A Problem From Hell

by Samantha Power

  In Kigali in the early days, the killers were well-equipped government soldiers and militiamen who relied mainly on automatic weapons and grenades. In the countryside, where the slaughter gradually spread, the killing was done at first with firearms, but as more Hutu joined in the weapons became increasingly unsophisticated—knives, machetes, spears, and the traditional masu, bulky clubs with nails protruding from them. Later screwdrivers, hammers, and bicycle handlebars were added to the arsenal. Killers often carried a weapon in one hand and a transistor radio piping murder commands in the other.

  Tens of thousands of Tutsi fled their homes in panic and were snared and butchered at checkpoints. Little care was given to their disposal. Some were shoveled into landfills. Human flesh rotted in the sunshine. In churches bodies mingled with scattered hosts. If the killers had taken the time to tend to sanitation, it would have slowed their efforts to “sanitize” their country.

  Because the Hutu and Tutsi had lived intermingled and, in many instances, intermarried, the outbreak of killing forced Hutu and Tutsi friends and relatives into life-altering decisions about whether or not to desert their loved ones in order to save their own lives. At Mugonero Church in the town of Kibuye, two Hutu sisters, each married to a Tutsi husband, faced such a choice. One of the women decided to die with her husband. The other, who hoped to save the lives of her eleven children, chose to leave. Because her husband was Tutsi, her children had been categorized as Tutsi and thus were technically forbidden to live. But the machete-wielding Hutu attackers had assured the woman that the children would be permitted to depart safely if she agreed to accompany them. When the woman stepped out of the church, however, she saw the assailants butcher eight of the eleven children. The youngest, a child of three years old, pleaded for his life after seeing his brothers and sisters slain. “Please don’t kill me,” he said. “I’ll never be Tutsi again.” But the killers, unblinking, struck him down.6

  The Rwandan genocide would prove to be the fastest, most efficient killing spree of the twentieth century. In 100 days, some 800,000 Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu were murdered. The United States did almost nothing to try to stop it. Ahead of the April 6 plane crash, the United States ignored extensive early warnings about imminent mass violence. It denied Belgian requests to reinforce the peacekeeping mission. When the massacres started, not only did the Clinton administration not send troops to Rwanda to contest the slaughter, but it refused countless other options. President Clinton did not convene a single meeting of his senior foreign policy advisers to discuss U.S. options for Rwanda. His top aides rarely condemned the slaughter. The United States did not deploy its technical assets to jam Rwandan hate radio, and it did not lobby to have the genocidal Rwandan government’s ambassador expelled from the United Nations. Those steps that the United States did take had deadly repercussions. Washington demanded the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers from Rwanda and then refused to authorize the deployment of UN reinforcements. Remembering Somalia and hearing no American demands for intervention, President Clinton and his advisers knew that the military and political risks of involving the United States in a bloody conflict in central Africa were great, yet there were no costs to avoiding Rwanda altogether. Thus, the United States again stood on the sidelines.

  Warning

  Background: The UN Deployment

  If ever there was a peacekeeper who believed wholeheartedly in the promise of humanitarian action, it was the forty-seven-year-old major general who commanded UN peacekeepers in Rwanda. A broad-shouldered French Canadian with deep-set, sky blue eyes, Dallaire has the thick, callused hands of one brought up in a culture that prizes soldiering, service, and sacrifice. He saw the United Nations as the embodiment of all three.7

  Before his posting to Rwanda, Dallaire had served as the commandant of an army brigade that sent peacekeeping battalions to Cambodia and Bosnia, but he had never seen actual combat himself. “I was like a fireman who has never been to a fire, but has dreamed for years about how he would fare when the fire came,” Dallaire recalls. When, in the summer of 1993, he received the phone call from UN headquarters offering him the Rwanda posting, he was ecstatic. “It’s very difficult for somebody not in the service to understand what it means to get a command. He’d sell his mother to do it. I mean, when I got that call, it was answering the aim of my life,” he says. “It’s what you’ve been waiting for. It’s all you’ve been waiting for.”

  Romeo Dallaire

  Canadian Major General Romeo Dallaire, commander of UN peacekeeping forces in Rwanda.

