A Problem From Hell

by Samantha Power

  The UN Withdrawal

  When the killing had begun, Romeo Dallaire expected and appealed for reinforcements. Within hours, he had cabled UN headquarters in New York: “Give me the means and I can do more.” He was sending peacekeepers on rescue missions around the city, and he felt it was essential to increase the size and improve the quality of the UN’s presence. But the United States opposed the idea of sending reinforcements, no matter where they were from. The fear, articulated mainly at the Pentagon, was that what would start as a small engagement by foreign troops would end as a large and costly one by Americans. This was the lesson of Somalia, where U.S. troops had gotten into trouble after returning to bail out the beleaguered Pakistanis. The logical outgrowth of this fear was an effort to steer clear of Rwanda entirely and be sure others did the same. Only by yanking Dallaire’s entire peacekeeping force could the United States protect itself from involvement down the road. One senior U.S. official remembers,

  When the reports of the deaths of the ten Belgians came in, it was clear that it was Somalia redux, and the sense was that there would be an expectation everywhere that the U.S. would get involved. We thought leaving the peacekeepers in Rwanda and having them confront the violence would take us where we’d been before. It was a foregone conclusion that the United States wouldn’t intervene and that the concept of UN peacekeeping could not be sacrificed again.

  “A foregone conclusion.” What is most remarkable about the American response to the Rwandan genocide is not so much the absence of U.S. military action as that during the entire genocide the possibility of U.S. military intervention was never even debated. Indeed, the United States resisted even diplomatic intervention.

  The bodies of the slain Belgian soldiers were returned to Brussels on April 14. One of the pivotal conversations in the course of the genocide took place around that time, when Willie Claes, the Belgian foreign minister, called the State Department to request “cover.” “We are pulling out, but we don’t want to be seen to be doing it alone,” Claes said, asking the Americans to support a full UN withdrawal. Dallaire had not anticipated that Belgium would extract its soldiers, removing the backbone of his mission and stranding Rwandans in their hour of greatest need. “I expected the ex-colonial white countries would stick it out even if they took casualties,” he remembers. “I thought their pride would have led them to stay to try to sort the place out. The Belgian decision caught me totally off guard. I was truly stunned.”

  Belgium did not want to leave ignominiously, by itself. Warren Christopher agreed to back Belgian requests for a full UN exit. Policy over the next month or so can be described simply: no U.S. military intervention, robust demands for a withdrawal of all of Dallaire’s forces, and no support for a new UN mission that would challenge the killers. Belgium had the cover it needed.

  On April 15 Secretary Christopher sent Ambassador Albright at the UN one of the most forceful documents produced in the entire three months of the genocide. Christopher’s cable instructed Albright to demand a full UN withdrawal. The directions, which were heavily influenced by Richard Clarke at the NSC and which bypassed Steinberg, were unequivocal about the next steps. Saying that the United States had “fully” taken into account the “humanitarian reasons put forth for retention of UNAMIR elements in Rwanda,” Christopher wrote that there was “insufficient justification” to retain a UN presence:

  The international community must give highest priority to full, orderly withdrawal of all UNAMIR personnel as soon as possible. . . . We will oppose any effort at this time to preserve a UNAMIR presence in Rwanda. . . . Our opposition to retaining a UNAMIR presence in Rwanda is firm. It is based on our conviction that the Security Council has an obligation to ensure that peacekeeping operations are viable, that they are capable of fulfilling their mandates, and that UN peacekeeping personnel are not placed or retained, knowingly, in an untenable situation.66

  “Once we knew the Belgians were leaving, we were left with a rump mission incapable of doing anything to help people,” Clarke remembers. “They were doing nothing to stop the killings.”

