'The Responsibility to Protect and the Duty to Prevent Genocide: Lessons to Be Learnt from the Role of the International Community and the Media During the Rwandan Genocide and the Conflict in the Former Yugoslavia'

Abstract

This article examines the roles played by the international community and the media in cases of genocide and other gross human rights violations. It explores the motivations behind the international community’s decisions to intervene or refrain from intervening in cases of mass atrocities. It analyzes the correlation between lack of media coverage in certain cases and the failure of the international community to respond in a manner that mitigates the outcome and saves lives. The Rwandan Genocide of 1994 serves as a case study to examine how the international community responded, or failed to respond, to a situation of humanitarian crisis and will be used to illuminate why, in certain circumstances, the international community decides against intervention. The Rwandan Genocide exposes the role the media plays in facilitating or mitigating the systematic violations of human rights in a time of conflict. Finally, the genocide in Rwanda is compared to the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, which occurred at the same time as the Rwandan genocide, to explore the regional biases of the international media to show how such biases affect public opinion and impact the creation of policy. The article finds that the failure of the international community to respond to the Rwanda genocide — and to gross human rights violations in other parts of the developing world — is partly attributable to the nature of media coverage of mass atrocities and the media’s preference for covering certain countries and certain areas of the world over others.