  Dallaire was sent to command a UN force that would help to keep the peace in Rwanda, a nation the size of Vermont, with a population of 8 million, which was known as “the land of a thousand hills.” Before Rwanda achieved independence from Belgium in 1962, the Tutsi, who made up 15 percent of the populace, had enjoyed a privileged status. But independence ushered in three decades of Hutu rule, under which Tutsi were systematically discriminated against and periodically subjected to waves of killing and ethnic cleansing. In 1990 a group of armed exiles, mainly Tutsi, who had been clustered on the Ugandan border, invaded Rwanda. Over the next several years the rebels, known as the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), gained ground against Hutu government forces. In 1993, with the support of the major Western powers, Tanzania brokered peace talks, which resulted in a power-sharing agreement known as the Arusha accords. Under its terms the Rwandan government agreed to govern with Hutu opposition parties and the Tutsi minority. UN peacekeepers would be deployed to patrol a cease-fire and assist in demilitarization and demobilization as well as to help provide a secure environment, so that exiled Tutsi could return. The hope among moderate Rwandans and foreign diplomats was that Hutu and Tutsi would at last be able to coexist in harmony.

  Hard-line elements within the Rwandan government and Hutu extremists outside it found the Arusha agreement singularly unattractive. They saw themselves as having everything to lose, everything to fear, and nothing obvious to gain by complying with the terms of the peace deal. The Hutu had dominated the Rwandan political and economic scene for three decades, and they were afraid that the Tutsi, who had long been persecuted, would respond in kind if given the chance again to govern. The accord did not grant past killers amnesty for their misdeeds, so those Hutu leaders who had blood on their hands were concerned that integrating Tutsi political and military officials into the government would cost them their freedom or their lives. The Hutu memories of preindependence Rwanda had been passed down through the generations, and Hutu children could recite at length the sins the Tutsi had committed against their forefathers.

  Hutu extremists opposed to Arusha set out to terrorize the Tutsi and those who supported power-sharing. Guns, grenades, and machetes began arriving by the planeload.8 By 1992, Hutu militia had purchased, stockpiled, and begun distributing an estimated eighty-five tons of munitions, as well as 581,000 machetes—one machete for every third adult Hutu male.9 The situation deteriorated dramatically enough in 1993 for a number of international and UN bodies to take interest. In early 1993 Mujawamariya, executive director of the Rwanda Association for the Defense of Human Rights, urged international human rights groups to visit her country in the hopes of deterring further violence. Des Forges of Human Rights Watch was one of twelve people from eight countries who composed the International Commission of Investigation. The commission spent three weeks in Rwanda, interviewing hundreds of Rwandans. The crimes that were being described even then were so savage as to defy belief. In one instance the investigators met a woman who said that her sons had been murdered by Hutu extremists and buried in the mayor’s back garden. When the authorities denied the woman’s claims, the team knew they had to obtain concrete proof. They descended upon the mayor’s doorstep, demanding they be allowed to dig up his garden; the mayor nonchalantly agreed on the condition that they reimburse him for the price of the beans that would be uprooted. The investigators, most of whom were lawyers and none of whom had ever dug up a grave (or even done
much gardening), began digging. “We dug and dug and dug,” remembers Des Forges, “while the mayor sat there and watched us amateurs with a big smirk on his face.” With the sides of the pit on the verge of collapsing inward, the team had found nothing and was prepared to give up. Only the sight of the woman waiting nearby kept them going. “This woman is a mother,” Des Forges told her colleagues. “She may get a lot of things wrong, but the one thing she won’t get wrong is where her sons are buried.” Minutes later the investigators unearthed a foot. More body parts followed.

  The commission’s March 1993 report found that more than 10,000 Tutsi had been detained and 2,000 murdered since the RPF’s 1990 invasion.10 Government-supported killers had carried out at least three major massacres of Tutsi. Extremist, racist rhetoric and militias were proliferating. The international commission and a UN rapporteur who soon followed warned explicitly of a possible genocide.11

  Low-ranking U.S. intelligence analysts were keenly aware of Rwanda’s history and the possibility that atrocity would occur. A January 1993 CIA report warned of the likelihood of large-scale ethnic violence. A December 1993 CIA study found that some 4 million tons of small arms had been transferred from Poland to Rwanda, via Belgium, an extraordinary quantity for a government allegedly committed to a peace process. And in January 1994 a U.S. government intelligence analyst predicted that if conflict restarted in Rwanda, “the worst case scenario would involve one-half million people dying.”12

  The public rhetoric of the hard-liners kept pace with the proliferation of machetes, militias, and death squads. In December 1990 the Hutu paper Kangura (“Wake up!”) had published its “Ten Commandments of the Hutu.” Like Hitler’s Nuremberg laws and the Bosnian Serbs’ 1992 edicts, these ten commandments articulated the rules of the game the radicals hoped to see imposed on the minority:

  1. Every Hutu should know that a Tutsi woman, wherever she is, works for the interests of her Tutsi ethnic group. As a result, we shall consider a traitor any Hutu who:

  • marries a Tutsi woman;

  • befriends a Tutsi woman;

  • employs a Tutsi woman as a secretary or concubine.

