A Problem From Hell

by Samantha Power

  Back in the United States, Rwanda was extremely low on the list of American priorities. When Woods of the Defense Department’s African affairs bureau suggested that the Pentagon add Rwanda-Burundi to its list of potential trouble spots, his bosses told him, in his words, “Look, if something happens in Rwanda-Burundi, we don’t care. Take it off the list. U.S. national interest is not involved and we can’t put all these silly humanitarian issues on lists. . . . Just make it go away.”21

  Every aspect of Dallaire’s UNAMIR was run on a shoestring. It was equipped with hand-me-down vehicles from the UN’s Cambodia mission, and only eighty of the 300 that turned up were usable. When the medical supplies ran out, in March 1994, New York said there was no cash for resupply. Very few goods could be procured locally, given that Rwanda was one of Africa’s poorest nations. Spare parts, batteries, and even ammunition could rarely be found. Dallaire spent some 70 percent of his time battling UN logistics.22

  Dallaire had major problems with his personnel as well. He commanded troops, military observers, and civilian personnel from twenty-six countries. Although multinationality is meant to be a virtue of UN missions, the diversity yielded grave discrepancies in resources. Whereas Belgian troops turned up in Rwanda well armed and ready to perform the tasks assigned to them, the poorer contingents showed up “bare-assed,” in Dallaire’s words, and demanded that the United Nations suit them up. “Since nobody else was offering to send troops, we had to take what we could get,” he says. When Dallaire expressed concern, a senior UN official instructed him to lower his expectations. He recalls, “I was told, ‘Listen, General, you are NATO-trained. This is not NATO.’” Although some 2,500 UNAMIR personnel had arrived by early April 1994, few of the soldiers had the kit they needed to perform even basic tasks.

  The signs of militarization in Rwanda were so widespread that, even though Dallaire lacked much of an intelligence-gathering capacity, he was able to learn of the extremists’ sinister intentions. In December high-ranking military officers from within the Hutu government sent Dallaire a letter warning that Hutu militias were planning massacres. Death lists had become so widely known that individuals had begun paying local militias to have their names removed. In addition to broadcasting incitements against Tutsi, Radio Mille Collines had begun denouncing UN peacekeepers as Tutsi accomplices.

  In January 1994 an anonymous Hutu informant, said to be high up in the inner circles of the Rwandan government, came forward to describe the rapid arming and training of local militias. In what is now referred to as the “Dallaire fax,” Dallaire relayed to New York the informant’s claim that Hutu extremists “had been ordered to register all the Tutsi in Kigali.” “He suspects it is for their extermination,” Dallaire wrote. “Example he gave was that in 20 minutes his personnel could kill up to 1,000 Tutsis.”

  “Jean-Pierre,” as the informant became known, said that the militia planned first to provoke and murder a number of Belgian peacekeepers, in order to “guarantee Belgian withdrawal from Rwanda.” The informant was prepared to identify major arms caches littered throughout Rwanda, including one containing at least 135 weapons, but he wanted passports and protection for his wife and four children. Dallaire admitted the possibility of a trap but said he believed the informant was reliable. He and his UN forces were prepared to act within thirty-six hours. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” Dallaire signed the cable. “Let’s go.”23 He was not asking for permission; he was simply informing headquarters of the arms raids that he had planned.

  © Gilles Peress/Magnum

  The Hutu killers who fled Rwanda after the genocide were required by Zairean border guards to leave their weapons behind. These machetes were piled up outside a customs house on the Rwandan side of the border.

  Annan’s deputy, Iqbal Riza, cabled back to Dallaire on behalf of his boss, rejecting the proposed arms raids. “We said, ‘Not Somalia again,’” Riza remembered later. “Now in Somalia, those troops—U.S., Pakistani—they were acting within their mandate when they were killed. Here, Dallaire was asking to take such risks going outside his mandate. And we said no.”24 The Annan cable suggested that Dallaire focus instead on protecting his forces and avoiding escalation. The Canadian was to notify Rwandan President Habyarimana and the Western ambassadors in Kigali of the informant’s claims. Dallaire contested the decision, battling by telephone with New York and sending five faxes on the subject. Even after Dallaire had confirmed the reliability of the informant, his political masters told him plainly and consistently that the United States in particular would not support such an aggressive interpretation of his mandate. “You’ve got to let me do this,” Dallaire pleaded. “If we don’t stop these weapons, some day those weapons will be used against us.” In Washington Dallaire’s alarm was discounted. Lieutenant Colonel Tony Marley, the U.S. military liaison to the Arusha process, respected Dallaire but knew he was operating in Africa for the first time. “I thought that the neophyte meant well, but I questioned whether he knew what he was talking about,” Marley recalls.

