UNITED NATIONS (IPS)—Five years after the Rwandan genocide, a three-member panel began work June 21 on a question that has perplexed UN officials: did the world body do enough to prevent the massacres of as many as one million people?

Former Swedish Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson, leader of the three-member team that includes delegates from South Korea and Nigeria, said investigators would review UN documents and other reports that can shed light on how the United Nations responded to the 1994 genocide.

"We will have full access to all materials,’’ former Prime Minister Carlsson said. "We hope to draw conclusions about why this could happen.’’

Several nations, including France and Belgium, have conducted their own inquiries about how the United Nations and other forces responded to the massacres that followed the April 6, 1994, death of Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana in an unexplained plane crash.

Former Korean Foreign Minister Han Sung-Joo, a member of the panel, noted that "what is new, is that this is an independent panel, not tied to one particular country.’’ The United Nations is paying for the panel’s work under its regular budget, Mr. Han said.

"Although the United Nations is paying for our activities, that does not mean that they will have anything to do with the conclusions that we draw,’’ Mr. Han said, saying the team has the authority to reach its own conclusions about what went wrong in Rwanda, and what lessons can be learned.

The panel—which also included Nigerian Gen. Rufus Kupolati—was scheduled to report to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan by the end of the year.

Mr. Annan, in announcing creation of the panel last March, argued that the investigation was needed because "questions continue to surround the actions of the United Nations immediately before and during the crisis."

As a result, he said, an independent investigation was needed that would be able to interview any knowledgeable party and have full access to all UN internal papers.

Over the next month, Mr. Carlsson said, the team would study documents and cables, some of which contained information about warnings the United Nations had of potential genocide plans prior to the April plane crash.

At the time of the crash, the UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR) was deployed throughout the country in an attempt to forge peace between the Hutu-dominated government and the largely Tutsi Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF).

But immediately after Mr. Habyarimana’s death, government forces and extremist paramilitaries began to wipe out the minority Tutsis and Hutu moderates.

Instead of expanding the more than 5,000 UNAMIR peacekeepers in Rwanda, the UN Security Council responded two weeks after the massacres, starting by reducing the peacekeepers to a skeleton force of some 550 soldiers.

By the time the RPF took over the country three months later, pushing most of the Hutu extremist forces into neighboring Zaire, at least 800,000 people were believed dead.

Some rights groups have accused UN officials—including then Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Mr. Annan, then head of UN peacekeeping—of failing to act promptly when UNAMIR officials warned from Rwanda about massacre preparations.

The UN staff "failed to provide adequate information and guidance to members of the Security Council," Human Rights Watch argued in a report released earlier this year, "Leave None To Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda."

The report contended that, despite warnings from UNAMIR military chief Gen. Romeo Dallaire about the preparations for the massacre, Mr. Boutros-Ghali and Mr. Annan accepted the idea—espoused by the Rwandan government—that the violence after April 6 resulted from "chaos’’ rather than organized killings.

The UNAMIR forces—which were not authorized to use force under Chapter Seven of the UN Charter—also "did not intervene when they saw Tutsi being attacked," the report said. "Nor did they make any systematic effort to escort Tutsis from their homes to places of greater safety."

The report noted the UN force helped to evacuate some 4,000 foreigners from Rwanda in the early days of the killings, when approximately 20,000 Rwandans were killed.

The United Nations was not the only party blamed by experts for the weak international response to the crisis.

"The Americans were interested in saving money, the Belgians were interested in saving face, and the French were interested in saving their ally—the genocidal government,’’ said Alison Des Forges, author of the Human Rights Watch report. "All of that took priority over saving lives.’’

Now, however, the United Nations appeared willing to make amends by studying just where it may have failed.