A Problem From Hell

by Samantha Power

  Dallaire did not then imagine a full-scale, countrywide genocide. Indeed, although he quickly grasped the savage nature of the violence, his imagination was hemmed in by his knowledge of the region’s “last war,” which had occurred between Tutsi and Hutu in neighboring Burundi. “Burundi had just blown up, and 50,000 had been killed in just a few days,” Dallaire explains. “So when the plane went down, we actually expected around 50,000 plus dead. Can you imagine having that expectation in Europe? Racism slips in so it changes our expectations.” Still, with the smell of decomposing flesh already intolerable, Dallaire knew that regardless of the numbers likely to be killed, he would need outside help.

  On April 10 Dallaire made the most important request of his life. He telephoned New York and asked for reinforcements so as to double his troop strength to 5,000. Just as crucial, he appealed for a more forceful mandate so he could send his peacekeepers to intervene to stop the killings. If he did not get a positive response, he knew he had neither the soldiers, the ammunition, the fuel, the vehicles, the communication equipment, nor even the water or food—what few survival rations he had were rotten and inedible—to mount any sustained opposition to the militiamen. He could do nothing but await his instructions. The United States, more than any other country, would dictate the UN reply.

  The Intervention That Wasn’t

  David Rawson was sitting with his wife in their residence watching a taped broadcast of the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour when he heard the back-to-back explosions that signaled the downing of President Habyarimana’s plane. As the U.S. ambassador, Rawson was concerned primarily for American citizens, whom, he feared, would be killed or injured in any outbreak of fighting. The United States made the decision to withdraw its personnel and nationals on April 7. Penned within his house, Rawson did not think his presence was of any use. Looking back, he says, “Did we have a moral responsibility to stay there? Would it have made a difference? I don’t know, but the killings were taking place in broad daylight while we were there. I didn’t feel that we were achieving much.”

  Still, about 300 Rwandans from the neighborhood had gathered at Rawson’s residence seeking refuge, and when the Americans cleared out, the local people were left to their fates. Rawson recalls, “I told the people who were there that we were leaving and the flag was coming down, and they would have to make their own choice about what to do. . . . Nobody really asked us to take them with us.” Rawson says he could not help even those who worked closest to him. His chief steward, who served dinner and washed dishes, called the ambassador from his home and pleaded, “We’re in terrible danger. Please come and get us.” Rawson says, “I had to tell him, ‘We can’t move. We can’t come.’” The steward and his wife were killed.

  Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Moose was away from Washington, so Bushnell, the acting assistant secretary, was made the director of the task force that managed the Rwanda evacuation. Her focus, like Rawson’s, was on the fate of U.S. citizens. “I felt very strongly that my first obligation was to the Americans,” she recalls. “I was sorry about the Rwandans, of course, but my job was to get our folks out. . . . Then again, people didn’t know that it was a genocide. What I was told was, ‘Look, Pru, these people do this from time to time.’ We thought we’d be right back.”

  At a State Department press conference on April 8, Bushnell made an appearance and spoke gravely about the mounting violence in Rwanda and the status of Americans there. After she left the podium, Michael McCurry, the department spokesman, took her place and criticized foreign governments for preventing the screening of the Steven Spielberg film Schindler’s List. “This film movingly portrays. . . the twentieth century’s most horrible catastrophe,” McCurry said. “And it shows that even in the midst of genocide, one individual can make a difference.” McCurry urged that the film be shown worldwide. “The most effective way to avoid the recurrence of genocidal tragedy,” he declared, “is to ensure that past acts of genocide are never forgotten.”30 No one made any connection between Bushnell’s remarks and McCurry’s. Neither journalists nor officials in the United States were focused on the Tutsi.

  On April 9 and 10, in five different convoys, Ambassador Rawson and 250 Americans were evacuated from Kigali and other points. “When we left, the cars were stopped and searched,” Rawson says. “It would have been impossible to get Tutsi through.” All told, thirty-five local employees of the U.S. embassy were killed in the genocide.

