Knowing that the South Sudanese had experienced such endless heartbreak, I was immensely relieved as I read in the New York Times about their celebration—“hollering, singing, hugging, kissing, smacking high-fives and dancing as if they never wanted the day to end, despite the sun beating down and voting lines that snaked for blocks.”
In Ivory Coast, the tools we employed were different, but also had important effects. There, the crisis emerged when the incumbent president, Laurent Gbagbo, lost his bid for reelection and tried to remain in power while holed up in the presidential compound. Forces loyal to Gbagbo used a large arsenal of weapons to attack civilians and shell homes in neighborhoods thought to be aligned with the winner, Alassane Ouattara. By February of 2011, the potential for mass atrocities was high, and as in South Sudan, grave warnings were pouring in.
Instead of waiting for lower-level diplomatic maneuvers to be tried, we recommended President Obama telephone Gbagbo to press him to accept the election results. When he ducked the call, we sent him a written message from Obama, conveying that he would face consequences if he refused to step down. We also imposed visa restrictions and targeted sanctions on Gbagbo and members of his inner circle, while working with other countries that had influence in Ivory Coast to see if they could convince Gbagbo to go into exile.
During the Rwandan genocide in 1994, most UN peacekeepers evacuated the country when the violence escalated. In Srebrenica in 1995, UN forces stood by while a massacre was committed. This time was different. France and the United States led a relatively collaborative UN Security Council in authorizing the 11,000 UN peacekeepers in the country “to use all necessary means” to protect civilians from attacks.
Working in tandem with 1,600 French troops who were stationed in Ivory Coast, the UN peacekeepers showed unusual firmness, striking military sites that were being used to launch attacks against civilians, and eventually targeting Gbagbo’s presidential compound, from which he commanded his loyalists. Gbagbo was finally arrested in April of 2011, averting a larger bloodbath and allowing Ouattara to take office, fulfilling the will of the voters.
To combat the killers in the so-called Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), President Obama deployed US resources in support of central African governments whose previous efforts had foundered. Formed in northern Uganda in the late 1980s by a young rebel soldier named Joseph Kony, the LRA had killed some 100,000 people, displaced another 2.5 million, and kidnapped at least 60,000 children. Kony and his commanders forced boys as young as six to become soldiers and made young women and girls act as sex slaves.
With broad bipartisan backing and energized by religious and student groups in the US, President Obama ordered the deployment of one hundred military personnel to provide advice, training, and information to what were largely Ugandan military efforts to hunt down and dismantle the LRA leadership.11 Although a US military presence can often provoke a backlash abroad, when thirty of these advisers set up shop in Obo, an impoverished town in the neighboring Central African Republic, the residents were so relieved to have protection after years of LRA attacks that they reportedly staged nightly celebrations to honor the Americans.
In addition to working with the regional militaries, officials with the State Department and USAID helped build early-warning networks, using radios and cell phone towers, which communicated LRA troop movements to isolated communities. And in collaboration with the governments of the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and South Sudan, the US military advisers helped airdrop one million leaflets that contained photos of former LRA fighters who had safely returned home, information about the demobilization process, and maps showing the closest sites where militia members could defect.
Through the same War Crimes Rewards Program that helped secure Mladić’s capture, the State Department offered $5 million for information leading to the arrest of Kony and his two lieutenants. While Kony has eluded capture to this day, one of his top aides, Okot Odhiambo, was found dead in 2015, while another, Dominic Ongwen, surrendered to US forces and was sent the same year to the ICC. He is currently standing trial on numerous counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The US-backed regional effort made a major difference. Battlefield deaths and defections reduced the LRA’s fighting force by more than half, significantly eroding its ability to terrorize civilians. In 2010, before President Obama stepped up US involvement, the LRA killed 776 civilians. In 2013, it killed 76. In 2014, it killed 13.
TWO YEARS INTO THE ADMINISTRATION, I had a greater appreciation for the limits of our resources—most particularly our attention, our intelligence assets, and our senior diplomatic personnel. Nonetheless, I saw that with the President’s backing, utilizing the toolbox could pay dividends on other vital issues as well.
Attacks abroad against the LGBT community called out for attention. Hundreds of LGBT people were being killed annually, and tens of thousands faced both arrest and the threat of physical and sexual violence. Seventy-six countries criminalized being gay, and five states (Mauritania, Sudan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen) still imposed the death penalty as punishment.* Although attacks on LGBT people were not being carried out on the scale of mass atrocities, David and I set out to identify a set of tools that the US government could use to promote the safety and dignity of people being persecuted and attacked for their sexual orientation.
Supporting at-risk LGBT people in other countries was breaking new ground. Indeed, just before President Bush left office, his administration refused to support a UN General Assembly declaration that called for an end to the criminalization of homosexuality around the world, even though sixty-six other countries, including all twenty-seven members of the European Union, had signed on. A couple of weeks into Obama’s presidency, our administration had reversed course and joined the declaration.12
Gruesome events drove home just how vulnerable LGBT people remained in many parts of the world. In 2011, a forty-six-year-old Ugandan activist named David Kato was murdered. Kato, one of the bravest LGBT leaders in the world, was bludgeoned to death with a hammer in his home. His murder followed the publication of his photo, name, and address in a Ugandan tabloid, among a list of one hundred alleged “Homos.” Kato’s picture appeared next to the words “Hang them.”
