligations (366, 373-374).
• The Bush Jr. administration demonstrated a superior understanding of the legal obligations of the Genocide Convention, as Secretary Powell specifically stated that recognition of a conflict as genocide did not necessitate military intervention, but could satisfied by support for UN action (374, 381).
• Whereas the Clinton administration was reticent to apply the label of genocide to the Rwandan Genocide until the moment when it was clear that a genocide was ongoing, the administration of George W. Bush was quick to declare the conflict in Darfur to be an instance of genocide (359).
• While the George W. Bush administration was more willing to use the term 'genocide', both administrations were equally unwilling to actually intervene in the conflict. The difference was essentially that President Clinton believed that characterizing the conflict as a genocide necessitated action, whereas President Bush Jr. did not (373, 383).
• In February 2003, rebels rose up in Darfur against the Islamist government of Sudan's oppressive rule. The government responded with a brutal counter-insurgency campaign that resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and the displacement of millions (360).
• Accusations of genocide emerged when it was disclosed that the Sudanese government intended to use counter-insurgency operations to ethnically cleanse Darfur of the rebellious Fur, Massaleit, and Zaghawa peoples by arming Arab militias, known as the janjaweed, and allowing them to kill civilians and destroy villages until unwanted ethnic groups either died of starvation during flight or would slowly die of disease and exposure in refugee camps (360-361).
• The conflict in Darfur began to be referred to as a genocide in Summer 2004 upon the urging of Evangelical Christians, African-American leaders, and human rights activists. This status was officially recognized in a resolution by the US Congress in July 2004 that the Darfur conflict constituted a genocide. Secretary of State Colin Powell declared it a genocide in September 2004, as did President Bush Jr. that on 21 September (361, 369).
• The press and several NGOs began to claim that conflict in Darfur constituted a genocide in February 2003, but this idea only began to gain traction after UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan stated that a genocide may be ongoing in Darfur during a conference on the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide (367).
• The first US government statement declaring the Darfur conflict a genocide appears to be Representative Frank Wolf on 2 April 2004. By June 2004, this characterization was shared by Senators Mike DeWine, John McCain, and Jon Corzine, and 52 Senators sent a letter to Secretary Powell on 25 June 2004 demanding action on Darfur, including the deployment of UN peacekeepers (368-369).
• In response to the letter from US Senators, Secretary Powell traveled to Darfur on 30 June 2004 to investigate allegations of genocide. He concluded his investigation on 9 September 2004, declaring the Darfur conflict to be a genocide (369).
• The condemnation of the Darfur conflict as a genocide by the US government continued despite the fact that a UN inquiry in January 2005 declared that a genocide had not occurred in the region (361).
• The UN report claiming that no genocide had occurred in Darfur actually played into US political interests, since it allowed the US to continue raking in the political support for characterizing the conflict a genocide, while simultaneously creating legal obstacles at the international level to any actual action to stop the genocide (376).
• The willingness of the government of George W. Bush to declare that the Darfur conflict was a genocide is puzzling because he faced many of the same factors that prompted President Clinton to avoid branding the Rwandan conflict as a genocide in 1994. President Bush Jr. faced several ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and a public reticent to engage in additional interventions (361, 367-368).
• This willingness to declare the conflict a genocide was not matched by a willingness to intervene in the conflict. Already, in 27 April 2004, Andrew Natsios, the head of USAID, declared that the US did not believe that the deployment of soldiers to Darfur was the solution (368).
• Congress also was not willing to commit the US to military intervention in Sudan, with Senators Corzine and Sam Brownback specifically noting the Congressional recognition of the conflict as a genocide provided moral weight to UN statements, but was not meant to commit the US to intervention (372).
• Secretary Powell noted in his September 2004 report that the characterization of the Darfur conflict as genocide did not imply any necessity to change US policy in the region (372-373).
• In debates after declaring the conflict a genocide, President Bush Jr. said that he did not believe that the US should deploy troops in the region. Instead, he said that the AU should play the major role in managing the conflict (373).
• A US intervention in Sudan would have faced domestic opposition, due to public distaste for the occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq, international opposition, from countries increasingly concerned that US human rights rhetoric was a cover for imperialist expansion, and would have stretched US military resources (378).
• The willingness of the US government to declare the Darfur conflict a genocide is deeply related to US involvement in the civil war in Sudan between the Sudanese government and the Sudan People's Liberation Army/Movement [SPLA/M]. The Liberation Army had been fighting the Sudanese government since 1983 to protect the Black and non-Muslim population of southern Sudan against domination by the Muslim Arab government, to which the government has responded with a brutal counter-insurgency justified in religious terms of jihad and featuring mass war crimes and atrocities (369-370). 
