by Kofi Annan
It was in this context—less than two weeks after the damning December UNAMIR report on the military incapacity of the operation—that we received the January 11, 1994, cable from Dallaire informing us of the tense situation on the ground and his plan to raid an arms cache. My deputy, Iqbal Riza, received it and sent the response to the SRSG in Rwanda, Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh, as was the proper chain of communication, telling him to curtail any plan to raid. It stated that we could not agree to his planned raid, stressing the overriding consideration being “the need to avoid entering into a course of action that might lead to the use of force and unanticipated repercussions.”
Our greatest fear at that moment, given the precarious position of UN peacekeeping at the time, was for another military disaster to befall a peacekeeping operation leading to significant casualties. In Dallaire’s cabled request to raid, we saw the ingredients of a disaster akin to the failed raid on Aidid in Mogadishu three months earlier—but with a force that was a thousand times weaker in military capabilities and entirely isolated from any possibility of reinforcement. In Dallaire’s plan there lay the potential for a scenario that, for the peacekeeping force, could have proved even worse than the events in Somalia. In a remote country surrounded by two armies made up of tens of thousands of potentially hostile and well-armed soldiers, with no contingency for the deployment of additional, robust fighting troops or any standby force, I believed such a raid would set them up for a confrontation they would not be able to deal with. It could have led to not just a few dozen peacekeepers exposed, as had happened in Somalia, but hundreds, perhaps even the entire force of 2,165.
What is more, in the post-Somalia international climate, there was no appetite in the international community for taking even the slightest risks with the lives of peacekeepers, certainly not in the United States. A small-scale encounter with only a few casualties would have set off a withdrawal by the Security Council and the collapse of yet another peacekeeping mission, perhaps triggering the collapse of the entire peace process.
With the information we had then, it was impossible to countenance the raid. Later, in April, when ten Belgian troops were captured, as predicted by Dallaire’s informant, Dallaire at that time was in a car on the way to meet leading members of the government’s armed forces. He passed a compound where he saw two of the Belgian peacekeeping troops being held and beaten. This was the first he knew of their capture, and he realized then, he would explain later, that he could do nothing to save them other than engage in negotiations. “At that moment I was already saying: ‘I just can’t get those guys out of there. I just don’t have the forces,’” he would recount. He considered a rescue option irresponsible due to the risk to his other troops, and it was this same overriding consideration that dictated our response to his January 11 request.
Dallaire’s cable also warned of a potential trap. Even if it had not, we would seriously have considered this possibility. There were always parties with an interest in manipulating peacekeeping forces. The supply of false information was a common feature of missions to conflict zones. There was a delicate balance in the Arusha peace process, and this intelligence had come out of the blue from an isolated source. There was the real risk that it could have been planted by elements from either side precisely to trigger the offensive action envisaged by Dallaire and so set a course of events that would restart the war.
Furthermore, if we had agreed with the plan to raid, it would have had to have gone to the secretary-general and the Security Council to be authorized. All cable traffic from force commanders was automatically copied to over a dozen people, both among senior staff in DPKO and the secretary-general’s office. Given its contents, the cable certainly caused a stir in DPKO and in the office of the secretary-general, but there was no dissent to our response. The reason for this was clear to all: there was no appetite whatsoever in the Security Council to even consider the use of force in a peacekeeping mission—as it had been made clear to us repeatedly in the weeks and months earlier.
The atmosphere in the Security Council was grim, and its attitude regarding any initiatives from the Secretariat, whom the United States was publicly blaming for recent failures in Somalia, was skeptical at best. Any recommendations contrary to the attitudes of the Security Council were met with a mix of derision and anger at that time. In one instance, for example, Maurice Baril, the senior military advisor at DPKO, in a rare opportunity for anyone other than Gharekhan to meet the Security Council, joined me to brief the Council with a military analysis of the plan to set up “safe areas” in Bosnia, which he explained were subject to severe deficiencies under current conditions. Maurice said he felt as if he was being “skinned alive” by U.S. ambassador Albright and UK ambassador David Hannay for implying that he might know better than the Council’s members about the conditions necessary for a successful peacekeeping operation. The attitude was very much one of “who do you think you are to come here and lecture us?” and they made sure they punished Maurice verbally for it.
Within these constraints, we sent our response to Dallaire’s request. But we still took his warning seriously. In our cable we instructed him to implement an alternative, diplomatic course of action that seemed to have the best chance of preempting any plan to carry out a massacre in Kigali. To add further pressure on President Habyarimana, we also said to Dallaire:
on the assumption that you are convinced that the information provided by the informant is absolutely reliable . . . you should advise the President that, if any violence occurs in Kigali, you would have to immediately bring to the attention of the Security Council the information you have received on the activities of the militia, undertake investigations to determine who is responsible and make appropriate recommendations to the Security Council.