  Even a rise in political assassinations in the spring of 1994 could not attract mainstream attention to Rwanda. On February 21, 1994, right-wing extremists assassinated Felicien Gatabazi, the minister of public works. Martin Bucyana, president of the hard-line Hutu Coalition pour la Défense de la République (Coalition for the Defense of the Republic, or CDR), was killed in the southern Rwandan town of Butare the next day, giving outsiders the impression of tit-for-tat skirmishes rather than a trial balloon for something more ambitious.25 Dallaire wanted to investigate these murders, but he could do little but watch as the feared Interahamwe units became more conspicuous around town, singing, blowing whistles, wearing colorful uniforms, and toting weapons. Machetes hung from belts around their waists, as guns once hung in cowboys’ holsters. Grenades were available at the market for next to nothing. On February 23 Dallaire reported that he was drowning in information about death squad target lists. “Time does seem to be running out for political discussions,” he wrote, noting that “any spark on the security side could have catastrophic consequences.”26

  The Peace Processors

  The United States was alarmed enough about the deterioration for the State Department’s Bureau for African Affairs to send Deputy Assistant Secretary Bushnell and Central Africa Office Director Arlene Render to Rwanda in late March. The daughter of a diplomat, Bushnell had joined the foreign service in 1981, at the age of thirty-five. With her agile mind and sharp tongue, she had earned the attention of George Moose when she served under him at the U.S. embassy in Senegal. When Moose was named the assistant secretary of state for African affairs in 1993, he made Bushnell his deputy. In meetings with President Habyarimana, the able Bushnell warned him that failure to implement Arusha might cause the United States to demand the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers, whose mandate was up for review on April 4. Bushnell ran through all of PDD-25’s “factors for involvement.” She described the congressional mood in the United States. Before leaving, Bushnell said, “President Habyarimana, your name will head this chapter of Rwandan history. It is up to you to decide whether it will be a chapter of glory or a chapter of tragedy.”27 Before she departed Rwanda, Bushnell received a handwritten note from the mercurial president in which he promised to comply with the Arusha agreement and set up the transitional government the following week.

  For all the concern of the U.S. officials familiar with Rwanda, their diplomacy suffered from several weaknesses. First, it continued to reveal its natural bias toward states and negotiations. Because most diplomatic contact occurs between representatives of states, U.S. officials are predisposed to trust the assurances of government officials. In the case of Rwanda, several of these officials were plotting genocide behind the scenes. Those in the U.S. government who knew Rwanda best viewed the escalating violence with a diplomatic prejudice that left them both institutionally oriented toward the Rwandan government and reluctant to do anything to disrupt the peace process. This meant avoid
ing confrontation. An examination of the cable traffic from the U.S. embassy in Kigali to Washington, between the signing of the Arusha agreement and the downing of the presidential plane, reveals that setbacks were perceived as “dangers to the peace process” more than as “dangers to Rwandans.” As was true in the Iran-Iraq war and the Bosnian war, American criticisms were steadfastly leveled at “both sides,” although here Hutu government and militia forces were usually responsible.

  The U.S. ambassador in Kigali, David Rawson, proved especially vulnerable to such bias. Rawson had grown up in Burundi, where his father, an American missionary, had set up a Quaker hospital. He entered the foreign service in 1971. When in 1993, at age fifty-two, he was given the embassy in Rwanda, his first, he could not have been more intimate with the region, the culture, or the peril. He spoke the local language—almost unprecedented for an ambassador in central Africa. But Rawson found it difficult to imagine the Rwandans who surrounded the president as conspirators in genocide. He issued pro forma démarches about Habyarimana’s obstruction of power-sharing, but the cable traffic shows that he accepted the president’s assurances that he was doing all he could. The U.S. investment in the peace process gave rise to a wishful tendency to see peace “around the corner.” Rawson remembers,

  We were naive policy optimists, I suppose. The fact that negotiations can’t work is almost not one of the options open to people who care about peace. We were looking for the hopeful signs, not the dark signs. In fact, we were looking away from the dark signs. . . . One of the things I learned and should have already known is that once you launch a process, it takes on its own momentum. I had said, “Let’s try this, and then if it doesn’t work, we can back away.” But bureaucracies don’t allow that. Once the Washington side buys into a process, it gets pursued, almost blindly.

  Even after the Hutu government began exterminating the country’s Tutsi in April 1994, U.S. diplomats focused most of their efforts on “re-establishing a cease-fire” and “getting Arusha back on track.”

  In order to do so, U.S. and UN officials often threatened to pull out UN peacekeepers as punishment for bad behavior or failure to implement Arusha’s terms.28 The trouble with this approach, which Western officials adopted in Bosnia as well, was that extremists who believed in ethnic purity wanted to see nothing more than a UN withdrawal. As one senior U.S. official remembers, “The first response to trouble is, ‘Let’s yank the peacekeepers.’ But that is like believing that when children are misbehaving the proper response is, ‘Let’s send the babysitter home,’ so the house gets burned down.”

  The second problematic feature of U.S. diplomacy before and during the genocide was a tendency toward blindness bred by familiarity: The few people in Washington who were paying attention to Rwanda before Habyarimana’s plane was shot down were those who had been tracking Rwanda for some time and had thus come to expect a certain level of ethnic violence from the region. And because the U.S. government had tolerated the deaths of some 50,000 civilians in Burundi in October 1993, these officials also knew that Washington would not get exercised over substantial bloodshed. When the massacres began in April, some U.S. regional specialists initially suspected that Rwanda was undergoing “another flare-up” that would involve another “acceptable” (if tragic) round of ethnic murder.