  But Clarke underestimated the deterrent effect that Dallaire’s very few peacekeepers were having. Although many soldiers hunkered down, terrified, others scoured Kigali, rescuing Tutsi, and later established defensive positions in the city, opening their doors to the fortunate Tutsi who made it through roadblocks to reach them. One Senegalese captain, Mbaye Daigne, saved 100 or so lives single-handedly. Some 25,000 Rwandans eventually assembled at positions manned by UNAMIR personnel. The Hutu were generally reluctant to massacre large groups of Tutsi if foreigners (armed or unarmed) were present. It did not take many UN soldiers to dissuade the Hutu from attacking. At the Hotel des Mille Collines, ten peacekeepers and four UN military observers helped to protect the several hundred civilians sheltered there for the duration of the crisis. About 10,000 Rwandans gathered at the Amohoro Stadium under light UN cover. Beardsley, Dallaire’s executive assistant, remembers, “If there was any determined resistance at close quarters, the government guys tended to back off.” Kevin Aiston, the Rwanda desk officer at the State Department, was keeping track of Rwandan civilians under UN protection. When Deputy Assistant Secretary Bushnell told him of the U.S. decision to demand a UNAMIR withdrawal, he turned pale. “We can’t,” he said. Bushnell replied, “The train has already left the station.”

  On April 19 the Belgian colonel Luc Marchal delivered his final salute to Dallaire and departed with the last of his soldiers. The Belgian withdrawal reduced UNAMIR’s troop strength to 2,100. What was more crucial, Dallaire lost his best troops. Command and control among Dallaire’s remaining forces became tenuous. Dallaire soon lost every line of communication to the countryside. He had only a single satellite phone link to the outside world.

  The UN Security Council now made a decision that sealed the Tutsi’s fate and signaled to the Hutu militia that they would have free rein. The U.S. demand for a full UN withdrawal had been opposed by some African nations as well as Albright, so the United States lobbied instead for a dramatic drawdown in troop strength. On April 21, amid press reports of some 100,000 dead in Rwanda, the Security Council voted to slash UNAMIR’s force size to 270.67 Albright went along, publicly declaring that a “small, skeletal” operation would be left in Kigali to “show the will of the international community.”68

  After the UN vote, Clarke sent a memorandum to Lake reporting that language about “the safety and security of Rwandans under UN protection had been inserted by US/UN at the end of the day to prevent an otherwise unanimous UNSC from walking away from the at-risk Rwandans under UN protection as the peacekeepers drew down to 270.” In other words, the memorandum suggested that the United States was leading efforts to ensure that the Rwandans under UN protection were not abandoned. The opposite was true.

  Most of Dallaire’s troops were evacuated by April 25. Although he was supposed to keep only 270 peacekeepers, 503 remained. By this time Dallaire was trying to deal with a bloody frenzy. “My force was standing knee-deep in mutilated bodies, surrounded by the guttural moans of dying people, looking into the eyes of children bleeding to death with their wounds burning in the sun and being invaded by maggots and flies,” he later wrote. “I found myself walking through villages where the only sign of life was a goat, or a chicken, or a songbird, as all the people were dead, their bodies being eaten by voracious packs of wild dogs.”69

  Dallaire had to work within narrow limits. He attempted simply to keep the positions he held and to protect the 25,000 Rwandans under UN supervision while hoping that the member states on the Security Council would change their minds and send him some help while it still mattered.

  By coincidence Rwanda held one of the rotating seats on the Security Council at the time of the genocide. Neither the United States nor any other UN member state ever suggested that the representative of the genocidal government be expelled from the council. Nor did any Security Council country offer to provide safe haven to Rwandan refu
gees who escaped the carnage. In one instance Dallaire’s forces succeeded in evacuating a group of Rwandans by plane to Kenya. The Nairobi authorities allowed the plane to land, sequestered it in a hangar, and echoing the American decision to turn back the USS St. Louis during the Holocaust, then forced the plane to return to Rwanda. The fate of the passengers is unknown.