  2. Every Hutu should know that our Hutu daughters are more suitable and conscientious in their role as woman, wife and mother of the family. Are they not beautiful, good secretaries and more honest?

  3. Hutu women, be vigilant and try to bring your husbands, brothers and sons back to reason.

  4. Every Hutu should know that every Tutsi is dishonest in business. His only aim is the supremacy of his ethnic group. As a result any Hutu who does the following is a traitor:

  • makes a partnership with a Tutsi in business;

  • invests his money or the government’s money in a Tutsi enterprise;

  • lends or borrows money from a Tutsi;

  • gives favors to a Tutsi in business (obtaining import licenses, bank loans, construction sites, public markets . . .)

  5. All strategic positions, political, administrative, economic, military and security should be entrusted to Hutu.

  6. The education sector (school pupils, students, teachers) must be majority Hutu.

  7. The Rwandese Armed Forces should be exclusively Hutu. The experience of the October [1990] war has taught us a lesson. No member of the military shall marry a Tutsi.

  8. The Hutu should stop having mercy on the Tutsi.

  9. The Hutu, wherever they are, must have unity and solidarity, and be concerned with the fate of their Hutu brothers.

  • The Hutu inside and outside Rwanda must constantly look for friends and allies for the Hutu cause, starting with their Bantu brothers;

  • They must constantly counteract the Tutsi propaganda;

  • The Hutu must be firm and vigilant against their common Tutsi enemy.

  10. The Social Revolution of 1959, the Referendum of 1961, and the Hutu Ideology, must be taught to every Hutu at every level. Every Hutu must spread this ideology widely. Any Hutu who persecutes his brother Hutu for having read, spread and taught this ideology, is a traitor.13

  Staunch Hutu politicians made plain their intentions. In November 1992 Leon Mugesera, a senior member of Habyarimana’s party, addressed a gathering of the National Revolutionary Movement for Development Party (MRND), saying: “The fatal mistake we made in 1959 was to let [the Tutsi] get out. . . . They belong in Ethiopia and we are going to find them a shortcut to get there by throwing them into the Nyabarongo River. I must insist on this point. We have to act. Wipe them all out!”14 When the Tutsi-dominated RPF invaded Rwanda in February 1993 for a second time, the extremist Hutu media portrayed the Tutsi as devils and, alluding to Pol Pot’s rule in Cambodia, identified them as “Black Khmer.” As genocidal perpetrators so often do as a prelude to summoning the masses, they began claiming the Tutsi were out to exterminate Hutu and appealing for preemptive self-defense.15 Although the threats against the Tutsi and the reports of violence did not generate mainstream Western press coverage, they were reported regularly in the Foreign Broadcast Information Service and in diplomatic cables back to Washington.

  But Dallaire knew little of the precariousness of the Arusha accords. When he made a preliminary reconnaissance trip to Rwanda, in August 1993, he was told that the country was committed to peace and that a UN presence was essential. It is hardly surprising that nobody steered Dallaire to meet with those who preferred the eradication of Tutsi to the ceding of power. But it was remarkable that no UN officials in New York thought to give Dallaire copies of the alarming reports prepared by the International Commission of Investigation or even by a rapporteur from the United Nations itself.

  The sum total of Dallaire’s intelligence data before that first trip to Rwanda consisted of one encyclopedia’s summary of Rwandan history, which Major Beardsley, Dallaire’s executive assistant, had snatched at the last minute from his local public library. Beardsley says, “We flew to Rwanda with a Michelin road map, a copy of the Arusha agreement, and that was it. We were under the impression that the situation was quite straightforward: There was one cohesive government side and one cohesive rebel side, and they had come together to sign the peace agreement and had then requested that we come in to help them implement it.”

