THIS month marks the tenth anniversary of one of the world's most brutal exercises in mass murder. In fact, the bloodshed that took place in the Central African country of Rwanda in 1994 reached such horrific dimensions that it almost qualified as an act of genocide, an attempt to exterminate an entire people.

Rwanda, as far as most of the world was concerned, was an obscure and remote country prior to the tragic events that propelled it onto the front pages of international newspapers. Before tribal warfare soaked its soil in blood, it was perhaps best known as the home of the great apes in the forest areas of the country, a great and snaking green swath that borders another conflict-plagued African country, the former Zaire (now the Congo Republic).

April 6, 1994 would prove to be a fateful day for Rwanda. On that day the Rwandan president Juvenal Habyariman's aircraft was shot down under mysterious circumstances. It would be the spark that would begin the killing in Rwanda. The victims of the mass slaughter were the Tutsi ethnic group who had shared the country with its Hutu majority.

Despite the fact they only constituted a minority of the Rwandan population, traditionally the Tutsis had been the ruling class ? tall with thin features, they would seem to differ racially from their Hutu / Bantu countrymen. However, they shared the same Bantu language and often intermarried and the struggle for power within the country saw both groups in ascendancy from time to time.

But it was the arrival of the European colonials that deepened this longstanding rivalry. Insisting as they did on racial classifications of the native population, the Europeans assumed the Tutsis must be the superior group and ruled indirectly through them. Rwanda had an African twin, the neighbouring country of Burundi. which had the same ethnic mix of Hutu and Tutsis and both experienced the same deteriorating inter-group relationship under colonial rule.

As Frantz Fanon noted wryly in : "The last battle of the colonised against the coloniser was often a fight of the colonised against each other." This was certainly the state of affairs when both of these countries gained their Independence. The political rivalry between the two ethnic groups hardened under colonial rule. In the aftermath of Independence both Rwanda and Burundi were wracked by civil war and political upheaval in what was described as tribal conflict.

Then there was a cooling-off period that ended abruptly in Rwanda in 1994. When I became aware of what was happening in Rwanda in 1994, I had the same sickening feeling I had during the Nigerian civil war, when the Ibos of the south of that country attempted to secede.

They had called their new country Biafra, but the whole enterprise dissolved into massive bloodshed and suffering for the Ibo people and the world was treated to the picture of starving children with bloated stomachs and denials from the Nigerian federal government that its blockade of a suffering Biafra amounted to using starvation as a weapon of war.

I wrote two articles decrying the slaughter in Rwanda and got two interesting replies. One essay was titled "Shame of Silence Over Rwanda", in which I pointed out the black world was silent over what was happening in Rwanda even though bodies of the victims of the mass killings were turning up in small fishing villages in Uganda, having floated down Africa's largest lake ? Lake Victoria ? where most of the corpses ended up providing food for the crocodiles. Some truly terrible atrocities took place during the slaughter in Rwanda. Churches were no sanctuary as hundreds of victims were cut down among the pews, in some cases with the complicity of religious leaders such as the two Hutu nuns who were recently sentenced to prison for their roles in the Tutsi murders.

Parents even killed their half-Tutsi children as neighbours slaughtered neighbours during the killing frenzy. Even radio broadcasts in this largely illiterate nation were utilised to direct killers to their Hutu victims.

two responses I received on my Rwandan articles interested me. One was from an African woman living in Bermuda who questioned how could I call myself a Pan-Africanist when I was being critical of Africans, to which I had replied that more people died in Rwanda than in the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. So how could one not speak of these things? How could one ignore them?

The other response was from another woman, who I believe was white, who stated that she had cried when she read my essays.

The world did, in fact, turn its back on what went on in Rwanda. The Belgians, the former colonial rulers, quickly withdrew their contingent of troops after 11 of them were killed in cold blood by Hutu rebels. The United States was in no mood to intervene. The Rwandan civil war broke out just months after President Clinton's so-called "low-risk humanitarian mission" to Somalia, when attempts to seize several top advisers to the warlord Mohammed Farah Aideed went badly wrong, with the loss of 18 American soldiers and the wounding of at least 73.

The spectacle of the corpse of a US Ranger being dragged through a Mogadishu street prompted President Clinton to withdraw the American presence from Somalia.

Washington was in no mood for another African entanglement with the potential for further loss of American soldiers in an African battleground. But perhaps the greatest betrayal was committed by the United Nations itself, which, under an African Under Secretary General of Peacekeeping, Kofi Annan, withdrew UN troops at the height of the Rwandan Holocaust.

But then the United Nations has always depended on the sum of its parts, which means the will of the countries that make up the international body. The will to intervene there did not exist.

Recently I read the book , written by Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian Force Commander of the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda. In reading the foreword to this book, it became clear how much his experience in that conflict country had marked him and changed his life.

remains convinced that with only a few more troops and the will of the United Nations, he could have prevented a Holocaust. The world always says after each horror "never again". But it has happened again. And it will continue to happen again if the international community lacks the will to stop acts of genocide.

The latest battleground is again in Africa and involves the people in Southern Sudan. The victims of a long-running civil war between the Arab north and African south, there are now reports of further ethnic cleansing of African people from a land area where there is oil.

Does mankind have an inclination to commit genocide when the circumstances present themselves? A study of history would suggest that, yes, this is true and it makes no difference what race or ethnic group is involved if an opportunity arises to exterminate a scapegoated minority.

This was made plain from the landmark study of the Holocaust and Germany in the book by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. Willing executioners, as Goldhagen made clear, are not a uniquely German phenomenom ? they exist in the former Yugoslavia, Ireland, Africa, the Arab world, the Pacific Rim, everywhere, in fact, where social and political conditions have been such that a majority group could persecute a minority with impunity.