A Problem From Hell

by Samantha Power

  Those who did own the issue paid a price. Any relationship Frank McCloskey maintained with the Clinton administration was severed after his highly public demand for Christopher’s resignation. Although McCloskey occupied a seat in the most hotly contested district in the entire country, he seemed oblivious to the polls and the likely repercussions of his crusade. He ignored the appeals of his staff members to stop making so many visible trips to the Balkans. Ahead of the November 1994 election, he told a reporter that he didn’t care if his Bosnia efforts cost him his seat in office: “This thing is beyond politics for me and beyond election or reelection.” To another journalist, he said, “I would rather actively try to stop the slaughter than run and continue to win, knowing that I didn’t face this.”151

  Back in Indiana, though, McCloskey’s Republican challenger made him pay, deriding him for being “more concerned about Bosnia than Evansville.” Republican National Committee chairman Haley Barbour visited Evansville, the largest city in McCloskey’s district, and happily noted, “People are coming out of the woodwork to run.”152 McCloskey’s constituents by and large opposed military intervention. Recalling constituent letters that poured into the office, Marshall Harris remembers, “They would say, ‘Bosnia is far from our concern.’ They always sounded a lot like Warren Christopher.” In the end, after electing him to six terms in office, sour voters sent McCloskey packing in the November 1994 Republican sweep. The race was tight, 51–49, and although McCloskey, then fifty-five, says he does not regret a moment he spent lobbying for intervention in Bosnia, he does wonder if a few more trips back to his district on weekends instead of those across the Atlantic to Bosnia might have made the difference. The Indianapolis Star attributed his defeat to his Balkan fixation. In McCloskey’s southern Indiana district, the Star noted, “Hoosiers were much more interested in local events than the problems of a region half a world away.”

  Before he was voted out of office, McCloskey had a bizarre encounter with President Clinton that taught him all he needed to know about the president’s now notorious tendency to compartmentalize. At a black-tie Democratic fund-raising dinner in Washington, McCloskey stood in a rope line to greet the president, whom he had been criticizing fiercely. Like Lemkin, McCloskey was never one to waste an opportunity. The congressman took Clinton’s hand and said, “Bill, bomb the Serbs. You’ll be surprised how good it’ll make you feel.” Unflustered, Clinton nodded thoughtfully for a few seconds and then blamed the Europeans for their hesitancy. “Frank, I understand what you’re saying,” the president said. “But you just don’t understand what bastards those Brits are.” Clinton slid along the rope line, shaking more hands and making more small talk, and McCloskey thought the exchange was over. But a few minutes later the president spun around and walked back to where McCloskey was standing. “By the way, Frank,” Clinton proclaimed cheerily, “I really like what you’re doing. Keep it up!” “The problem with Bill Clinton,” McCloskey observes, “was that he didn’t realize he was president of the United States.”

  During the Bosnian war, during both a Republican and a Democratic administration, the UN Security Council passed resolutions deploring the conduct of the perpetrators. It created the UN-EU International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia as a formal negotiation channel. It called upon states and international human rights organizations to document human rights violations. It deployed UN peacekeepers (though no Americans). And it funded the longest-running humanitarian airlift since the Berlin airlift.

  In addition, in its most radical affront to state sovereignty, the Security Council invoked the genocide convention and created the first international criminal tribunal since Nuremberg.153 The court would sit in The Hague and try grave breaches of the Geneva conventions, violations of the law or customs of war, crimes against humanity, and, at long last, genocide. One of the most tireless supporters of the court was Madeleine Albright, the U.S. ambassador at the UN. If her colleagues looked to Vietnam for policy guidance, Albright liked to say, “My mindset is Munich.” She was the rare official in the Clinton team who lobbied relentlessly for NATO bombing and who laced her public condemnations of Serb “extermination” and expulsion with Holocaust references. When the Security Council voted to establish an international tribunal, Albright declared, “There is an echo in this Chamber today. The Nuremberg Principles have been reaffirmed. . . . This will be no victors’ tribunal. The only victor that will prevail in this endeavor is the truth.”154

  But in the Bosnian war, the truth had never been in short supply. What was missing was U.S. willingness to risk its own soldiers on the ground or to convince the Europeans to support NATO bombing from the air. As a result, the ethnic cleansing and genocide against the country’s Muslims proceeded apace, and more than 200,000 Bosnians were killed.

