On April 6, 1994, two air-to-ground missiles hit the Dassault Falcon jet bringing Rwandan President Habyarimana back home to Kigali from a regional summit in Dar es Salaam, killing all aboard. The contending parties in the country's long-running civil conflict thereupon returned to war, instead of working out the arrangements of democratic governance and power sharing based on the hard-won principles of the August 1993 Arusha Accords. David Rawson had participated in 19992 as the initial U.S. Observer in the peace talks at Arusha, Tanzania, and later served as ambassador to Rwanda during the last months of the doomed effort to make the Arusha agreements hold. In Prelude to Genocide, Rawson draws on declassified documents and his personal involvement to seek out what went wrong. Rawson examines the international diplomatic and humanitarian intervention in Rwanda and asks what lessons might be learned from the nearly four-year international effort that failed to halt the conflict between the Hutu-dominated Rwandan government and the Tutsi Patriotic Front and to establish peace and security for Rwanda's people.