A Problem From Hell

by Samantha Power

  The U.S. Senate authorized only $170 million of the $320 million Clinton requested and wrote into the legislation that all forces be withdrawn by October 1 unless Congress specifically approved a longer stay. Although cost had been one of several factors behind U.S. opposition to sending UN reinforcements to Rwanda ahead of and during the genocide, its peacekeeping contribution would probably have hovered around $30 million; it ended up spending $237 million on humanitarian relief alone.96

  In late August U.S. ambassador David Rawson held a press conference back in Kigali. Even after the deaths of 800,000 people, he remained committed to the Arusha peace process:

  Since they all speak the same language, have basically the same culture and the same history, the reality of it is if they all want to live in Rwanda, then they have to at some point sit around a table and figure out the formulas that will make this happen. We believe that the Arusha formulas, negotiated over a very intense year of negotiations in Arusha, provide that kind of power-sharing formula that would make that happen. And the closer that, even with all the horror that has happened, the current arrangements can hew to the Arusha formulas, we believe, the more chance there is for success.97

  In one of his parting cables, Dallaire summed up his experience in UNAMIR:

  What we have been living here is a disgrace. The international community and the UN member states have on the one hand been appalled at what has happened in Rwanda while, on the other hand, these same authorities, apart from a few exceptions, have done nothing substantive to help the situation. . . . The [UN] force has been prevented from having a modicum of self-respect and effectiveness on the ground. . . . I acknowledge that this mission is a logistical nightmare for your [headquarters], but that is nothing compared to the living hell that has surrounded us, coupled with the obligation of standing in front of both parties and being the bearer of so little help and credibility. . . . Although Rwanda and UNAMIR have been at the centre of a terrible human tragedy, that is not to say Holocaust, and although many fine words had been pronounced by all, including members of the Security Council, the tangible effort . . . has been totally, completely ineffective.98

  The Stories We Tell

  It is not hard to conceive of how the United States might have done things differently. Ahead of the April killing, as violence escalated, it could have agreed to Belgian pleas for UN reinforcements. Once the killing of thousands of Rwandans a day had begun, the president could have deployed U.S. troops to Rwanda. The United States could have joined Dallaire’s beleaguered UNAMIR forces, or, if it feared associating with shoddy UN peacekeeping, it could have intervened unilaterally with the Security Council’s backing, as France did in June. The United States could also have acted without the UN’s blessing, as it would do five years later in Kosovo. Securing congressional support for U.S. intervention would have been extremely difficult, but by the second week of the killing, Clinton, one of the most eloquent presidents of the twentieth century, could have made the case that something approximating genocide was under way, that an inviolable American value was imperiled by its occurrence, and that U.S. contingents at relatively low risk could stop the extermination of a people.

  Even if the White House could not have overcome congressional opposition to sending U.S. troops to Africa, the United States still had a variety of options. Instead of leaving it to midlevel officials to communicate with the Rwandan leadership behind the scenes, senior officials in the administration could have taken control of the process. They could have publicly and frequently denounced the slaughter. They could have branded the crimes “genocide” at a far earlier stage. They could have called for the expulsion of the Rwandan delegation from the Security Council. On the telephone, at the UN, and over the Voice of America, they could have threatened to prosecute those complicit in the genocide, naming names when possible. They could have deployed Pentagon assets to jam—even temporarily—the crucial, deadly radio broadcasts.

  Instead of demanding a UN withdrawal, quibbling over costs, and coming forward (belatedly) with a plan better suited to caring for refugees than to stopping massacres, U.S. officials could have worked to make UNAMIR a force to contend with. They could have urged their Belgian allies to stay and protect Rwandan civilians. If the Belgians insisted on withdrawing, the United States could have done everything within its power to make sure that Dallaire was immediately reinforced. Senior officials could have spent U.S. political capital rallying troops from other nations and could have supplied strategic airlift and logistic support to a coalition that it had helped to create. In short, the United States could have led the world.

  It is striking that most officials involved in shaping U.S. policy were able to define the decision not to stop genocide as ethical and moral. The administration employed several devices to dampen enthusiasm for action and to preserve the public’s sense—and more important, its own—that U.S. policy choices were not merely politically astute but also morally acceptable. First, administration officials exaggerated the extremity of the possible responses. Time and again U.S. leaders posed the choice as between staying out of Rwanda and “getting involved everywhere.” In addition, they often presented the choice as one between doing nothing and sending in hundreds of thousands of marines.

  Second, administration policymakers appealed to notions of the greater good. They did not simply frame U.S. policy as one contrived in order to advance the national interest or avoid U.S. casualties. Rather, they often argued against intervention from the standpoint of people committed to protecting human life. Owing to recent failures in UN peacekeeping, many humanitarian interventionists in the U.S. government were concerned about the future of America’s relationship with the United Nations generally and peacekeeping specifically. They believed that the UN and humanitarianism could not afford another Somalia. Many internalized the belief that the UN had more to lose by sending reinforcements and failing than by allowing the killings to proceed. Their chief priority, after the evacuation of the Americans, was looking after UN peacekeepers, and they justified the withdrawal of the peacekeepers on the grounds that it would ensure a future for humanitarian intervention. In other words, Dallaire’s peacekeeping mission in Rwanda had to be destroyed so that peacekeeping might be saved for use elsewhere.

