Mercenaries used in Rwanda

[Strategos' Risk]

According to Wikipedia, there was an idea to hire the South African private contractor company, Executive Outcomes, for peacekeeping/-making/ripping sh!t up, during the Rwanda Civil War in 1994. They would have saved 100,000 people, at the price of U.S. $100 million.

Now, the UN not only was not willing to do something as radical as to hire mercenaries, but they weren't even able to use their own peacekeepers, much less ask the European intervention force to stay.

So what if some prominent Tutsi/moderate Hutus got the EO mercenaries to come to Rwanda and to stop the genocide?

I was thinking of this while I watched Hotel Rwanda the other day. As terrible as the events were happening, I kept on wondering, "what if a bunch of apartheid tough guys showed up?"

I think alternate history also has a desensitizing effect, but that's for another thread.

[Melvin Loh]

Hmm, very interesting, i do know about the idea post-genocide in late 1994 by Kofi Annan to hire the private security firm ADL to clear out the refugee camps in Zaire of INTERAHAMWE holdouts, but not about any real discussion during the genocide itself to utilise mercs such as EO to stop the GENOCIDAIRES. Well, I reckon EO, with all their apartheid-era vets from the Parabats, Recces, 32 Buffalo Bn and SAP's KOEVOET (Crowbar) counter-intel group, would've kicked butt against the likes of the Rwandan security forces and INTERAHAMWE rabble, just as the ex-SADF mercs did in Sierra Leone against the RUF in 1995.

BTW, FYI Strategos' Risk, there wasn't after April 1994 really any European intervention force after the French and Belgian paras cravenly extracted their and other foreign nationals and heartlessly abandoned the local ppl to their fate, it was only, as depicted in HOTEL RWANDA (which i must see again), a toekn force of approx 270 Ghanaian and Tunisian blue helmets and a handful of unarmed UNMOs whom Gen Dallaire had available to try to apply bandaids to the massive damage and suffering caused during the genocide.