David Bosco

By a coincidence of history, Rwanda held one of 10 rotating seats on the U.N. Security Council at the time, giving Jean Damascene Bizimana, the country's 36-year-old ambassador, a place at the table for the council's private deliberations. Bizimana, a rising star in Rwanda's diplomatic corps, initially told his fellow ambassadors that the violence was due to spontaneous public outrage over the president's death on April 6 and that the interim government he now represented would quickly reestablish order. As violence escalated, he blamed rebel forces from the country's Tutsi ethnic minority for all the trouble, insisting to the council on April 21 that the rebellion "must be made responsible for its attitude in wishing to continue hostilities, to perpetuate the current violence and to continue to perpetrate massacres." In May, he voted against an arms embargo on Rwanda that every other member of the council supported. However, in the weeks that followed, as the government's direct responsibility for the mounting deaths became increasingly clear, Bizimana spoke out less and less. He became a "sullen and mostly silent" figure at Security Council meetings, and he "never showed the slightest sign of remorse about what was going on in his country," former British ambassador David Hannay told me.