Our tactic here was to try to create the impression that the president was on notice from powerful forces in the world—from the most militarily active foreign nations on the ground in Rwanda to the UN itself—that could bring serious repercussions upon him if he was complicit in any violence.
On the day after we sent our cable, on January 12, 1994, the UN special representative Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh and General Dallaire met with the ambassadors of those three countries as instructed by us, in response to which the ambassadors said they would inform their capitals and coordinate strategy. There was the later claim that members of the Security Council were unaware of the warning conveyed by Dallaire’s informant. Given that permanent Council members, particularly the United States and France, had far more advanced and established intelligence-gathering capabilities in Rwanda than UNAMIR, this could not have been true.
On April 6, 1994, a plane carrying President Habyarimana of Rwanda and President Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi was shot down while carrying its passengers from negotiations in Tanzania, just as it was nearing its destination at Kigali Airport. All passengers were killed. Immediately following this, violence initiated by government Hutu forces erupted in Kigali. The day after the assassinations, ten Belgian paratroopers who were part of UNAMIR and assigned to protect the prime minister of Rwanda were captured by government troops. Radioing for instructions from their commander, Colonel Luc Marchal, they were told to lay down their weapons and not engage in combat. The prime minister was then murdered, and soon after the ten Belgian paratroopers were killed and their bodies mutilated.
Our fears from January were now being confirmed—troop contributors looked likely to withdraw, with the mission set to collapse, and there were now massacres occurring in Kigali. But over the coming days, reports came in of something Dallaire had not warned us about. The violence and massacres were clearly spreading beyond the capital. Civilians were being killed in the open by government troops, militia groups, and bands of civilians under the direction of local commanders and state officials, mostly with agricultural tools, and at a rate and intensity none of us had ever heard of before.
A senior Rwandan
official later said of the plan to kill the Belgian peacekeepers that “we watch CNN too, you know.” He was referring to the lesson that they had garnered from Somalia the year before: that the death of just a few foreign peacekeepers would be enough to end the appetite for intervention and allow them to get on with their murderous plans. They were right. Five days after the grisly killing of its soldiers, the Belgian government announced that it would withdraw its troops—the core fighting capability of UNAMIR—from Rwanda immediately.
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The first instructions to come from the Security Council on April 8 were for UNAMIR to do everything it could to facilitate an agreement that would reestablish a cease-fire. On the ground, meanwhile, the UNAMIR force was in no way equipped to intervene in any meaningful way without seriously jeopardizing the lives of all its troops. On April 15, Dallaire said to a New York Times journalist: “We have been sitting now eight or nine days in our trenches. The question is how long do you sit there or attempt to get it settled? Ours is not a peace enforcement mission . . . If we don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel, if we see another three weeks of being cooped up watching them pound each other then we have to seriously assess the risk of keeping these soldiers here.” Dallaire took full responsibility for protecting his troops and did his duty for them. But when the time came to draw down and leave Rwanda, as he was expected to do, he himself decided to stay. He remained for a further three months, and very much in harm’s way, with a tiny contingent of Ghanaian and Tunisian peacekeepers to save what Rwandan civilians they could.
In New York—with feelings of shock and disbelief that only escalated each day—we read the reports and news releases as they came in. By April 21, it was clear that the violence was being conducted in a systematic and intensifying fashion across the country. On that day, the Security Council then voted to draw down the UNAMIR force to just 270 troops. There was no interest in getting involved. As Bob Dole, the Republican leader in the United States Senate, said a few days before the Council’s decision: “I don’t think we have any national interest here. I hope we don’t get involved . . . The Americans [U.S. citizens in Rwanda] are out. As far as I’m concerned, in Rwanda that ought to be the end of it.”
The choice offered to the Security Council on that day by Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali included options for the complete transformation of the force and a major military intervention. This was summarily rejected. The Security Council took no responsibility for the situation in Rwanda and the growing number of lives lost, and its key members flatly denied the notion that a genocide was taking place. However, a CIA briefing report, dated April 23, 1994, two days after the Security Council decision to withdraw, demonstrates that at least by this date the conflict was considered and referred to as a “genocide” by officials in the U.S. administration.
The Security Council turned its back, but the news reports did not stop in their growing testimony to atrocities that were beyond imagination. On April 29, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) published statistics indicating that over 250,000 Rwandans had crossed into neighboring Tanzania alone, which made this the largest mass exodus of refugees ever witnessed by the UN agency. At that same point, the UN estimated that over 200,000 people had been killed inside Rwanda. By early May, we at the UN were officially describing the killings in Rwanda as genocide, having dispatched Iqbal Riza to Rwanda to make his assessment of the situation. These different points of pressure finally compelled the Security Council to restart deliberations on Rwanda on May 6. The secretary-general, supported by us at DPKO, submitted options to the Council for a response, including a range of interventions involving different levels of force. Eventually, on May 17, the Council issued resolution 918, mandating the reestablishment of the UNAMIR mission (with the new name, UNAMIR II) with a force of 5,500.
