Kigali — A Top Queen's Counsel has accused the immediate former Conservative government in the UK of not only failing to act over the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, but of playing a leading role in stopping calls for a UN intervention force in the Security Council.

Geoffrey Robertson is one of the two authors who have in the recent past published books on the 1994 genocide. Robertson's argument argues that Britain, along with the US, refused to allow a major UN expedition force into Rwanda to stop the massacre is not new.

What is new, however, is his accusation that the UK "actually led the opposition to intervention, on the pretence that what was happening in Rwanda was not genocide."

Mr. Robertson also points out that while former US President Bill Clinton apologised for America's role in the tragic affair, Britain pointedly has not, although Foreign Office ministers had acknowledged that the UK had learned a lot from what happened in Rwanda and that the same mistakes would not be repeated again.

The British QC says that the American administration's attitude, traumatised as it was by the setback it suffered when it intervened in Somalia in the early 1990s, could at least be explained, but British opposition to intervention could not.

This was particularly so as it had become clear that British officials were aware of the scale of the slaughter in Rwanda and of the Unamir commander in Rwanda, Gen Romeo Dallaire's belief that a mere 5,500 crack troops could have stopped the genocide in its tracks.

Instead, Britain is said to have urged a pull-out of the UN troops and even rejected a fact-finding mission to the region once the death-toll reached six figures.

In her book, A People Betrayed - the Role of the West in Rwanda's Genocide, Ms Linda Melvern demonstrates that Britain played a leading role in rejecting Western intervention even after the US-based Human Rights Watch presented a report on Rwanda reminding Security Council members of their obligations under the genocide convention.

Ms Melvern says that the British parliament was misled by the previous government over the whole crisis when the then opposition Labour party manage to force a debate on the issue. Robertson, in his book Crimes Against Humanity, also asks whether there was some kind of unconscious racism in Britain's determination not to intervene.

"There is no example of British acquiescence in genocide so inexplicable and so unexplained as the behaviour of John Major's government during the racial slaughter that began in Rwanda on April 6 1994. Why did this country, holding a permanent seat at the UN Security Council, turn its back on legal obligations under the (1948) genocide convention?"

The pain of losing loved ones: "The UK actually led the opposition to intervention in the 1994 Rwanda genocide, claiming that what was happening was not genocide."