A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (56 page)

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."' 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.''

Low-ranking U.S. intelligence analysts were keenly aware of Rwanda's history and the passibility 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 40 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."'

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 commar, dments 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 aTutsi 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."

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!"" 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." 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 ofTutsi 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."

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, the UN was posting 70,000 peacekeepers on seventeen missions around the world." 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." Against the backdrop of the Somalia meltdown and the congressional showdown, the Clinton admin istration 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.'" 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.."-' 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.

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."''

Every aspect of 1)allaire'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."

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," I:)allaire signed the cable. "Let's go"" He was not asking for permission; he was simply informing headquarters of the arms raids that he had planned.