  In June 1995 President Clinton and Vice President Gore appeared on Larry King Live and defended their policy. “This is a tragedy that has been unfolding for a long time, some would say for 500 years,” Gore said. Clinton did him one better: “Their enmities go back 500 years, some would say almost a thousand years.” He also claimed that 130,000 people were killed in 1992, whereas fewer than 3,000 were murdered in 1994. “That’s still tragic,” the president noted, “but I hardly think that constitutes a colossal failure.”155

  Jim Hooper, who had worked within both administrations and had chosen not to resign, juxtaposes the struggles:

  The Bush administration did not have to be persuaded it was OK to intervene. They had done so in the Gulf. They just had to be persuaded that this was the right place to do it. With the Clinton administration we had to convince them that it was OK to intervene and that this was the right place to do so. Their starting point was that military intervention was never OK. This made it doubly difficult.

  In the immediate aftermath of Clinton’s election victory, the former British foreign secretary and European negotiator Lord David Owen had warned the Bosnians not to rely on U.S. promises. In December 1992, standing on the tarmac at Sarajevo airport, his cheeks flush with the winter cold, Owen had declared: “Don’t, don’t, don’t live under this dream that the West is going to come in and sort this problem out. Don’t dream dreams.”156 However cold the sentiment, Owen honestly and accurately urged Bosnians to assume they were on their own. Clinton administration officials often spoke sternly about Serb brutality and criticized European and UN peace plans that would have divided Bosnia and “rewarded aggression.” But if Clinton managed to keep the dream of rescue alive, for the first two and a half years of his presidency he left the Bosnians to their own meager devices. It was not until July 1995 that Clinton would act. By then, another genocide would have killed 800,000 people in Rwanda.

  © Gilles Peress/Magnum

  Rwandan bodies floating down the Kagera River.

  Chapter 10

  Rwanda: “Mostly in a Listening Mode”

  “I’ll Never Be Tutsi Again”

  On the evening of April 6, 1994, two years to the day after the beginning of the Bosnian war, Major General Romeo Dallaire was sitting on the couch in his bungalow residence in Kigali, Rwanda, watching CNN with his assistant, Brent Beardsley. Beardsley was preparing plans for a national sports day that would match Tutsi rebel soldiers against Hutu government soldiers in a soccer game. Dallaire, the commander of the UN mission, said, “You know, Brent, if the shit ever hit the fan here, none of this stuff would really matter, would it?” The next instant the phone rang. Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana’s Mystère Falcon jet, a gift from French president François Mitterrand, had just been shot down, with Habyarimana and Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira aboard. When Dallaire replaced the receiver, the phone rang again instantly. Indeed, the UN phones rang continually that night and the following day, averaging 100 phone calls per hour. Countless politicians, UN local staff, and ordinary Rwandans were calling out for help. The Canadian pair hopped in their UN jeep and dashed to Rwandan army headquarters, where a crisis meeting was under way. They never r
eturned to their residence.

  When Dallaire arrived at the Rwandan army barracks, he found Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, the army staff director, a hard-line Hutu, seated at the head of a U-shaped table. Appearing firmly in command, Bagosora announced that the president’s death meant the government had collapsed and the army needed to take charge. Dallaire interjected, arguing that in effect the king had died, but the government lived on. He reminded the officers assembled that Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, a leading moderate, had become the lawful head of state. Many of the stone-faced officers gathered around the table began to snicker at the prospect.