  Throughout this period the Clinton administration was largely silent. The closest it came to a public denunciation of the Rwandan government occurred after personal lobbying by Human Rights Watch, when Anthony Lake issued a statement calling on Rwandan military leaders by name to “do everything in their power to end the violence immediately.” When he is informed six years after the genocide that human rights groups and U.S. officials point to this statement as the sum total of official public attempts to shame the Rwandan government, he seems stunned. “You’re kidding,” he says. “That’s truly pathetic.”

  At the State Department the diplomacy was conducted privately, by telephone. Prudence Bushnell regularly set her alarm for 2:00 a.m. and phoned Rwandan government officials. She spoke several times with Augustin Bizimungu, the Rwandan military chief of staff. “These were the most bizarre phone calls,” she says. “He spoke in perfectly charming French. ‘Oh, it’s so nice to hear from you,’ he said. I told him, ‘I am calling to tell you President Clinton is going to hold you accountable for the killings.’ He said, ‘Oh, how nice it is that your president is thinking of me.’” When she called Tutsi rebel commander Paul Kagame, he would say, “Madame, they’re killing my people.”

  The Pentagon “Chop”

  The daily meeting of the Rwanda interagency working group was attended, either in person or by teleconference, by representatives from the various State Department bureaus, the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and the intelligence community. Any proposal that originated in the working group had to survive the Pentagon “chop.” “Hard intervention,” meaning U.S. military action, was obviously out of the question. But Pentagon officials routinely stymied initiatives for “soft intervention” as well.

  The Pentagon May 1 discussion paper on Rwanda, referred to earlier, ran down a list of the working group’s six short-term policy objectives and carped at most of them. The fear of a slippery slope was pervasive. Next to the seemingly innocuous suggestion that the United States “support the UN and others in attempts to achieve a cease-fire” the Pentagon official responded, “Need to change ‘attempts’ to ‘political efforts’—without ‘political’ there is a danger of signing up to troop contributions.”70

  The one policy move the Defense Department supported was a U.S. effort to achieve an arms embargo. But the same discussion paper acknowledged the ineffectiveness of this step: “We do not envision it will have a significant impact on the killings because machetes, knives and other hand implements have been the most common weapons.”71

  Dallaire never spoke to Bushnell or to Tony Marley, the U.S. military liaison to the Arusha process, during the genocide, but they separately reached the same conclusions. Seeing that no troops were forthcoming, they turned their attention to measures short of full-scale deployment that might alleviate the suffering. Dallaire pleaded with New York, and Bushnell and her team recommended in Washington, that something be done to “neutralize” Radio Mille Collines.

  The country best equipped to prevent the genocide planners from broadcasting murderous instructions directly to the population was the United States. Marley offered three possibilities. The United States could destroy the antenna. It could transmit “counterbroadcasts” urging perpetrators to stop the genocide. Or it could jam the hate radio station’s broadcasts. This could have been done from an airborne platform such as the Air National Guard’s Commando Solo airplane. Anthony Lake raised the matter with Secretary of Defense William Perry at the end of April. Pentagon officials considered all the proposals nonstarters. On May 5 Frank Wisner, the undersecretary of defense for policy, prepared a memo for Sandy Berger, the deputy national security adviser. Wisner’s memo testifies to the unwillingness of the U.S. government to make even financial sacrifices to diminish the killing:

  We have looked at options to stop the broadcasts within the Pentagon, discussed them interagency and concluded jamming is an ineffective and expensive mechanism that will not accomplish the objective the NSC Advisor seeks.

  International legal conventions complicate airborne or ground based jamming and the mountainous terrain reduces the effectiveness of either option. Commando Solo, an Air National Guard asset, is the only suitable DOD jamming platform. It costs approximately $8500 per flight hour and requires a semi-secure area of operations due to its vulnerability and limited self-protection.

