A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (61 page)

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.`'' Albright went along, publicly declaring that a "small, skeletal" operation would be left in Kigali to "show the will of the international community.""'

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 aban- doned.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 refugees 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. Loris 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 Bizimunpu, 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""'

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.""

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 .12

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 naivete: "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 *iotel 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 (!). ' (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 they 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 policymakers 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.

At the height of the war in Bosnia, the op-ed pages of America's newspapers had roared with indignation; during the three-month genocide in Rwanda, they were silent, ignorant, and prone fatalistically to accept the futility of outside intervention. An April 17 Washington Post editorial asked "what if anything might be done" about the killings. "Unfortunately, the immediate answer to the last question," the editors wrote, "appears to be: not much":

The United States has no recognizable national interest in taking a role, certainly riot a leading role. In theory, international fire-engine service is available to all houses in the global village. Imagine a fire department that would respond only to the lesser blazes. But in a world of limited political and economic resources, not all of the many fires will be egr.ally tended. Rwanda is in an unpreferred class.'

An April 23 New York Times editorial acknowledged that genocide was under way but said that the Security Council had "thrown in the bloodied towel":

What looks very much like genocide has been taking place in Rwanda. People are pulled from cars and buses, ordered to show their identity papers and then killed on the spot if they belong to the wrong ethnic group.... It is legally if not morally easy to justify pulling out since the unevenly trained U.N. force was meant to police a peace, not take sides in a civil war. Somalia provides ample warning against plunging open-endedly into a "humanitarian" mission.... The horrors of Kigali show the need for considering whether a mobile, quick-response UN force under UN aegis is needed to deal with such calamities. Absent such a force, the world has little choice but to stand aside and hope for the best.

A May 4 Nicthtlbne program began with anchorman Ted Koppel's asking: "Rwanda: Is the world just too tired to help?"The segment included a comment from President Clinton, who had been asked about Rwanda that day. Clinton invoked Somalia: "Lesson number one is, don't go into one of these things and say, as the U.S. said when we started in Somalia, `Maybe we'll be done in a month because it's a humanitarian crisis.' ... Because there are almost always political problems and sometimes military conflicts, which bring about these crises.""