A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (97 page)

87. Holly Burkhalter, "The Question of Genocide: The Clinton Administration," World Policy Journal, Winter 1994, p. 50.

88. The RPF was opposed to the deployment both because of its mistrust of France and because the rebels were trying to consolidate their territorial gains in the south and west, where Operation Turquoise was to be launched.

89. On June 22, 1994, the Security Council, under UN Resolution 929, authorized France to deploy a Chapter VII "temporary multinational force" to establish secure humanitarian areas. The duration of the deployment was limited to two months. Around Gisenyi, before the French arrival, the Hutu officials broadcast a message to "Hutu girls," telling them, "Wash yourselves and put on a good dress to welcome our French allies. The Tutsi girls are all dead, so you have your chance." Quoted by Gerard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 292.

90. SWB/France 2 TV, Jily 14, 1994, quoted in ibid., p. 297.

91. White House briefing, Federal News Service, July 15, 1994.

92. UN Security Council, statement by the president of the Security Council, August 25, 1994, S/PRST/1994/48.

93. "At Last, Rwanda's Pain Registers," New York Times, July 23, 1994, p.A18.

94. U.S. Lieutenant General Daniel Schroeder, the U.S. commander of the joint task force on Rwanda, initially seemed poised to be very supportive of Dallaire, his UN counterpart. But after his political masters laid out the rules of the road, Schroeder backed off from his prior commitments. "He wasn't allowed to sustain a single injury, so he essentially stayed out of Rwanda," Dallaire recalls. "It was surreal.You had American NGOs running around Rwanda left and right.Yet U.S. forces couldn't leave their compound"

95. White House briefing, Federal News Service,July 29, 1994.

96. Quoted in Milton Leitenberg, "U.S. and UN Acts Escalate Genocide and Increase Costs in Rwanda" in Helen Fein, ed., The Prevention of Genocide: Rwanda and Yugoslavia Reconsidered (New York: Institute for the Study of Genocide, 1994), pp. 41-42.

97. U.S. Information Agency press conference, Rwanda, Federal News Service, August 24, 1994.

98. Melvern, A People Betrayed, pp. 216-217.

99. Secretary-General Kofi Annan at first refused to permit Dallaire to testify. Under public pressure, however, Annan granted a waiver to the general to appear as a witness on matters directly relevant to the case against a Rwandan mayor,Jean Paul Akayesu.The waiver explicitly excluded con fidential document and cable traffic between Rwanda and the UN mission in New York. Daphna Shraga, a UN legal affairs officer, said that the trial was "not the appropriate context within which the performance of a peacekeeping operation, the propriety and adequacy of its mandate, its operational activities and the decision-making processes relating thereto, should be assessed"; United Nations, "General Dallaire, Former Commander of UNAMIR, Gives Testimony Before International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda," Press Release L/2856, February 25, 1988, p. 2.

100. Lara Santoro, "Rwanda Massacres Were Avoidable, General Says," Christian Science Monitor, February 27, 1998, p. 7.

101. Dallaire,"The End of Innocence," p. 79.

102. Allan Thompson, "General May Recount Rwanda Horror Again;Tribunal Likely to Recall Canadian," Toronto Star, February 27, 1998, p. Al.

103. Ibid.

104. James Bennet, "Clinton Declares U.S., with World, Failed Rwandans;' New York Times, March 26, 1998, pp.A6,Al2.

105. Mike Blanchfield, "General Battles Rwanda `Demons': After Witnessing the Atrocities of Genocide, Romeo Dallaire Has Had to Endure the Belgian Government's Criticism," Ottawa Citizen, December 13, 1998, p. A3.

106. Luke Fisher, `Besieged by Stress: The Horrors of Rwanda Haunt a General;' MacLeans, October 12, 1998, p. 24.

Chapter 11, Srebrenica

1. The rebellion Mladic mentioned was a Serb uprising crushed by the Turks in 1804. David Rohde, Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica, Europe's Worst Massacre Since World War II (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), p. 167.

2. Ibid., p. 79.

3. Ibid., p. 369.

4. Confidential cable from U.S. embassy in Sarajevo to Secretary of State Warren Christopher, July 11, 1995; these documents were declassified through the Freedom of Information Act at the request of Bob Silk, a New York lawyer, who filed the request on behalf of the group Students Against Genocide.

5. Rohde, Endgame, p. 101.

6. Human Rights Watch, Bosnia-Hercegovina:The Fall of Srebrenica and the Failure of U.N. Peacekeeping (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1995), p. 16.

7. Rohde, Endgame, p. 132.

8. UN, Report of the Secretary General Pursuant to General Assembly Resolution 53/35, The Fall of Srebrenica, November 15, 1999, p. 106, para. 478.