Devastated by the news of Kato’s death, David drafted a short statement for President Obama to issue, which I pushed up the NSC’s chain of command. While the Ugandan government was an ally in taking on the LRA, its stance on LGBT rights was abhorrent. Kato’s murder terrified LGBT Ugandans, who understandably had no confidence that the police would protect them from violence. President Obama hailed Kato, whose name was not widely known globally, as “a powerful advocate for fairness and freedom” who had “tremendous courage in speaking out against hate.” A friend of Kato’s read Obama’s statement at his funeral.
For a head of state—and not just any head of state, but the President of the United States—to denounce the killing of a gay activist abroad was unheard of. Yet by raising his voice, President Obama was making clear that he cared about attacks on LGBT people wherever they happened.
At the last minute, we decided to include a reference in the President’s statement to five LGBT murder victims in Honduras. Even this brief mention made headlines there. And when the US embassy followed up, offering American assistance, the Honduran government agreed to establish a Special Victims Task Force of federal police and prosecutors to investigate crimes against LGBT people and other vulnerable groups. I relayed this development at our biweekly NSC meeting of Senior Directors, using these examples to make the case that US officials should not underestimate the power of their words. Not long after, we helped secure a resolution in the UN Human Rights Council, which for the first time in history recognized discrimination against LGBT people as a human rights violation.
We had to walk a very fine line in promoting LGBT rights internationally. The more vocal Obama and other Western leaders became, for example, the
more we saw African leaders trying to claim that “imperialists” were foisting their values on traditional cultures. We were sensitive to the risk that the US government’s vocal support for LGBT people abroad could end up being counterproductive.
At the same time, US reticence over the years had not prevented various African leaders and parliaments from propagating bigoted laws (sometimes encouraged by American evangelicals who felt they were losing ground in the United States). Nor had our silence deterred vigilantes from brutalizing gay people in their communities.
We took our cues on whether to speak out publicly or engage governments behind the scenes from LGBT activists, many of whom were bravely protesting and filing court cases themselves. Of course, among activists too one could hear a range of opinions. But by and large, they said President Obama was uniquely situated to advocate for gay rights, as he could draw on America’s long struggle for civil rights—and our own country’s slow progress toward LGBT rights—as he explained the importance of equality.
David started convening US officials from agencies across the government to brainstorm what the United States could do to integrate LGBT rights into our foreign policy. Knowing that who attended government meetings—how invested they were in an issue, or how much clout they had back in their home agency—was often a better predictor of eventual impact than precisely what was on the agenda, David handpicked the participants.
Whenever I sat in on these meetings, I would express my wonder at the enthusiasm of those at the table. “I’ve never seen such a beaming bunch of government officials in my life,” I would tell David. Many US officials who joined our efforts identified as LGBT themselves, and they relished being part of a historic process that could help people living in the shadows elsewhere. The mere fact that each meeting began with an intelligence briefing on threats to LGBT people abroad was a rousing mark of a new era.
Every September, the President traveled to New York to deliver a kind of State of the Union on foreign policy to the world leaders gathered at the UN General Assembly (UNGA). As Obama’s UN adviser, I worked with Susan and her team in New York to help plan the President’s meetings with other heads of state during his three-day visit. I also offered Ben Rhodes ideas for his annual speech.
When Ben circulated a draft of the 2011 UNGA remarks to a small circle of NSC officials, I tried to add a line in which Obama would urge world leaders to respect LGBT rights. Yet every time Ben sent around a revised version of the speech, my line had been cut. As was often the case with the harried speechwriting process, he did not have time to write back to explain why he kept rejecting my suggestion.
I tried calling and emailing, even unsuccessfully resorting to parking myself in front of his door at the hotel where we were all staying. Finally, the evening before Obama was slated to speak, I spotted Ben across the lobby and began a light jog in his direction. When he saw me coming, he looked pained and hurried toward the nearest elevator bank.
“I can’t,” Ben said when I caught up with him. “We just don’t have room. Obama’s all over me to cut more.”
“I understand,” I said, while also positioning myself so the elevator door couldn’t close. “I’ll send you a much shorter version of the point!”
I hurried to my room, emailed Ben a menu of options to choose from and, having not heard back by three a.m., drifted off to sleep. I had secured a decent number of changes to the speech on other human rights issues, and I was resigned to the fact that this would not be the year President Obama took on LGBT rights at the UN.
When I woke up a couple of hours later, though, Ben had forwarded me the final version of the speech with the words “Happy Birthday” at the top of the email. My birthday (and Cass’s) always fell during UNGA week. In the craze, I had forgotten it. This birthday present—like Holbrooke’s wedding gift of a meeting with Hillary Clinton—was unusual, but much appreciated.