  Rawson had read up on genocide before his posting to Rwanda, surveying what had become a relatively extensive scholarly literature on its causes. But although he expected internecine killing, he did not anticipate the scale at which it occurred. “Nothing in Rwandan culture or history could have led a person to that forecast,” he says. “Most of us thought that if a war broke out, it would be quick, that these poor people didn’t have the resources, the means, to fight a sophisticated war. I couldn’t have known that they would do each other in with the most economic means.” Assistant Secretary Moose agrees: “We were psychologically and imaginatively too limited.”

  Dallaire, for one, quickly saw that withdrawal threats only encouraged the militants. They knew that if they pushed harder, disrupted longer, they could get rid of the UN peacekeepers who were implementing the agreement they hoped to sabotage. UN withdrawal was a carrot, not a stick. But as the Canadian officer resisted the political approach of his colleagues, he was scolded and scoffed. “The general attitude,” remembers Beardsley, “was, ‘Shut up. You’re a soldier. Let the experts handle this.’”

  But within weeks the “experts” had vanished, and Dallaire was on his own.

  Recognition

  Crimes Against Humanity

  In the first days after the checkpoints were hoisted and the massacres began on April 6, 1994, Dallaire maintained his contacts with Colonel Bagosora and other Rwandan army officials. But these men, the ringleaders of the slaughter, assured Dallaire and foreign diplomats that they were committed to stopping the killing and continuing the peace process. They even appealed to Dallaire for help in brokering a cease-fire. They claimed, as had Talaat and Milosevic, that they needed time to rein in the “uncontrolled elements.”

  Initially, although Dallaire was aghast at the killings, he believed that the Hutu gunmen and militia were only pursuing their “political enemies.” In the first few days, moderate Hutu and leading Tutsi politicians had been the main targets of attack. As in Cambodia, this gave rise to the notion that the killings were narrowly tailored reprisals rather than harbingers of a broadly ambitious genocide. Ordinary people, Dallaire and others hoped, would be left alone.

  Dallaire and other foreign observers passed through two phases of recognition. The first involved coming to grips with the occurrence not only of a conventional war but of massive crimes against humanity. All Tutsi were targets. The second involved understanding that what was taking place was genocide.

  The first wave of recognition swept through UN headquarters—and was relayed back to Western capitals—very quickly. Two days after the plane crash, on April 8, Dallaire sent a cable to New York indicating that ethnicity was one of the dimensions behind the killing. The telegram detailed the political killings, which then included not only ten Belgian peacekeepers and Prime Minister Uwilingiyimana, but also the chairman of the Liberal Party, the minister of labor, the minister of agriculture, and dozens of others. It refuted the impression (and the claim by the Hutu authorities) that the violence was uncontrolled. Dallaire described instead a “very well-planned, organized, deliberate and conducted campaign of terror initiated principally by the Presidential Guard”; he urged that UN forces make protecting government leaders their “major task.”29 Dallaire still considered the killings mainly as political adjuncts to a civil war and his own role as broker of a cease-fire.

  The following day, though, Dallaire’s thinking shifted. Beardsley, Dallaire’s executive assistant, got a frantic call by radio from a pair of Polish UN military observers who were at a church run by Polish missionaries across town. “Come get us,” the UN officials said. “They are massacring people here.” Beardsley got permission from Dallaire to take a Bangladeshi armored personnel carrier through the front lines. He passed about twenty roadblocks and reached the church.

  When we arrived, I looked at the school across the street, and there were children, I don’t know how many, forty, sixty, eighty children stacked up outside who had all been chopped up with machetes. Some of their mothers had heard them screaming and had come running, and the militia had killed them, too. We got out of the vehicle and entered the church. There we found 150 people, dead mostly, though some were still groaning, who had been attacked the night before. The Polish priests told us it had been incredibly well organized. The Rwandan army had cleared out the area, the gendarmerie had rounded up all the Tutsi, and the militia had hacked them to death.

  Beardsley left a first-aid kit and his ration of water for the wounded. He promised to come back later in the evening with help. But by the time he managed to clear dozens of additional roadblocks, the militia had finished off the survivors. The Polish priests, who had been pinne
d up to the wall with a barrel of the gun, were broken-hearted. Beardsley remembers, “They kept repeating, over and over, ‘These were our parishioners.’” All Beardsley could do was make sure the details of the massacre were communicated back to headquarters in New York.

  By the fourth day, April 10, 1994, Dallaire had concluded that Bagosora and the Hutu militants were ordering a massive campaign of crimes against humanity, against anybody carrying a Tutsi identity card. “Only when I saw with my own eyes the militias at the roadblocks pulling people out of their vehicles did it really become clear,” he says. “At that point you couldn’t argue anymore that it was just politically motivated slaughter.” Hutu officers kept insisting that the violence was a product of war, but Dallaire had come to see that the civil war between the RPF rebels and the government forces was a separate problem. “I saw that one side was eliminating civilians behind the lines,” Dallaire explains. “And what was going on at the front had nothing much to do with the killings of civilians going on in the back.”