The African Union and Peace Support Operations: The Case of the Rwanda

Ethnocentrism defines the basic social balance of every society. This cuts across skin colour, depth of education and exposure amongst others. The Jewish Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide have one thing in common-the use of ethnocentrism as a political tool. For the sake of clarity a detailed exposé of the Rwandan genocide is necessary to provide a firm grasp of the underlying factors that resulted into one of the worse crimes against humanity in the 21st Century, and how these influence the level of intervention or response provided by the AU (Hintjens, 1999). Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to assess the AU's intervention in the Rwandan crisis and its successes over the past two decades. This is required to assess the efforts of the AU after it has put in place measures to offer timely measures of response to remedy the shortfalls in R2P during the genocide.