  Secretary of State Warren Christopher knew little about Africa. At one meeting with his top advisers, several weeks after the plane crash, he pulled an atlas off his shelf to help him locate the country. Belgian foreign minister Willie Claes recalls trying to discuss Rwanda with his American counterpart and being told, “I have other responsibilities.” Christopher appeared on the NBC news program Meet the Press the morning the U.S. evacuation was completed. “In the great tradition, the ambassador was in the last car,” Christopher said proudly. “So that evacuation has gone very well.” Christopher stressed that although U.S. marines had been dispatched to Burundi, there were no plans to send them into Rwanda to restore order: They were in the region as a safety net, in case they were needed to assist in the evacuation. “It’s always a sad moment when the Americans have to leave,” he said, “but it was the prudent thing to do.”31 The Republican Senate minority leader, Bob Dole, agreed. “I don’t think we have any national interest there,” Dole said on April 10. “The Americans are out, and as far as I’m concerned, in Rwanda, that ought to be the end of it.”32

  Dallaire, too, had been ordered to make the evacuation of foreigners his priority. At the UN, Kofi Annan’s Department of Peacekeeping Operations, which had rejected the field commander’s proposed raid on arms caches in January, sent an explicit cable: “You should make every effort not to compromise your impartiality or to act beyond your mandate, but [you] may exercise your discretion to do [so] should this be essential for the evacuation of foreign nationals. This should not, repeat not, extend to participating in possible combat except in self-defense.”33 Neutrality was essential. Avoiding combat was paramount, but Dallaire could make an exception for non-Rwandans.

  While the United States evacuated overland without an American military escort, the Europeans sent troops to Rwanda so that their personnel could exit by air. On April 9 Dallaire watched covetously as just over 1,000 French, Belgian, and Italian soldiers descended on the Kigali airport to begin evacuating their expatriates. These commandos were clean-shaven, well fed, and heavily armed, in marked contrast to Dallaire’s exhausted, hungry, ragtag peacekeeping force.

  If the soldiers ferried in for the evacuation had teamed up with UNAMIR, Dallaire would have had a sizable deterrent force. He commanded 440 Belgians, 942 Bangladeshis, 843 Ghanaians, 60 Tunisians, and 255 others from twenty countries. He could also call on a reserve of 800 Belgians in Nairobi. If the major powers had reconfigured the 1,000-man European evacuation force and the 300 U.S. Marines on standby in Burundi and contributed them to Dallaire’s mission, he would finally have had the numbers to stage rescue operations and to confront the killers. “Mass slaughter was happening, and suddenly there in Kigali we had the forces we needed to contain it, and maybe even to stop it,” he recalls. “Yet they picked up their people and turned and walked away.”

  The consequences of the exclusive attention to foreigners were felt immediately. In the days after the plane crash, some 2,000 Rwandans, including 400 children, had grouped at the Ecole Technique Officielle under the protection of about ninety Belgian soldiers. Many of the Rwandans were already suffering from machete wounds. They gathered in the classrooms and on the playing field outside the school. Rwandan government and militia forces lay in wait nearby, drinking beer and chanting, “Pawa, pawa,” for “Hutu power.” On April 11 the Belgian peacekeepers were ordered to regroup at the airport to aid the evacuation of European civilians. Knowing they were trapped, several Rwandans pursued the jeeps, shouting, “Do not abandon us!” The UN sold
iers shooed them away from their vehicles and fired warning shots over their heads. When the peacekeepers had departed out through one gate, Hutu militiamen entered through another, firing machine guns and throwing grenades. Most of the 2,000 gathered there were killed.34

  In the three days during which some 4,000 foreigners were evacuated, about 20,000 Rwandans were killed. After the American evacuees were safely out and the U.S. embassy had been closed, Bill and Hillary Clinton visited the U.S. officials who had manned the emergency-operations room at the State Department and offered congratulations on a “job well done.”

  What Did the United States Know?