That day, sitting in the US seats in the General Assembly hall behind Secretary Clinton and Ambassador Rice, I held my breath while Obama spoke, wondering whether he would be greeted with jeers or cheers as he declared:
No country should deny people their rights because of who they love, which is why we must stand up for the rights of gays and lesbians everywhere.
He was the first head of state ever to advocate for gay rights in the UN General Assembly.
Owing to alphabetical happenstance, the US box was adjacent to that of the Zimbabwean delegation, where the eighty-seven-year-old president Robert Mugabe sat. Mugabe had once remarked that gay people were “worse than dogs and pigs and should be hounded out by society.” And he had overseen changes to the country’s criminal code to make it illegal for men to even hug one another in public. As soon as Obama invoked gay rights, I heard Mugabe groan, “My God!”*
Human rights advocates around the world expressed gratitude to Obama for elevating the issue in such a forum. As the Kenyan activist David Kuria told a journalist, “When a President such as Obama with African roots talks in favor of gay rights, at the very least it shows that not everyone is homophobic and that, in fact, African leaders are in a . . . thinning minority.” The following year, Kuria would become the first openly gay person to run for office in Kenya.
After I left the General Assembly hall, I forwarded a copy of Obama’s remarks to Sally Brooks, my close friend from high school, whom I had watched struggle for acceptance as she came out when we were teenagers.
David Pressman’s meetings with government agency representatives had generated a range of practical ideas on how to expand our tools to help LGBT people in peril. We enshrined the best of these in a presidential guidance document, which Obama signed. The very existence of what became an official Presidential Memorandum on International Initiatives to Advance the Human Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Persons sent a ripple throughout the US government, signaling to officials at every level that the President cared about fighting anti-gay prejudice.
Obama instructed government agencies to step up the diplomatic fight against the criminalization of LGBT people abroad. He directed the State Department to improve protection for LGBT refugees and those seeking asylum. And he encouraged diplomats to fund rapid legal defense to combat the imprisonment or persecution of sexual minorities.
During the eight years Obama was President, US embassies would open their doors to persecuted LGBT persons, with many ambassadors marching in LGBT Pride parades and pressing foreign governments to reject bigotry and protect the rights of all their citizens.
Obama’s personal engagement with Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff secured the creation of both a special unit at the Organization of American States for monitoring LGBT rights in Latin America and a new position for a high-level expert (or “special rapporteur”) who would advocate on their behalf throughout the Americas.
Clinton would give a landmark speech at the UN in Geneva in which she proclaimed “gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights,” echoing her famous 1995 speech on women’s rights in Beijing. Her successor, Secretary of State John Kerry, would create the position of US Special Envoy for the Human Rights of LGBT Persons. Overall, as an administration, we would dispense more than $30 million to support frontline advocates for LGBT rights in some eighty countries.
And, in powerful acts of statesmanship and symbolism, when he traveled to Africa, President Obama would raise LGBT rights standing next to the very African leaders who ridiculed them.
Promoting these rights abroad wasn’t just something that affected vulnerable foreigners. When planning to live or travel overseas, LGBT Americans had to consider whether they would be harassed, denied service, or even lynched for their sexual orientation. We were using US foreign policy to work toward a day when the rights that were finally gaining acceptance at home would not be denied abroad.*
LEADERS RARELY GET POLITICAL CREDIT for preventing harms or for attempting to improve the lives of vulnerable people. Practically speaking, the complexities of almos
t every international crisis mean that even a generally positive outcome is messy and involves tradeoffs that do not resolve the issues at the root of conflict or exclusion. When the US government takes a leadership role in preventing mass atrocities, the blame is sometimes laid at our feet for not being able to prevent future human rights abuses. And unfortunately, violence frequently recurs.
In South Sudan in late 2013, for example, some of the very same politicians and generals who brought the country into existence would lead their people into a savage civil war.
In Syria, we would soon see that bureaucratic reforms and high-level discussions would not spare President Obama the wrenching dilemma of whether to risk using military force to try to prevent slaughter.
Discrimination and attacks against LGBT people still happen all around the world.
But just because we couldn’t right every wrong did not mean we couldn’t—or shouldn’t—try to improve lives and mitigate violence where we could do so at reasonable risk.
Obama once told me, “Better is good, and better is actually a lot harder than worse”—a message he has expressed often since leaving office.
Convincing the American national security apparatus to incorporate concern for human consequences into our dealings with other countries would never be easy. And people were right to charge that, even at our best, the United States was inconsistent. But on the occasions when we did push other governments to treat their citizens with dignity—something few other governments took it upon themselves to do—US influence could be profound.
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Revolutions
In early 2010, President Obama sent US troops on a humanitarian mission to help Haiti recover from a devastating earthquake that had killed more than 150,000 people. After a discussion in the Situation Room among top national security officials about the progress of the mission, I pulled aside Deputy National Security Advisor Tom Donilon. The participants in the meeting had seemed confused about the US military’s exact mandate, and I stressed how important it was that our forces in Haiti be given a clearly defined set of tasks.
The Education of an Idealist Page 30
