War & Peace Quote by Boutros Boutros-Ghali

Bureaucratic language rarely sounds like a confession, but this one almost does. Boutros Boutros-Ghali frames entry into the Rwanda peace process as “simple,” then immediately reveals a chain of institutional momentum: a Security Council decision, troops already staged in Uganda, and the choice to “have a military presence.” The rhetoric isn’t about moral urgency or human protection; it’s about procedural gravity. Once the machinery is in motion, involvement becomes a matter of logistics and mandate, not imagination.

The subtext is a portrait of how international action often happens: not because the situation is understood in its human stakes, but because the UN’s decision-making ecosystem has produced a paper trail and a deployment map. “Because the troops were in Uganda” is especially telling. Geography becomes justification. Proximity replaces political clarity. It hints at a worldview where intervention is easier to rationalize when it’s already halfway assembled.

Context sharpens the chill. The early 1990s UN approach to Rwanda leaned on “peace process” vocabulary even as the conditions for peace were eroding. Boutros-Ghali’s phrasing captures a UN caught between legitimacy (Security Council authorization) and capability (a limited, constrained force), choosing presence as a signal of engagement while sidestepping the harder question: what is the mission for, and what happens when “peacekeeping” meets organized mass violence?

It works, rhetorically, because it’s unvarnished. No soaring ideals, just the candid logic of institutions that act when they can justify action internally - and hesitate when the justification demands moral risk.