Interventions

by Kofi Annan

  The problem, however, was that with the removal of much of the U.S. troop presence, the ambitions of UNOSOM II were expanding enormously just as it was being stripped of capabilities. It was now a smaller, far less well-equipped force with a much more fragmented command structure. Before March 1993, there had been around forty thousand international troops deployed, mostly from the United States. But although still supported by some U.S. troops, UNOSOM II was now made up of troops from Turkey, Malaysia, Pakistan, and elsewhere in a force that never went above twenty thousand. If UNOSOM II was going to succeed, it would need rapid progress in the political reconciliation of the parties and the establishment of a peace deal. Otherwise, UNOSOM II would not have the power to force the issue.

  But a deal was not forthcoming, and the civil war continued, particularly with the fighting in southern Mogadishu, which UNOSOM II could do little to stop with its limited resources. What is more, UNOSOM II’s effort to disarm the Somali factions dragged the force directly into the conflict. In a situation of ongoing war such as this, any faction that was targeted for disarmament then found itself disadvantaged in relation to its enemies. No Somali warlord was simply going to let this happen. On June 5, 1993, following a series of incidents involving attacks on UNOSOM II forces, twenty-five Pakistani peacekeeping troops were killed and over fifty others wounded. General Aidid was blamed, and the response of the Security Council—and particularly the United States—was to focus attention on arresting Aidid, whom they now perceived as the greatest threat to the mission.

  This distracted the mission from important strategic questions. In my view, we needed a stronger force as a whole, not a focus of limited resources on one man in Mogadishu. Sahnoun had also argued that the alternative to the approach of dealing with—and so empowering—warlords was to focus instead on local leaders outside Mogadishu. This would, in his view, help build Somali structures and reconciliation through leaders with real legitimacy in their communities, not just the men with the most guns in Mogadishu. But the obsession with Aidid left little space for considering such alternatives.

  Much of UNOSOM II was run by Boutros-Ghali in his secretive style. Through his personal negotiations with troop contributors, Boutros-Ghali kept most people at the UN, including the leadership of DPKO, out of much of the decision making.

  Most significant of the developments that Boutros-Ghali kept to himself was the deployment of U.S. Special Forces to hunt for Aidid: the forces arrived in Somalia in late August 1993 in a unit made up of U.S. Rangers, Delta Force, and Navy SEALs under a chain of command entirely separate from the UN mission. But the first we in DPKO knew of this was on October 3, 1993, when news broke that there had been a disastrous attempt to capture the Somali warlord. Boutros-Ghali’s hard-nosed attitude to dealing with Somalia had come together with the newfound U.S. obsession with catching Aidid. Two helicopters had been shot down, eighteen U.S. soldiers killed, and scores of others wounded, trapped in different parts of the city, only to be retrieved from the jaws of a mob of armed Somalis by UN peacekeeping troops who, like us, had been unaware of the operation. In horrifying images screened around the world, dead U.S. soldiers were stripped naked and dragged through the streets of Mogadishu.

  For a humanitarian mission this was devastating. The American public was shocked. It did not matter that U.S. and other UN troops had been engaged in significant episodes of combat for several months in Mogadishu as part of UNOSOM II’s mandate—it had still been understood as “peacekeeping” and the American people had not been prepared for casualties. The politicians who opposed the intervention were now full throated in their call for an end to the United States’ involvement.

  The U.S. swiftly announced its departure from Somalia. This gutted UNOSOM II as it took the best-trained, best-equipped features with it. The rest of the troop contributors, now even more exposed, followed suit, and the UN mission in Somalia collapsed in the weeks and months that followed. Thus ended the greatest experiment ever attempted to use peace enforcement in a mission motivated purely by humanitarian goals. Going in under the cover of peacekeeping only to meet the fire of combat meant political momentum had swung decisively and rapidly toward withdrawal—and with it all the help that had proudly been offered to the Somali people.