  A third feature of the response that helped to console U.S. officials at the time was the sheer flurry of Rwanda-related activity. U.S. officials with a special concern for Rwanda took their solace from minivictories, working on behalf of specific individuals such as Monique Mujawamariya or groups like the Rwandans gathered at the hotel and the stadium. “We were like the child in the ghetto who focuses all of her energy on protecting her doll,” says one senior official. “As the world collapses around her, she can’t bear it, but she takes solace in the doll, the only thing she can control.” Government officials involved in policy met constantly and remained, in bureaucratic lingo, “seized of the matter”; they neither appeared nor felt indifferent. Although little in the way of effective intervention emerged from midlevel meetings in Washington or New York, an abundance of memoranda and other documents did.

  Finally, the almost willful delusion that what was happening in Rwanda did not amount to genocide created a nurturing ethical framework for inaction. “War” was “tragic” but created no moral imperative.

  One U.S. official kept a journal during the crisis. In late May, exasperated by the obstructionism pervading the bureaucracy, the official dashed off this lament:

  A military that wants to go nowhere to do anything—or let go of their toys so someone else can do it. A White House cowed by the brass (and we are to give lessons on how the armed forces take orders from civilians?). An NSC that does peacekeeping by the book—the accounting book, that is. And an assistance program that prefers whites (Europe) to blacks. When it comes to human rights we have no problem drawing the line in the sand of the dark continent (just don’t ask us to do anything—agonizing is our specialty), but not China or any place else busine
ss looks good.

  We have a foreign policy based on our amoral economic interests run by amateurs who want to stand for something—hence the agony—but ultimately don’t want to exercise any leadership that has a cost.

  They say there may be as many as a million massacred in Rwanda. The militias continue to slay the innocent and the educated. . . . Has it really cost the United States nothing?

  Aftermath

  Guilt

  The genocide in Rwanda cost Romeo Dallaire a great deal. It is both paradoxical and natural that the man who probably did the most to save Rwandans feels the worst. By August 1994 Dallaire had a death wish. “At the end of my command, I drove around in my vehicle with no escort practically looking for ambushes,” Dallaire recalls. “I was trying to get myself destroyed and looking to get released from the guilt.”

  Upon his return to Canada, he behaved initially as if he had just completed a routine mission. As the days passed, though, he began to show signs of distress. In late 1994 the UN Security Council established a war crimes tribunal for Rwanda modeled after one just set up to punish crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia. When the UN tribunal called Dallaire to take the stand in February 1998, four years after the genocide, he plunged back into his memories.99 Pierre Prosper, the UN prosecutor, remembers the scene: “He carried himself so proudly and so commanding. Just like a soldier. He saluted the president of the tribunal. All of his answers were ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘No, sir.’ He was very stoic. And then, as the questioning progressed, you could just see it unraveling. It was as though he was just reliving it right there in front of us.” As Dallaire spoke, it became clear how omnipresent the genocide was in his life. On one occasion, as he described his operational capacity, he said, “I had a number of bodies on the ground”—but then paused and corrected himself: “Forgive me—a number of troops on the ground.” His voice cracked as he struggled to find words to match his shock and disappointment: “It seems . . . inconceivable that one can watch . . . thousands of people being . . . massacred . . . every day in the media . . . and remain passive.”100

  Dallaire seemed to be searching the courtroom for answers. He still could not understand how the major powers could have sent troops to the region with a genocide under way, extracted their civilian personnel and soldiers, and stranded the people of Rwanda and the UN peacekeepers. Dallaire stared straight ahead and said stiffly that the departure of those military units “with full knowledge of the danger confronting the emasculated UN force, is inexcusable by any human criteria.”101

  The defense attorney at the tribunal interjected at this point: “It seems as though you regret that, Major General.” Dallaire glanced up as if the trance had been broken, fixed his gaze on the interrogator, and responded, “You cannot even imagine.”

  At a news conference after his testimony, Dallaire said, “I found it very difficult to return to the details. . . . In fact, at one point yesterday, I had the sense of the smell of the slaughter in my nose and I don’t know how it appeared, but there was all of a sudden this enormous rush to my brain and to my senses. . . . Maybe with time, it will hurt less.”102 He hoped to visit Rwanda after testifying. “Until I can see many of those places, until I can see some of the graves, until I can see those hills and those mountains and those villages,” he said. “I don’t think I’ll ever have closure.”103 He hoped to bring his wife.

  President Clinton visited Rwanda a month after Dallaire testified. With the grace of one grown practiced at public remorse, he issued something of an apology. “We in the United States and the world community did not do as much as we could have and should have done to try to limit what occurred,” Clinton said. “It may seem strange to you here,” he continued, “but all over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror.”104 But Clinton’s remorse came too late for the 800,000 Rwandans who died, and for Dallaire, who often feels sorry he lived.