  I believe it would be wiser to use air to assist in Rwanda in the [food] relief effort.72

  The U.S. plane would have needed to remain in Rwandan airspace while it waited for radio transmissions to begin. “First we would have had to figure out whether it made sense to use Commando Solo,” Wisner recalls. “Then we had to get it from where it was already and be sure it could be moved. Then we would have needed flight clearance from all the countries nearby. And then we would need the political go-ahead. By the time we got all this, weeks would have passed. And it was not going to solve the fundamental problem, which was one that needed to be addressed militarily.” Pentagon planners understood that stopping the genocide required a military solution. Neither they nor the White House wanted any part in a military solution. Yet instead of undertaking other forms of intervention that might at least have saved some lives, they justified inaction by arguing that a military solution was required.

  It was clear that radio jamming would have been no panacea, but most of the delays Wisner cites could have been avoided if senior administration officials had followed through. Instead, justifications for standing by abounded. In early May the State Department Legal Adviser’s Office issued a finding against radio jamming, citing international broadcasting agreements and the American commitment to free speech. When Bushnell raised radio jamming yet again at a meeting, one Pentagon official chided her for naiveté: “Pru, radios don’t kill people. People kill people!”

  The Defense Department was disdainful both of the policy ideas being circulated at the working-group meetings, and, memos indicate, of the people circulating them. A memo by one Defense Department aide observed that the State Department’s Africa bureau had received a phone call from a Kigali hotel owner who said that his hotel and the civilians inside were about to be attacked. The memo snidely reported that the Africa bureau’s proposed “solution” was “Pru Bushnell will call the [Rwandan] military and tell them we will hold them personally responsible if anything happens (!).”73 (In fact the hotel owner, who survived the genocide, later acknowledged that phone calls from Washington played a key role in dissuading the killers from massacring the inhabitants of the hotel.)

  However significant and obstructionist the role of the Pentagon in April and May, Defense Department officials were stepping into a vacuum. As one U.S. official put it, “Look, nobody senior was paying any attention to this mess. And in the absence of any political leadership from the top, when you have one group that feels pretty strongly about what shouldn’t be done, it is extremely likely they are going to end up shaping U.S. policy.” Lieutenant General Wesley Clark looked to the White House for leadership. “The Pentagon is always going to be the last to want to intervene,” he says. “It is up to the civilians to tell us they want to do something and we’ll figure out how to do it.”

  But with no powerful personalities or high-ranking officials arguing forcefully for meaningful action, midlevel Pentagon officials held sway, vetoing or stalling on hesitant proposals put forward by midlevel State Department and NSC officials. If Pentagon objections were to be overcome, the president, Secretary Christopher, Secretary Perry, or Lake would have had to step forward to “own” the problem, which did not happen.

  The deck was stacked against Rwandans, who were hiding wherever t
hey could and praying for rescue. The American public expressed no interest in Rwanda, and the crisis was treated as a civil war requiring a cease-fire or as a “peacekeeping problem” requiring a UN withdrawal. It was not treated as a genocide demanding instant action. The top policy-makers trusted that their subordinates were doing all they could do, while the subordinates worked with an extremely narrow understanding of what the United States would do.

  Society-Wide Silence

  The Clinton administration did not actively consider U.S. military intervention, it blocked the deployment of UN peacekeepers, and it refrained from undertaking softer forms of intervention. The inaction can be attributed to decisions and nondecisions made at the National Security Council, at the State Department, in the Pentagon, and even at the U.S. mission to the UN. But as was true with previous genocides, these U.S. officials were making potent political calculations about what the U.S. public would abide. Officials simultaneously believed the American people would oppose U.S. military intervention in central Africa and feared that the public might support intervention if they realized a genocide was under way. As always, they looked to op-ed pages of elite journals, popular protest, and congressional noise to gauge public interest. No group or groups in the United States made Clinton administration decisionmakers feel or fear that they would pay a political price for doing nothing to save Rwandans. Indeed, all the signals told them to steer clear. Only after the genocide would it become possible to identify an American “constituency” for action.