  The world abandoned Somalia, allowing it to create for the world whole new forms of civil chaos and human suffering. Somalia would from then on be ignored by Western countries—until years later, when international terrorists emerged there in force, and when scores of well-organized pirates took to the high seas to threaten one of the lifelines of international commerce. But in 1993, the concept of the “enlightened self-interest” of international humanitarianism had barely been grasped in the international community.

  The failure of the raid on October 3 brought the dysfunctional nature of the peacekeeping system into plain view. The response to this, however, did not trigger a careful reassessment of the tool of peacekeeping by member states, but snap reactions: President Bill Clinton announced that U.S. troops would never again be put in harm’s way in a UN peacekeeping mission. The debacle in Somalia meant the aversion to taking any risks now ran even harder through the instincts of the troop-contributing nations. But peacekeeping operations continued to be deployed to complex and rapidly shifting civil war zones elsewhere.

  This only deepened the dysfunction in peacekeeping. A peacekeeping mission in Haiti, mandated in September, soon collapsed after a U.S. warship, bearing U.S. and Canadian troops, was turned back from the country on October 11 in the face of the presence of only lightly armed criminal gangs on the shore. The resentful attitude toward peacekeeping immediately fed into the negotiations for the creation and implementation of other peacekeeping operations after October 3, 1993, leading to angry resistance in the Security Council to any mandate or deployment that might include the use of force. Fatefully, the first operation to be created in this climate was the mission to Rwanda.

  RWANDA: IN THE SHADOW OF SOMALIA

  Code Cable, 11 January 1994.

  To: Maurice Baril, DPKO, UN, New York.

  From: Romeo Dallaire, Force Commander, UNAMIR, Kigali, Rwanda.

  Subject: Request for protection of informant.

  Force Commander put in contact with informant by very very important government politician. Informant is a top level trainer in the cadre of interahamwe-armed militia of MRND [the ruling Hutu political party]. He informed us he was in charge of last Saturday’s demonstrations . . . [There] they hoped to provoke the RPF battalion [the unit of the rebel army stationed in Kigali as part of the peace agreement] to engage (being fired upon) the demonstrators and provoke a civil war. Deputies were to be assassinated upon entry or exit from Parliament. Belgian troops [the core component of the peacekeeping force] were to be provoked and if Belgian soldiers resorted to force a number of them were to be killed and thus guarantee Belgian withdrawal from Rwanda . . . Since the UNAMIR mandate he [the informant] has been ordered to register all Tutsi in Kigali. He suspects it is for their extermination. Example he gave was that in 20 minutes his personnel could kill up to 1,000 Tutsis. Informant states he disagrees with anti-Tutsi extermination . . . Informant is prepared to provide location of major weapons cache with at least 135 weapons . . . He was ready to go to the arms-cache tonight . . . It is our intention to take action within the next 36 hours . . . Recce of armed cache and detailed planning of raid to go on late tomorrow. Possibility of a trap not fully excluded . . . Peux Ce Que Veux. Allons-Y.

  By January 1994, DPKO was locked in an ongoing effort to manage eighty thousand troops engaged in seventeen peacekeeping operations worldwide, from over sixty troop-contributing countries, and all with a staff at the New York head office that had expanded little alongside. In the midst of this dizzying situation, and in the shadow of Somalia, we received this urgent and deeply disturbing message from the force commander of our peacekeeping mission in Rwanda.

  Th
ree months later, an estimated 800,000 people were killed in Rwanda in one hundred days. Our reply to General Dallaire’s cable was in stark contrast to the tone of his closing words in French: “Allons-Y,” or, “Let’s Go.” Instead, we warned Dallaire against the offensive action envisaged in his plan to raid the arms cache, reminding him that it would not be allowed by the Security Council or his existing mandate, and instructed him only to convey the information as a warning to other more influential parties on the ground, including the three countries with the most influence in Rwanda. He was to go, we told him, to the diplomatic missions of France, the United States, and Belgium in Rwanda, and also to approach the president of Rwanda himself. We believed it to be the best—indeed, the only—option that we could take.

  In light of what came after, how did we come to that conclusion? The answer, in many ways, cuts to the heart of everything that was going wrong in UN peacekeeping at that time.