9. "President Clinton's Remarks Before Meeting with Congressional Leaders;' U.S. Newswire, July 11, 1995.

10. UN, Report of the Secretary General, p. 72, para. 315.

11. Stephen Engelberg and Tim Weiner, "Massacre in Bosnia; Srebrenica: The Days of Slaughter," New York Times, October 29, 1995, sec. 1, p. 1.

12. Human Rights Watch, The Fall of Srebrenica, p. 20.

13. Engelberg and Weiner, "Massacre in Bosnia."

14. Rohde, Endgame, pp. 242, 256, 280.

15. Ibid., p. 194.

16. DPI International Report, Online Newsletter, July 12, 1995, quoted in Human Rights Watch, The Fall of Srebrenica, p. 48. This UN propensity for spinning its disasters and debacles was one of the ugliest features of the mission. Akashi's efforts in 1995 were only the latest in a long tradition of packaging failure as success. In 1992, the first year of the war, Lieutenant Colonel Barry Frewer famously informed an open-mouthed press corps that there was no siege of Sarajevo, only "a tactically advantageous position "When the Serbs took territory, burning and looting houses and expelling civilians in their path, UN officials said they were "adjusting" the confrontation line. David Rieff, "Nothing Was Delivered," New Republic, May 1, 2000, p. 27. And during previous Serb attacks against safe areas, UN officials repeatedly tried to put a happy face on the shrinking territory under their protection, obfuscating the boundaries of the safe areas and claiming an ever narrower diameter under their authority. Reporters used to joke that Serb attacks led to such predictable efforts by UN officials to shrink the enclaves that the only reliable definition of a "safe area" was the "smallest concentric space into which a bullet cannot pass"

17. UN, Report of the Secretary General, p. 87, para. 390.

18. Chris Hedges, "Balkans: 'Srebrenica Is Our Country,' Serbs Boast; Leader Rejects UN Demand to Return Safe Ares," Newyork Tunes, July 13, 1995, p. A6.

19. State Department briefing, Federal News Service,July 12, 1995.

20. Yasushi Akashi to Kofi Annan,July 14, 1995.

21. State Department briefing, Federal News Service, July 12, 1995.

22. Rohde, End'a,ne, p. 225.

23. Bob Woodward, The Choice (NewYork: Simon & Schuster, 1996), pp. 259-260; Chuck Lane, "The Fall of Srebrenica," The New Republic, August 16, 1995, pp. 14-18.

24. UN, Report of the Secretary General, p. 80, para. 350.

25. Engelberg and Weiner, "Massacre in Bosnia."

26. Michael Dobbs and R. Jeffrey Smith, "New Proof Offered of Serb Atrocities; U.S. Analysts Identify More Mass Graves," Washington Post, October 29, 1995, p. Al.

27. State Department briefing, Federal News Service, July 12, 1995.

28. John Pomfret, "Witnesses Allege Abuses by Serbs; Killings, Abductions Cited; Search for Missing to Begin," W shincton Post, July 16, 1995, p. Al.

29. Rohde, Endgame, p. 332.

30. John Pomfret, "'We Count for Nothing'; Srebrenica Refugees Unwelcome in Tuzla;' Wash- iuton Post, July 15, 1995, p. Al.

31. Woodward, The Choice, pp. 262-263.

32. Confidential Information Memorandum to Secretary of State Christopher from Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor John Shattuck;"Subject: Defense of the Safe Areas in Bosnia," July 19, 1995.

33. Human Rights Watch, The Fall of Srehrenica, p. 39. The testimony included here does not correspond precisely to that of the first three Muslim survivors. Detailed transcripts of their testimony is unavailable, but their experiences approximated those quoted by HRW.

34. Ibid., p. 44.

35. Rohde, Endgame, p. 255.

36. Ibid., p. 287.

37. Ibid., p. 326. One Dutch hostage, quoted in the Croatian paper Slobodna Dabnacija (Independent Dalmatia) on July 25, 1995, reported seeing a truck filled with bodies when the Serbs transported him and other hostages to Bratunac. "We drove next to the truck. There were dead bodies to the left and to the right of it, and the truck itself was filled to the top with corpses," the soldier,Ynse Schellens, said. But he quickly added that the bodies were probably Bosnian Muslim soldiers. Quoted in Human Rights Watch, The Fall of Srebrenica, p. 46.

38. Roy Gutman, "An Appeal for Zepa," Neivsday, July 25, 1995, p. A6.

39. Mazowiecki to Tau Sri Dato' Musa Hitam, chairman of the UNCHR,July 27, 1995.

40. Secretary of State Warren Christopher to the U.S. embassy in Sarajevo, August 16, 1995. Holbrooke, meanwhile, had his own personal line of communication with Tuzla. His twenty-fiveyear-old son, Anthony, vvas also helping interview refugees as they crossed from Serb territory into Muslim hands, and he often yelled into the phone that his father should "get his ass in gear." Richard Holbrooke, Tt F'nd a War (New York: Random House, 1998), p. 70.