  © Gilles Peress/Magnum

  A Tutsi survivor of a machete attack nurses his wounds at a hospital in Kabgai, Rwanda.

  Some of Dallaire’s colleagues speculated that he was reacting emotionally to his experience in Rwanda because the Belgian press and the families of the deceased Belgian soldiers had vilified him. He claims to be reconciled to his decisions. “I’ve been criticized by the Belgians for sending their troops to a ‘certain death’ by directing them to protect Prime Minister Agathe,” he notes. “I’ll take that heat, but I could not take the heat of having hunkered down and not having tried to give Agathe the chance to call to the nation to avert violence. You couldn’t let this thing go by and watch it happen.”

  His bigger problem is his guilt over the Rwandans. They entrusted their fate to the UN and were murdered: “I failed my mission,” he says. “I simply cannot say these deaths are not mine when they happened on my mission. I cannot erase the thousands and thousands of eyes that I see, looking at me, bewildered. I argued, but I didn’t convince, so I failed.”

  In an effort to help Canadians deal with the stress of their military experiences, Dallaire agreed to produce a thirty-minute video, “Witness the Evil.” In the video he says it took two years for the experiences to hit him but that eventually he reached a point where he couldn’t “keep it in the drawer” any longer:

  I became suicidal because . . . there was no other solution. I couldn’t live with the pain and the sounds and the smell. Sometimes, I wish I’d lost a leg instead of having all those grey cells screwed up. You lose a leg, it’s obvious and you’ve got therapy and all kinds of stuff. You lose your marbles, very, very difficult to explain, very difficult to gain that support that you need.105

  As the passage of time distanced Dallaire from Rwanda, the nights brought him closer to his inner agony. He carried a machete around and lectured cadets on post-traumatic stress disorder, he slept sparingly, and he found himself nearly retching in the supermarket, transported back to Rwandan markets and the bodies strewn within them. In October 1998 Canada’s chief of defense staff, General Maurice Baril, asked Dallaire to take a month of stress-related leave. Dallaire was shattered. After hanging up the phone, he says, “I cried for days and days.” He tried to keep up a brave public front, sending a parting e-mail to his subordinates that read: “It has been assessed essential that I recharge my batteries due to a number of factors, not the least being the impact of my operational experience on my health. . . . Don’t withdraw, don’t surrender, don’t give up.”106

  Dallaire returned from leave, but in December 1999 Baril called again. He had spoken with Dallaire’s doctors and decided to force a change with an ultimatum: Either Dallaire had to abandon the “Rwanda business” and stop testifying at the tribunal and publicly faulting the international community for not doing more, or he would have to leave his beloved armed forces. For Dallaire, only one answer was possible: “I told them I would never give up Rwanda,” he says. “I was the force commander and I would complete my duty, testifying and doing whatever it takes to bring these guys to justice.” In April 2000 Dallaire was forced out of the Canadian armed services and given a medical discharge.

  Dallaire had always said, “The day I take my uniform off will be the day that I will also respond to my soul.” But since becoming a civilian he has realized that his soul is not readily retrievable. “My soul is in Rwanda,” he says. “It has never, ever come back, and I’m not sure it ever will.” He feels that the eyes and the spirits of those killed continue to watch him.

  In June 2000 a brief Canadian news wire story reported that Dallaire had been found unconscious on a park bench in Hull, Quebec, drunk and alone. He had consumed a bottle of scotch on top of his daily dose of pills for post-traumatic stress disorder. He was on another suicide mission. After recovering, Dallaire sent a letter to the Canadian Broadcast Corporation thanking them for their sensitive coverage of this episode. His letter was read on the air:


  Thank you for the very kind thoughts and wishes.

  There are times when the best medication and therapist simply can’t help a soldier suffering from this new generation of peacekeeping injury. The anger, the rage, the hurt, and the cold loneliness that separates you from your family, friends, and society’s normal daily routine are so powerful that the option of destroying yourself is both real and attractive. That is what happened last Monday night. It appears, it grows, it invades, and it overpowers you.

  In my current state of therapy, which continues to show very positive results, control mechanisms have not yet matured to always be on top of this battle. My doctors and I are still [working to] establish the level of serenity and productivity that I yearn so much for. The therapists agree that the battle I waged that night was a solid example of the human trying to come out from behind the military leader’s ethos of “My mission first, my personnel, then myself.” Obviously the venue I used last Monday night left a lot to be desired and will be the subject of a lot of work over the next while.

  Dallaire remained a true believer in Canada, in peacekeeping, in human rights. The letter went on:

  This nation, without any hesitation nor doubt, is capable and even expected by the less fortunate of this globe to lead the developed countries beyond self-interest, strategic advantages, and isolationism, and raise their sights to the realm of the pre-eminence of humanism and freedom . . . . Where humanitarianism is being destroyed and the innocent are being literally trampled into the ground . . . the soldiers, sailors, and airpersons . . . supported by fellow countrymen who recognize the cost in human sacrifice and in resources will forge in concert with our politicians . . . a most unique and exemplary place for Canada in the league of nations, united under the United Nations Charter.