UN more able to prevent genocide, conference told

UNITED NATIONS - More than a decade after the United Nations was criticized for failing to stop genocide in Rwanda, the world body is more able to prevent another such atrocity, scholars and U.N. officials said on Wednesday.

The idea that internal affairs were outside the scope of international involvement had been a "crucial inhibitor to effective responses over a generation," Gareth Evans, president of the International Crisis Group, told a U.N. conference.

But faced with violence like that in Sudan's Darfur region -- where some 200,000 have died and 2.5 million have been driven from their homes since 2003 -- the world had been more ready to accept the need to intervene on behalf of vulnerable populations, conference participants said, even if intervention has been too little, too late.

Since assuming leadership of the United Nations at the start of this year, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has increased the mandate of his Special Representative for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities.

The U.N. Security Council is considering an additional post proposed by Ban -- special adviser for the responsibility to protect.

In January, the world body will establish a Global Center for the Responsibility to Protect at the City University of New York.

"There now really is a feeling that the international community as a whole has the responsibility to help states meet their responsibility, and that's a very big change historically," said Edward Luck, a U.S. academic who has been named as Ban's adviser on the responsibility to protect. The appointment needs Security Council approval.

But Jean-Marie Guehenno, U.N. undersecretary-general for peacekeeping operations, sounded a note of caution.

"We've been haunted in the last 15 years by what happened in Yugoslavia and what happened in Rwanda. And none of us can avoid the question, would that happen again?" he said.

"And I think we have to be honest. There has been some progress in the international discussion. But does that mean that it will be fundamentally different tomorrow? Not necessarily."

In Rwanda, some 800,000 people were killed in 1994 in a 100-day orgy of violence perpetrated mainly by ethnic Hutus against ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The slaughter was triggered when the plane of Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, was shot down.