Daily Inspiration Quote by Lakhdar Brahimi

The sting in Brahimi's line is how little it asks of the world - and how damning that makes the refusal. He doesn't reach for lofty moral language; he reaches for a budget estimate. "Again, another 5000 troops" lands like a weary refrain, implying Rwanda wasn't a unique failure but part of a pattern: warnings filed away, modest requests denied, catastrophe treated as an avoidable line item.

The casual "I don't know, maybe" is doing more than hedging. It's a rhetorical trap. By acting almost indifferent to the precise figure, he makes the cost feel trivially knowable next to the human cost everyone already knows by heart. The numbers aren't meant to be accurate; they're meant to be embarrassingly small in proportion to what was at stake. Fifty or a hundred million dollars is the price of a few weeks of modern war-making, a rounding error in many national defense budgets. Brahimi frames genocide not as a tragic mystery but as a solvable logistics problem that powerful institutions declined to solve.

Context matters: Brahimi is a career UN diplomat speaking from inside the machine, where "the international community" often becomes a convenient abstraction that dissolves accountability. By pairing it with "the Security Council", he puts a face on that abstraction: a handful of states with veto power, endless procedure, and the ability to decide that intervention is always too risky, too expensive, too politically inconvenient. The subtext is brutal: Rwanda wasn't just a failure of compassion; it was a failure of prioritization, dressed up as prudence.