In mid-1994, over 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu were killed in the Rwandan genocide (Destexhe 1994: 3-4). The international community utterly failed to prevent and stop this atrocity. There are numerous interconnected and complex factors that led to international inaction, such as a misguided view of African conflicts, the bureaucratic nature of the United Nations and peacekeeping fatigue in general. However, this essay will focus on three reasons that the authors deem to be the most important ones: First, the “shadow of Somalia”[1] was still present and made states as well as the UN Secretariat unwilling to engage in another Peace Operation in Africa. Second, inaction was due to national interest: the United States decided not to intervene in Rwanda as there was no national interest at stake. France, which had national interests at stake, did not try to save Rwandan lives, but actively contributed to the genocide. Third, due to the media’s failure to report on the genocide there was no internal pressure from citizens that could have influenced policy makers. My argument develops as follows. The major actors[2] – Belgium, the UN Secretariat, the US and France – knew that there was genocide underway in Rwanda; therefore, they had an obligation to prevent and stop the genocide but lacked political will. Each actor will be assessed individually. Following this analysis, I will show that the three factors mentioned above led to inaction at the level of the Security Council, where member states focused on the ongoing civil war rather than discussing the genocide, which would have forced them to act under the 1948 Genocide Convention. Finally, it will be shown that this international failure had horrific consequences for the United Nations Assistance Mission For Rwanda (UNAMIR), which, with neither a robust mandate nor adequate resources, became an eyewitness to the genocide.