  Just when did Washington learn of the sinister Hutu designs on Rwanda’s Tutsi? As always, the precise nature and extent of the slaughter was obscured by the civil war, the withdrawal of U.S. diplomatic sources, some confused press reporting, and the lies of the perpetrator government. Nonetheless, both the testimony of U.S. officials who worked the issue day to day and the declassified documents unearthed by the National Security Archive indicate that plenty was known about the killers’ intentions. Those officials who were quickest to diagnose genocide looked not at the numbers killed, which were, as always, difficult to ascertain. They looked instead at the perpetrators’ intent: Were Hutu forces attempting to destroy Rwanda’s Tutsi? The answer to this question was available quickly: “By 8 a.m. the morning after the plane crash, we knew what was happening, that there was systematic killing of Tutsi,” Joyce Leader, the deputy chief of mission, recalls. “People were calling me and telling me who was getting killed. I knew they were going door-to-door.” Back at the State Department, she explained to her colleagues that three kinds of killing were going on: casualties in war, politically motivated murder, and genocide. Dallaire’s early cables to New York likewise described the armed conflict that had resumed between rebels and government forces and also stated plainly that savage “ethnic cleansing” of Tutsi was occurring. U.S. analysts warned that mass killings would increase. In an April 11 memo prepared for Frank Wisner, the undersecretary of defense for policy, in advance of a dinner with Henry Kissinger, a key talking point was that “unless both sides can be convinced to return to the peace process, a massive (hundreds of thousands of deaths) bloodbath will ensue.”35

  Whatever the inevitable imperfections of U.S. intelligence early on, the reports from Rwanda were severe enough to distinguish Hutu killers from ordinary combatants in civil war. And they certainly warranted a heightened intelligence gathering operation to snap satellite photos of large gatherings of Rwandan civilians or of mass graves, to intercept military communications, and to infiltrate the country in person. In fact, in a shocking new revelation, some two dozen U.S. special forces were sent on a one-day reconnaissance mission to Kigali within a few days of the beginning of the murder campaign. According to one U.S. officer, the Marines returned from Kigali “white as ghosts,” describing “so many bodies on the streets that you could walk from one body to the other without touching the ground.” They reported that the metal leaf-springs of cars were being sharpened into knives, and that the scale of the slaughter was mammoth. The men were debriefed immediately, and the report was sent to European Command Headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany. On April 26, 1994, an unattributed intelligence memo titled “Responsibility for Massacres in Rwanda” reported that the ringleaders of the genocide, Colonel Bagosora and his crisis committee, were determined to liquidate their opposition and exterminate the Tutsi populace. A May 9 Defense Intelligence Agency report stated plainly that the Rwandan violence was not spontaneous but was directed by the government, with lists of victims prepared well in advance. The agency observed that an “organized parallel effort of genocide [was] being implemented by the army to destroy the leadership of the Tutsi community.”

  Dallaire was acutely conscious of the importance of the media. Although he had had no previous occasion in his military career to court press attention, he says he immediately saw that a “reporter with a line to the West was worth a battalion on the ground.” Between juggling the safety of his own peacekeepers and the protection of Rwandans, Dallaire shuttled reporters around Kigali whenever possible. “At that point,” he recalls, “the journalists were really all I had.” He permitted Mark Doyle of the BBC to live with the peacekeepers and file two stories a day from Dallaire’s satellite phone.

  Not all the reporting helped clarify the nature of the violence for the outside world. If all the reports portrayed the killing as extensive, many also treated the violence as typical. During the conflict in Bosnia, U.S. officials had tried to convince journalists that the conflict was the product of “ancient tribal hatreds”; in Rwanda reporters in the field adopted this frame on their own. Asked what caused such violence, CNN’s Gary Streiker reported by telephone from Nairobi that “what’s behind this story is probably the worst tribal hostility in all of Africa, hostility that goes back centuries long before European colonization.”36 Also reporting from Nairobi, Michael Skoler of NPR told of Tutsi killing Hutu as well as Hutu killing Tutsi.37 When NPR’s Daniel Zwerdling interviewed Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, an associate professor of African studies at Howard University, Zwerdling simply could not accept Ntalaja’s nuanced explanation of the violence:

  Zwerdling: Why are things in Africa so bad? Why is tribal violence so deep?

  Ntalaja: Most of it has been exacerbated by politicians hungry for more power.