However, not one of the Council’s members was willing to provide troops. At DPKO, we spent endless days frantically lobbying more than a hundred governments around the world for troops. I called dozens myself, and the responses were all the same. We did not receive a single serious offer. It was one of the most shocking and deeply formative experiences of my entire career, laying bare the disjuncture between the public statements of alarm and concern for the suffering of other people on the one hand, and, on the other, the unwillingness to commit any of the necessary resources to take action. The world knew the scale of the killing in Rwanda, and yet we could not get anyone, from governments across the world, to do anything serious to help.
What brought the genocide to an end—but not before it saw a staggering 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus killed in just 100 days—was the victory of the RPF over the government. The RPF military drove the government’s genocidal forces from Rwanda in a military campaign that came to its completion in July, and a new government under the RPF was established. It was only after this, in August, that troops were finally sent to form UNAMIR II, by which time the genocide and the civil war were firmly over.
The lesson of the RPF victory was that ending the genocide and protecting civilians on a large scale would have required military capacity and the political will to act to stop the killing. But in 1994, there was simply no culture or precedent in the international system of UN intervention in an internal conflict to use military force decisively to protect civilians. Combined with the impact of events in Mogadishu, the result was total inaction. It would take another war, and the deaths of thousands more civilians—this time in Europe—for the world to learn to take sides.
BOSNIA: FACING UP TO FAILURE
“A fantastic gap between the resolutions of the Security Council, the will to execute these resolutions, and the means available to commanders in the field.” That was Belgian general Francis Briquemont’s acerbic observation and summation of the UN mission in Bosnia at the end of his command of the peacekeeping force there. This gap would be filled, once again, with dead civilians, and on a scale not seen in Europe since World War II.
The UN was, and will probably always remain, an easy target when it comes to analyzing failed peacekeeping operations. The limits on our resources, the extreme reluctance of troop contributors to take risks with their troops, and, above all, the profound divisions over policy and strategic direction that often existed among members of the Security Council were often conveniently forgotten when apportioning responsibility for what was routinely referred to in those years as the “crisis in UN peacekeeping.” Nowhere was this more so than in Rwanda and Bosnia, where between 1992 and 1995 the UN was asked to keep the peace in the midst of an ongoing and brutal war.
I had taken up my post as deputy to Marrack Goulding, under-secretary-general in charge of peacekeeping, in early March 1992, just as the situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina was about to take a dramatic and violent turn for the worse. With the disintegration of Yugoslavia alongside the end of the Cold War, and after an intense but relatively brief war in Croatia, the Security Council in February 1992 authorized the deployment of UN peacekeepers, the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR), to oversee the separation of warring parties along the confrontation line between the Krajina Serbs and Croatian forces. Deployed firmly on the basis of traditional peacekeeping principles—host state consent, impartiality, and minimum use of force—UN blue helmets were to establish three so-called Protected Areas, ensure their demilitarization, and control access to them. They were also tasked to verify the withdrawal of the Serb Yugoslav National Army (known as the JNA) and irregular forces from Croatia, many of whom, as it turned out, would soon be providing logistic support to and fighting alongside Bosnian Serb militias in neighboring Bosnia.
Two months earlier, following the recognition of Slovenia and Croatia by the European Community on January 15, 1992, Bosnia held a referendum on independence. It was boycotted by the Bosnian Serbs but, unsurprisingly, overwhelmingly supported by the majority of Bosnian Muslims and Croats in the republic. On April 6, Bosnia’s in
dependence was duly recognized by a majority of European Community members, and what had hitherto been sporadic fighting exploded into full-scale war that crossed the new internationally recognized borders.
It proved a one-sided affair. Over the next three months, a savage onslaught by Serb militias and paramilitary forces, aided and abetted by the rump Yugoslav army, resulted in the displacement of some 1 million people from their homes. The attack on the town of Bijelinja by forces commanded by Željko “Arkan” Ražnatovi´c—a notorious career criminal turned paramilitary leader and later indicted for crimes against humanity—set the pattern for a campaign of murder, rape, looting, and destruction aimed at ethnically cleansing a swath of territory in the north and the east of the country. Conducted with the utmost brutality, Bosnian Serb forces sought the wholesale expulsion of the non-Serb, largely Muslim population from towns and cities where, in many cases, non-Serbs had constituted the majority population before the war. The offensive was as swift as it was brutal, and, in fact, most of the territory captured by the Bosnian Serbs during the war in Bosnia was secured within the first sixty days.