  Back in Washington, Kevin Aiston, the Rwanda desk officer at the State Department, knocked on the door of Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Prudence Bushnell and told her that the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi had been killed in a plane crash. “Oh, shit,” she said. “Are you sure?” In fact nobody was sure at first, but Dallaire’s forces supplied confirmation within the hour. The Rwandan authorities quickly announced a curfew, and Hutu militias and government soldiers erected roadblocks around the capital. Radio Mille Collines, the Hutu extremist radio station, named ethnic Tutsi, those they called Inyenzi, or “cockroaches,” the targets.

  Bushnell drafted an urgent memo to Secretary of State Warren Christopher. She was concerned about a probable outbreak of killing in both Rwanda and its neighbor Burundi. The memo read: “If, as it appears, both Presidents have been killed, there is a strong likelihood that widespread violence could break out in either or both countries, particularly if it is confirmed that the plane was shot down. Our strategy is to appeal for calm in both countries, both through public statements and in other ways.”1 A few public statements proved to be virtually the only strategy that Washington would muster in the weeks ahead.

  Lieutenant General Wesley Clark, who later commanded the NATO air war in Kosovo, was the director of strategic plans and policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon. On learning of the crash, Clark remembers, staff officers asked, “Is it Hutu and Tutsi or Tutu and Hutsi?” He frantically telephoned around the Pentagon for insight into the ethnic dimension of events in Rwanda. Unfortunately, Rwanda had never been of more than marginal concern to Washington’s most influential planners.

  America’s best-informed Rwanda observer was not a government official but a private citizen, Alison Des Forges, a historian and a board member of Human Rights Watch, who lived in Buffalo, New York. Des Forges had been visiting Rwanda since 1963. She had received a Ph.D. from Yale in African history, specializing in Rwanda, and she could speak the Rwandan language, Kinyarwanda. Half an hour after the plane crash Des Forges got a phone call from a close friend in Kigali, the human-rights activist Monique Mujawamariya. Des Forges had been worried about Mujawamariya for weeks because the hate-propagating Radio Mille Collines had branded her “a bad patriot who deserves to die.” Mujawamariya had sent Human Rights Watch a chilling warning a week earlier: “For the last two weeks, all of Kigali has lived under the threat of an instantaneous, carefully prepared operation to eliminate all those who give trouble to President Habyarimana.”2

  Now Habyarimana was dead, and Mujawamariya knew instantly that the hard-line Hutu would use the incident as a pretext to begin mass killing. “This is it,” she told Des Forges on the phone. For the next twenty-four hours, Des Forges called her friend’s home every half hour. With each conversation Des Forges could hear the gunfire grow louder as the Hutu militia drew closer. Finally the gunmen entered Mujawamariya’s home. “I don’t want you to hear this,” Mujawamariya said softly. “Take care of my children.” She hung up the phone.

  Mujawamariya’s instincts were correct. Within hours of Habyarimana’s death, armed Hutu took command of the streets of Kigali. Dallaire quickly grasped that supporters of a Hutu-Tutsi peace process were being targeted. Rwandans around the capital begged peacekeepers at the headquarters of the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) to come and get them. Dallaire was especially concerned about Prime Minister Uwilingiyimana, the reformer who had become the titular head of state. Just after dawn on April 7, five Ghanaian and ten Belgian peacekeepers arrived at the prime minister’s home in order to deliver her to Radio Rwanda, so that she could broadcast an emergency appeal for calm.

  Joyce Leader, the second-in-command at the U.S. embassy, lived next door to Uwilingiyimana. She spent the early hours of the morning behind the steel-barred gates of her embassy-owned house as Hutu killers hunted and dispatched their first victims. Leader’s phone rang. Uwilingiyimana was on the other end. “Please hide me,” she begged. Leader had not known Uwilingiyimana well. “She was a prime minister,” the American recalls, “I was just a lowly diplomat.” But they had become acquainted through diplomatic functions, and once, when the electricity supply had cut out, Uwilingiyimana had come over to Leader’s home to do her hair. It was considered an emergency.