  Rwanda had long suffered from an ethnic power struggle between the minority Tutsi population (who, before independence, had occupied a privileged position in the colonial administration of the country) and the majority Hutu population. The former Tutsi dominance of the colonial era was overturned during a violent power struggle that accompanied decolonization from Belgian rule. Following independence in 1962, there were many who would remain ever fearful of a return of Tutsi hegemony over the Hutus. On October 1, 1990, the predominantly Tutsi Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) launched an assault from neighboring Uganda against the Hutu-dominated government of Rwanda. To the Hutu government, the RPF invasion represented the threat of a return to Tutsi domination in Rwanda.

  The RPF proved itself a formidable rebel force and gained an increasingly strong foothold in northern Rwanda, several times threatening the capital, Kigali, in the months and years that followed. The Hutu-dominated Rwandan government of President Juvenal Habyarimana had an ally in France however, and on several occasions French paratroopers were deployed, along with troops from Zaire and Belgium, to secure key sites in Kigali to free more Rwandan government troops for the increasingly faltering campaign to halt the RPF. On February 8, 1993, the RPF launched one of its biggest offensives and came within fifteen miles of Kigali. The French intervened, sending six hundred additional paratroopers to shore up the defenses of the government in Kigali. This helped stall the RPF advance, and under diplomatic pressure from France, Belgium, and the United States, the RPF entered into concerted negotiations designed to find a peaceful settlement to the conflict.

  The result was a peace deal, known as the Arusha Accords, signed in August 1993, which established the conditions for a power-sharing, democratic government representing both sides and a unified army composed of government and RPF forces. Part of the agreement was the provision that a neutral international force should be deployed in Rwanda to assist in upholding the deal on the ground. This final detail of the agreement was largely a result of French lobbying. The French, interested in facilitating a deal that ensured the survival of its ally, the Habyarimana regime, albeit in a power-sharing deal with the RPF, pushed from the outset of the Arusha negotiations for a UN force to be deployed to Rwanda to support the peace deal.

  Other than from the French, there was at first little appetite among permanent members of the Security Council for mandating a new peacekeeping force in so distant and, to many, so obscure a country—especially when they were so preoccupied with other complicated, sizeable, and deeply troubled missions in Somalia and Bosnia. But the French made a deal to support peacekeeping missions in Haiti and Georgia, which the United States and Russia wanted, in return for backing on a Rwandan mission. The result was resolution 872, passed by the Council on October 5, 1993, creating the UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR).

  Of utmost importance to understanding resolution 872 was the context of hostility to any robustly equipped peacekeeping mission that prevailed in the Council at that time, particularly and acutely emanating from the United States. The vote on the creation of UNAMIR occurred just a few days after the Mogadishu debacle—the United States, supported by other states, was now insistent in its rejection of peacekeeping operations that might put troops on a course leading to the use of force and the complications and casualties that could come with them. Furthermore, within domestic U.S. politics there was now an agenda for reducing the cost of all peacekeeping missions, which many members of the United States Congress now argued to be excessive, absorbing too many U.S. tax dollars.

  As a result, at first the United States argued for only a tiny force of one hundred observers for UNAMIR, preferring a far cheaper option to the eight thousand, optimal number of troops recommended by a UN reconnaissance mission sent in August. That mission had argued that a force of five thousand was the minimum feasible to support the Arusha Accords, but in the end only twenty-five hundred troops were mandated.

  The outcome of the Mogadishu raid had caused a flurry of anger at the UN in the United States. The Clinton administration now blamed the UN for the debacle, including falsely claiming that the UN Secretariat had been in command of U.S. troops and thus was responsible for the calamity of October 3, 1993. Given that we had not even known about the planned raid to capture Aidid or even that U.S. Special Forces were in the country, stomaching this accusation was tough for all of us in DPKO.