  Zwerdling:. . . Well, of course, politicians can exacerbate what tensions already exist. I mean, you’re not arguing, are you, that these tribal hatreds were not already there before modern politicians came along?

  Ntalaja: I’m saying that the ethnic groups do have prejudices and people do tend to feel they may be different from other groups. But it’s not enough to make a person pick up a knife or a gun and kill somebody else. It is when politicians come and excite passion and try to threaten people—make people believe that they are being threatened by other groups that are going to be extinguished.

  Zwerdling: Of course, in most of these battlegrounds, though, there is ancient ethnic hatred and something that surprises me actually is that you’re blaming modern, contemporary African politicians for this divide and conquer, playing one tribe against another.38

  Still, for all the flaws in the coverage (especially by those stationed outside Rwanda), the major media gave anybody reading or watching cause for grave alarm. From April 8, 1994, onward, reporters described the widespread targeting of Tutsi and the corpses piling up on Kigali’s streets. American journalists relayed stories of missionaries and embassy officials who had been unable to save their Rwandan friends and neighbors from death. An April 9 front-page Washington Post story quoted reports that the Rwandan employees of the major international relief agencies had been executed “in front of horrified expatriate staffers.”39 On April 10 a New York Times front-page article quoted the Red Cross claim that “tens of thousands” were dead, 8,000 in Kigali alone, and that corpses were “in the houses, in the streets, everywhere.”40 The Post the same day led its front-page story with a description of “a pile of corpses six feet high” outside the main hospital.41 On April 12 the American evacuees, many of whom were Christian missionaries, described what they had seen. Phil Van Lanen, a relief worker with the Seventh-Day Adventist Church mission in Rwanda, wept openly when he told William Schmidt of the Times of the murder of the eight Tutsi girls who used to work in his dental clinic.42 Chris Grundmann, an American evacuee who worked for the Center for Disease Control, was quoted as saying, “It was the most basic terror.” He told how he and his family hunkered down in their house with mattresses against the windows and listened to the ordeals of Rwandan victims over a two-way radio. “The UN radio was filled with national staff screaming for help,” he said. “They were begging: ‘Come save me! My house is being blown up,’ or ‘They’re killing me.’ There was nothing we could do. At one point we just had to turn it off.”43

  On April 16 the New York Times reported the shooting and hacking
to death of nearly 1,200 men, women, and children in the church where they had sought refuge.44 On April 19 Human Rights Watch, which, through Des Forges, had excellent sources on the ground in Rwanda, estimated the number of dead at 100,000 and called on the Security Council to use the term “genocide.”45 The 100,000 figure (which proved to be a gross underestimation) was picked up immediately by the Western media, endorsed by the Red Cross, and featured on the front page of the Washington Post.46 On April 24 the Post reported how “the heads and limbs of victims were sorted and piled neatly, a bone-chilling order in the midst of chaos that harkened back to the Holocaust.”47 The Red Cross issued the most authoritative statement on the killings on April 26, declaring that “at least 100,000, but perhaps as many as 300,000” Rwandans had already been killed. On April 28 the British aid agency Oxfam warned that these estimates were too low and that 500,000 people had been reported missing.48

  The Tutsi rebels in the Rwandan Patriotic Front publicly appealed for a Western response. On April 13 they accused the Rwandan government of carrying out genocide. They invoked the Holocaust. In an April 23 letter to the head of the Security Council, the RPF representative, Claude Dusaidi, reminded Security Council members and the secretary-general, “When the institution of the UN was created after the Second World War, one of its fundamental objectives was to see to it that what happened to the Jews in Nazi Germany would never happen again.”49 But as Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani had found in Iraq and as the Bosnian government was learning around the same time, those who are suffering genocide are deemed to be biased and unreliable. Besides, the analogy that most gripped American minds at the time was not the Holocaust but Somalia. Dusaidi met with Albright, the U.S. ambassador, four times during the genocide. He did not know it, but Albright was aware of her constraints going into the meetings. Before one of them, she received a briefing memo that reminded her, “You should be mostly in a listening mode during this meeting. You can voice general sympathy for the horrific situation in Rwanda, but should not commit the USG to anything.”50