41. Ambassador Madeleine Albright to Security Council, August 10, 1995.

42. On August II a classified cable from the U.S. Mission in Geneva to the State Department updated the secretary on the progress of the Red Cross in locating the missing. The cable ominously reported that "all sites visited to date have either been empty, or occupied by residents from other towns." Yet the cable softened the implications by passing along the ICRC view that some of the missing had been reintegrated into the Bosnian army or returned to their families without reporting to the Red Cross; classified cable from U.S. Mission in Geneva to Secretary of State Warren Christopher, August 11, 1995. The ICRC submitted a formal request to the United States for copies of satellite photographs to aid it with its search after it saw the images of mass graves on CNN.

43. Unclassified memorandum, "BOTTOM LINES: Following are Direct Answers to Possible issues:' undated. See also Dobbs and Smith, "New Proof Offered."

44. White House briefing, Federal News Service, July 14, 1995.

45. State Department briefing, Federal News Service, July 14, 1995.

46. Ibid.

47. Clinton chided the UN for its "crazy" rules of engagement and said, "I never would have put forces on the ground in such a situation," using the conditional tense, which was inappropriate for a head of state who did not put troops on the ground. Woodward, The Choice, p. 255.

48. The Senate had in fact voted 58-42 eleven months before to suspend U.S. participation in enforcing the embargo, but implementation had been delayed after Senators George Mitchell (D.-Maine) and Sam Nunn (D.-Ga.) negotiated a compromise agreement.

49. Clinton pollster Dick Morris said his polling showed Americans opposed deploying ground troops to enforce a peace 38-55. Once Clinton began to make an effort to persuade them, however, the numbers jumped to 45-45. Morris also offered a general estimation of the American public's views on U.S. foreign engagement. In one poll he gave those surveyed three options: "to intervene overseas to protect our interests and values and to act as a global police officer; to act as a peacemaker, doing what we can when we can to promote peace without overtaxing our resources; to focus primarily on our domestic needs without spending much time at all worrying about the problems of other nations"The unsurprising result, given the loaded wording of the questions, was that 14 percent opted for global cop, 43 percent favored flexible peacemaker, and 37 percent rejected any role at all. Dick Morris, Behind the Oval Office: Winning the Presidency in the Nineties (New York: Random House, 1997), pp. 247-256. Polling conducted by Steven Kull and Clay Ramsey shows that Americans are much more supportive of humanitarian interventions and much less casualty-averse than Morris and the foreign policy establishment presume.

50. Elaine Sciolino and Craig R. Whitney, "Costly Pullout in Bosnia Looms Unless U.N. Can Prove Effective," New York Times, July 9, 1995, sec. 1, p. 1.

51. George Stephanopoulos, All Too Hunan: A Political Education (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998), p. 383.

52. By the end of the war, Dole's Senate office had published some 150 press releases on the subject of the war in Bosnia.

53. Bob Dole, "Failed Approach in Bosnia," Congressional Record, 104th Cong., 1st sess., 1995, 14 1, pt. 110: S9624.

54. Ibid.

55. Bob Dole, "Thousands of Bosnians Flee," Congressional Record, 104th Cong., 1st sess., 1995, 141, pt. 111: 59693.

56. This Week with David Brinkley, ABC,July 17, 1995.

57. Bob Dole,"Bosnia," Congressional Record, 104th Cong., 1st secs., 141, pt. 116: 510225.

58. Ibid., pt. 119: 510506.

59. Bob Dole, "Bosnian Arms Embargo," Congressional Record, 104th Cong., 1st sess., 141, pt. 120: S10537.

60. Columnist William Safire urged, "Public opinion needs rallying with a prime-time TV speech. If [Clinton] cannot do it, the networks should offer national leadership time to Dole, with a grumpy Clinton re uttal" William Safire, "Clinton Abdicates as Leader," New York Times, July 27, 1995, p. A23.

61. In a 1976 vice presidential debate, Dole had blundered badly by bemoaning the "Democrat wars" of the century that he said had killed and wounded 1.6 million Americans, "enough to fill the city of Detroit." By the time of the 1996 election, Dole's Democratic colleagues had come to respect him. Senator Paul Simon said on the floor, "I am supporting Bill Clinton. But I am not going to buy a one-way ticket to Canada if Bob Dole gets elected" Paul Simon, "Senator Dole's Announcement," Congressional Record, 104th Cong., 2nd Bess., 1996, 142, pt. 68:S5046.