  As a result, at the time of the establishment of UNAMIR and the weeks after, there was a sense that the future of UN peacekeeping was hanging in the balance. This was not least because the United States Congress, in approving the U.S. budget for 1994, had also thrown out a proposed peacekeeping contingency fund designed to enable the United States to provide emergency financing for the rapid start-up of peacekeeping operations. It seemed that the United States was looking to cut itself loose entirely from peacekeeping. Given that the U.S. government also owed some $900 million in unpaid contributions to the regular UN budget and its peacekeeping expenses—the payment of which Congress refused to approve despite the legal obligation as a UN member state—it felt as if UN peacekeeping, and all the benefits it brought to international peace and security, might be on the verge of rapid decline. Some feared it might wither entirely.

  In our analysis at the time, UNAMIR seemed to exhibit none of the risks that had caused the disaster in Somalia and the continuing problems in Bosnia. A three-year civil war had ceased and a full peace deal had been agreed to. Unlike in recent controversial operations, the force would not be deploying to an environment where there was no peace to keep. The peacekeeping operation was part of the Arusha Accords and so would exist with the full consent of the parties to the conflict. Furthermore, the operation was deployed as a Chapter VI mission, without any powers or agenda for peace enforcement. Finally, the operation was launched under the explicit provision that its existence and continuation was entirely dependent upon the ongoing commitment of the RPF and the Habyarimana-led government to the Arusha Accords. Any collapse in the agreement would mean the termination of the operation—and this was seen as a sensible caveat that would protect the mission from any messy entanglements in a civil war, as was then causing the problems in Somalia and Bosnia.

  We were aware of a history of ethnic violence in Rwanda, and the fact that there had been major ethnic killings in neighboring Burundi, too, but we did not translate this into any serious fear for a collapse in Rwanda. Unlike in Burundi, the parties had accepted a UN role in sustaining a peace agreement. From a traditional peacekeeping operations perspective, Rwanda seemed much safer ground for involvement than other missions of that time.

  We were not alone in our optimism. The international development community had been engaged for years in Rwanda, and right up to March 1994, reports were still being written by leading development organizations that praised Rwanda as an unusual success story. But the international community had a thin appreciation of Rwanda’s society and history and the forces at play there. As one CIA officer later admitted, when he was assigned to
Rwanda in 1990, his first task was to locate the country on a map. At DPKO, we certainly had no genuine, deep expertise on the country. Handed to us by the Security Council were over a dozen operations that we now had to manage worldwide with a tiny DPKO staff. A limited knowledge of the countries in which our operations were taking place had simply become a necessary way of life at DPKO.

  Even for the tightly limited tasks of UNAMIR, mandated to conduct traditional peacekeeping and oversee only a cease-fire, the deployment got off to a bad start. By late December 1993, the capabilities of the force were totally inadequate. A report from UNAMIR on December 30 outlined its severe deficiencies. No country had been willing to supply a self-contained, 800-man infantry battalion, which had been considered essential for securing the Kigali area. Instead, they had to use two smaller infantry battalions, one from Belgium, consisting of 398 men, and one from Bangladesh, which was supposed to consist of 370 men of which only 266 had arrived. The lack of any armored personnel carriers or helicopters also meant, the report stressed, the “absence of this deterrent capability and the lack of a mobile reserve force not only for Kigali, but also for the demilitarized zone, which was forecast as a critical requirement in the Secretary-General’s report.” Among an extensive list of other problems with the force, the report stated that engineers and logisticians were being reassigned as infantry due to the severe shortfall in the number of troops.

  UNAMIR was meant to receive twenty-two armored personnel carriers and eight helicopters to enable some flexibility in its response capability. But no country was willing to provide any helicopters, and only eight armored personnel carriers could eventually be sourced for the force, which were cannibalized from the UN mission in Mozambique. The vehicles finally arrived but they were dilapidated, and only five were serviceable; some of these often broke down and had to be towed by the remaining armored personnel carriers. Such humiliating exhibitions of the force’s lack of capacity often occurred in Kigali and in full view of Rwandan government forces. Years later, Paul Kagame, president of Rwanda and leader of the RPF, would tell me that it was clear to him at the time that Dallaire did not have the necessary means to carry out his mission, and that he did not even trust Daillaire’s ability to protect him when he made official visits to the UN field headquarters.