  Minutes after the phone call a UN peacekeeper attempted to hike the prime minister over the wall separating their compounds. When Leader heard shots fired, she urged the peacekeeper to abandon the effort. “They can see you!” she shouted. Uwilingiyimana managed to slip with her husband and children into another compound, which was occupied by the UN Development Program. But the militiamen hunted them down in the yard, where the couple surrendered. There were more shots. Leader recalls, “We heard her screaming and then, suddenly, after the gunfire, the screaming stopped, and we heard people cheering.” Hutu gunmen in the presidential guard that day systematically tracked down and eliminated virtually all of Rwanda’s moderate politicians.

  The raid on Uwilingiyimana’s compound not only cost Rwanda a prominent supporter of peace and power-sharing, but it also triggered the collapse of Dallaire’s UN mission. In keeping with a prior plan, Hutu soldiers rounded up the peacekeepers at Uwilingiyimana’s home, took them to a military camp, led the Ghanaians to safety, and then killed and savagely mutilated the ten Belgians. Because the United States had retreated from Somalia after the deaths of eighteen U.S. soldiers, the Hutu assailants believed this massacre would prompt a Belgian withdrawal. And indeed, in Belgium the cry for either expanding UNAMIR’s mandate or immediately pulling out was prompt and loud.

  Only at 9 p.m. on April 7 did Dallaire learn that the Belgians had been killed. He traveled to Kigali Hospital, where more than 1,000 dead Rwandan bodies had already been gathered. Dallaire entered the darkened morgue and shone his flashlight on the corpses of his men, who were heaped in a pile. At first he wondered why there were eleven bodies when he had been told that ten were killed. Then he realized that their bodies had been so badly cut up that they had become impossible to count. Dallaire negotiated with the Rwandan authorities to lay their corpses out with more dignity and to preserve what was left of their uniforms.

  Most in the Pentagon greeted the news of the Belgians’ death as proof that the UN mission in Rwanda had gone from being a “Somalia waiting to happen” to a Somalia that was happening. For many, the incident fed on and fueled ingrained biases about UN peacekeeping because the Belgians had allowed themselves to be disarmed. James Woods, deputy assistant secretary of defense for Africa since 1986, recalled:

  Well, there was horror and consternation at the deaths and, particularly, that they died badly. But there was also consternation that they did not defend themselves. They did not draw their pistols. I think it tended to confirm in the minds of those people who were following UN peace operations that there was a lot of romantic nonsense built into some of the ground rules and this was another reason to steer clear of UN peacekeeping operations. . . . I heard one person say, “Well, at least, you know, our rangers died fighting in Somalia. These guys, with their blue berets, were slaughtered without getting a shot off.”3

  A fever descended upon Rwanda. Lists of victims had been prepared ahead of time. That much was clear from the Radio Mille Collines broadcasts, which read the names, addresses, and license plate numbers of Tutsi and moderate Hutu. “I listened to [it],” one survivor recalle
d, “because if you were mentioned over the airways, you were sure to be carted off a short time later by the Interahamwe. You knew you had to change your address at once.”4

  In response to the initial killings by the Hutu government, Tutsi rebels of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, stationed in Kigali under the terms of a recent peace accord, surged out of their barracks and resumed their civil war against the Hutu regime. But under the cover of that war were early and strong indications that systematic genocide was taking place. From April 7 onward, the Hutu-controlled army, the gendarmerie, and the militias worked together to wipe out Rwanda’s Tutsi. Many of the early Tutsi victims found themselves specifically, not spontaneously, pursued. A survivor of a massacre at a hospital in Kibuye reported that he heard a list read over a loudspeaker before the attack began. Another survivor said that once the killing was finished:

  They sent people in among the bodies to verify who was dead. They said, “Here is the treasurer and his wife and daughter, but where is the younger child?” Or, “Here is Josue’s father, his wife and mother, but where is he?” And then, in the days after, they tried to hunt you down if they thought you were still alive. They would shout out, “Hey Josue, we see you now” to make you jump and try to run so that they could see you move and get you more easily.5