  Although Dallaire gravely underestimated the tensions brewing in Rwanda, he still believed that he would need a force of 5,000 to help the parties implement the terms of the Arusha accords. But the United States was unenthused about sending any UN mission to Rwanda. “Anytime you mentioned peacekeeping in Africa,” one U.S. official remembers, “the crucifixes and garlic would come up on every door.” Washington was nervous that the Rwanda mission would sour like those in Bosnia, Somalia, and Haiti were then doing. Multilateral initiatives for humanitarian purposes seemed like quagmires in the making. But President Habyarimana had traveled to Washington in 1993 to offer assurances that his government was committed to carrying out the terms of the Arusha accords. In the end, after strenuous lobbying by France (Rwanda’s chief diplomatic and military patron), U.S. officials accepted the proposition that UNAMIR could be the rare “UN winner.” Even so, U.S. officials made it clear that Washington would give no consideration to sending U.S. troops to Rwanda and would not pay for 5,000 troops. Dallaire reluctantly trimmed his written request to 2,500. He remembers, “I was told, ‘Don’t ask for a brigade, because it ain’t there.’” On October 5, 1993, two days after the Somalia firefight, the United States reluctantly voted in the Security Council to authorize Dallaire’s mission.16

  Once he was actually posted to Rwanda in October 1993, Dallaire lacked not merely intelligence data and manpower but also institutional support. The small Department of Peacekeeping Operations in New York, run by the Ghanaian diplomat Kofi Annan (who later became UN secretary-general), was overwhelmed. Madeleine Albright, the U.S. ambassador to the UN and a leading advocate of military intervention in Bosnia, recalls, “The global 9-1-1 was always either busy or nobody was there.” At the time of the Rwanda deployment, with a staff of a few hundred, t
he UN was posting 70,000 peacekeepers on seventeen missions around the world.17 Amid these widespread crises and logistical headaches, the Rwanda mission had low status.

  Life was not made easier for Dallaire or the UN peacekeeping office by the United States’ thinning patience for peacekeeping. The Clinton administration had taken office better disposed toward peacekeeping than any other administration in U.S. history. But Congress owed half a billion dollars in UN dues and peacekeeping costs. It had tired of its obligation to foot one-third of the bill for what had come to feel like an insatiable global appetite for mischief and an equally insatiable UN appetite for missions. The Clinton White House agreed that the Department of Peacekeeping Operations needed fixing and insisted that the UN “learn to say no” to chancy or costly missions.

  In the aftermath of the Somalia firefight, Senate Republicans demanded that the Clinton administration become even less trusting of the United Nations. In January 1994 Senator Bob Dole, a leading defender of the Bosnian Muslims at the time, introduced legislation to limit U.S. participation in UN peacekeeping missions.18 Against the backdrop of the Somalia meltdown and the congressional showdown, the Clinton administration accelerated the development of a formal U.S. peacekeeping doctrine. The job was given to Richard Clarke of the National Security Council, a special assistant to the president who was known as one of the most effective bureaucrats in Washington. In an interagency process that lasted more than a year, Clarke managed the production of a presidential decision directive, PDD-25, which listed sixteen factors that policymakers needed to consider when deciding whether to support peacekeeping activities: seven factors if the United States was to vote in the UN Security Council on peace operations carried out by non-American soldiers, six additional and more stringent factors if U.S. forces were to participate in UN peacekeeping missions, and three final factors if U.S. troops were likely to engage in actual combat. U.S. participation had to advance U.S. interests, be necessary for the operation’s success, and garner domestic and congressional support. The risk of casualties had to be “acceptable.” An exit strategy had to be shown.19 In the words of Representative David Obey of Wisconsin, the restrictive checklist tried to satisfy the American desire for “zero degree of involvement, and zero degree of risk, and zero degree of pain and confusion.”20 The architects of the doctrine remain its strongest defenders. “Many say PDD-25 was some evil thing designed to kill peacekeeping, when in fact it was there to save peacekeeping,” Clarke says. “Peacekeeping was almost dead. There was no support for it in the U.S. government, and the peacekeepers were not effective in the field.” Although the directive was not publicly released until May 3, 1994, a month into the genocide in Rwanda, the considerations encapsulated in the doctrine and the administration’s frustration with peacekeeping greatly influenced the thinking of U.S. officials involved in shaping Rwanda policy.