CLINTON DECRIES LACK OF ACTION IN GENOCIDE.

Byline: James Bennet The New York Times

President Clinton came to Kigali on Wednesday to talk to scarred and mutilated survivors of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and to acknowledge that the world could have protected them, though it did not.

``We in the United States and the world community did not do as much as we could have and should have done to try to limit what occurred in Rwanda in 1994,'' the president told half a dozen people here who lost parents, siblings and children during three months of ethnic mass killing that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.

After listening to the victims' stories of hiding among blood-soaked corpses, of being sliced with machetes, and of watching hundreds die, Clinton said in a later speech that ``we cannot change the past,'' but that nations should learn from it.

Both in his meeting with the victims and the speech to an invited audience in Kigali, Clinton called for sharper vigilance against genocide and swifter prosecution of its perpetrators in a new permanent international criminal court.

He told the survivors, who gathered at the Kigali airport, that the international community was not organized to deal with such violence.

``And we're still not organized to deal with it,'' he continued, citing as another example from his years in office the slow reaction to ethnic killing in Bosnia. Clinton said it took his administration ``more than two years'' to reach consensus internally and with American allies ``to go in and stop all that killing.''

In April 1994, the United States decided to take no action in Rwanda, fearing the risks outweighed the potential rewards. The decision was codified in a presidential directive, signed by Clinton the following month, which limited American participation in international peacekeeping operations.

And in those months, while the massacres were raging, the Clinton administration successfully argued against a U.N. effort that, in retrospect, might have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, according to U.N. officers, former administration officials and human-rights advocates.

Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., who is traveling with the president, said Clinton felt guilty that the United States had not intervened early on to halt the Rwandan genocide. But in his speech, the president did not go as far as he did in his talk with the survivors toward accepting blame for the United States.

In the speech, delivered to a couple of hundred diplomats and Rwandan government officials, Clinton did not single out the United States, but said that the ``international community, together with nations in Africa, must bear its share of responsibility for this tragedy, as well.''

He called the genocide, which he said resulted in at least a million deaths in 90 days, ``the most intensive slaughter in this blood-filled century we are about to leave.''

Clinton repeatedly said that the genocide was planned. ``It is important that the world know that these killings were not spontaneous or accidental,'' he said.

As at other stops on his 12-day tour, Clinton was greeted by dancers and drummers as he arrived in a drizzle at the airport, which rests among hills quilted with dark green forests and light green fields. Two little girls in white dresses presented him with flowers. But the tone of the president's visit was pensive, and often sad.

The Clinton administration had planned this trip as an upbeat tour of African nations with growing economies and strengthening democracies. In advance of the president's appearance Wednesday, officials said Clinton would acknowledge inaction by the world, but not specifically by the United States, to stop the Rwanda massacres.

But they appear to have underestimated Clinton's signature willingness to empathize with suffering, and he went further than they expected, at least in his impromptu remarks to survivors. The White House permitted one newspaper reporter to attend the meeting as a representative of the press corps.

Clinton's remarks Wednesday followed a speech in Uganda on Tuesday in which he departed from his prepared text to express regret for American failures in Africa, from benefiting from the slave trade to dealing with dictators.

The United States was more resistant than some of its European allies to putting a large U.N. force in Rwanda after leaders of the majority ethnic group here, the Hutu, began a campaign to wipe out a minority, the Tutsi, in April 1994. The Clinton administration had just been scalded by its peace mission in Somalia, in which 18 American soldiers died.

Tutsi rebels, operating from bases in Uganda, succeeded in replacing the Hutu regime that year with what is essentially a military government. The president here, Pasteur Bizimungu, is a Hutu, and the Clinton administration is persuaded that the Tutsi-dominated government is bent on national reconciliation and democracy.

But the genocide still reverberates here. Hutu insurgents are fighting in the northwest, and Rwandan troops have been accused of killing civilians in reprisals for their raids.

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Photo: In Kigali, Rwanda, President Clinton visits with survivors of the 1994 genocide in which more than half a million perished.

J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press