ABSTRACT
I was on the Delta Shuttle from New York to Washington on April 6, 1994 when I first learned, by way of the New York Times, that the plane carrying President Habyarimana of Rwanda had mysteriously crashed as it approached the Kigali airport. My first response was to study the photograph of the dead president; after closely covering his comings and goings for the past several months, it struck me as odd that the first time that I would see his face was in a newspaper article announcing his death. Then I felt frustration bordering on exasperation. As a political officer at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations who was assigned to cover Rwanda, I had spent the last part of March consumed by the negotiations on the mandate extension of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR). Although many of the Security Council debates on whether to extend a mandate and under what conditions have a scripted quality that foreordain renewal, this instance was uncharacteristically lengthy and contentious.