• The themes of religious persecution and racial conflict in the civil war against the Liberation Army attracted the attention of both Evangelical Christians and Black rights advocates in America. As a result, Congress became deeply involved in trying to alleviate the suffering of Black Christians in Sudan (370).
• President Bush Jr. appealed to his Evangelical base by promising that he would place the abuse of Sudanese Christians at the top of his foreign policy agenda. He placed John Danforth, an Episcopal Minister and former Senator from Missouri, as Special Envoy to Sudan, with the mission to negotiate an end to the Sudanese Civil War (370).
• Special Envoy Danforth said that the US never actually intended to intervene in the Darfur conflict, but instead discussed genocide solely to gain the support of Evangelical Christians, mainly in the South (379).
• The attention of the US government to the civil war in southern Sudan meant that the US government was already interested in Sudan at the time that the Darfur conflict began in 2003. Evangelic leaders and Black leaders, who had previously spoken about the war in southern Sudan, now also pressured the US government to intervene in Darfur (371-372).
• The Sudanese government suggested in 2004 that the US declaration of the Darfur conflict as a genocide might have implications for the Naivasha Accords, the contemporary basis for the peace process of the civil war in southern Sudan (377). By November 2004, the US had returned to focusing on these Accords, possibly influenced by the Sudanese threat to abandon the peace process if the US took action on Darfur (379).
• The US government tried to balance the demands of Evangelical Christians over Sudanese policy during the Darfur crisis. The Bush Jr. administration recognized that any attempt to push on Darfur, as Evangelical Christians demanded, would lead to failure of US policy about southern Sudan. Since Evangelical Christians were primarily concerned about the persecution of Black Christians in southern Sudan, the US choose to only discuss genocide in Darfur to the degree that they could gain the support of American Evangelical Christians without alienating the Sudanese government (380, 382).
• Other groups, like the UN, agreed with US concerns over the impact of intervention in Darfur on the peace process in southern Sudan. The UN Special Representative for Internally Displaced Persons, Francis Deng, specifically advocated against intervention in Darfur because of the degree in which he believed it would undermine the Naivasha Accords (380).
• For an act to constitute genocide, it needs to have both the actus rea of genocide, the evidence of mass murder, serious harm, forcible sterilization, or stealing of children, and a mens rea, that these actions must be committed with the intent to destroy all or part of an ethnic, religious, racial, or national group (375).
• The US State Department concluded that the actions of the janjaweed militias in Darfur constituted genocide because of their consistent crimes against specific ethnic groups with the express purpose of eliminating all or significant parts of these groups through violent actions (375).
• The international reaction to the US report claiming that the conflict was a genocide was deeply skeptical, with many seeing it as an attempt of the US to use genocide as a pretext to invade another oil-rich Muslim nation. Countries with economic interests in Sudan, including the EU, China, and Arab states issued statements disagreeing with the US declaration (376-378).
• The UNSC investigation of Sudan disputed US finding on Darfur, contending both that many of the 'tribal' groups in Darfur did not constitute national or ethnic groups protected under the Genocide Convention and that there was not sufficient evidence to indicated that the mens rea of genocide was present. Instead, the report characterized the crimes in Darfur as mass murder and crimes against humanity, but not genocide (375).
• Although US officials were found of making comparisons, the conflicts in Rwanda and Darfur were very different. This is demonstrate the intensify of violence, with 70,000 people dying in Darfur over 10 months, whereas the Rwandan Genocide claimed 800,000 lives in only 100 days (376).
• The Sudanese government had been a reliable US partner in the War on Terror and a reliable source of intelligence for several years in 2004, meaning that the US likely would have thought carefully about actually engaging in any military conflict with the Sudanese government (379).
• The primary difference between the Rwandan and Darfur conflicts to US policy was that the large Christian political bloc that demanded action on Darfur did not exist in any form for Rwanda, meaning that there was no pressure on the Clinton administration to declare that conflict a genocide (381).
• The Bush Jr. administration also had other organizations and bodies that it could shift responsibility for the conflict onto. In 1994, there was no African organization that President Clinton could instruct to stop the genocide, whereas in 2004, President Bush Jr. could both claim that the US military was too thinly spread to intervene in Sudan and that the real responsible for resolving the conflict lay with the AU (382).
• The lack of international support for intervention in Darfur, including the likelihood that any UNSC resolutions would be vetoed by China, meant that the US government had good excuses to not take action in Darfur. No similar international obstacles existed in Rwanda, where the USA itself was one of the countries most likely to veto action in the country (382).