Too little, far too late

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Cairo Times, Egypt, 24-02-2000

An independent inquiry's report condemns the United Nations' inaction during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, but others must also share the blame.

The Rwandan genocide was undoubtedly one of the major mass slaughters of the twentieth century. Many will remember with disgust the images in the global media of cut up corpses lying in a church and bloated bodies floating in Lake Victoria. An estimated 800,000 Rwandans lost their lives during those "100 days of horror" between April and July 1994.

There's a broad consensus that the United Nations—both the organization's officials and the member nations—could have greatly reduced the extent of the killing, if not prevented it altogether. Last December, more than five years after the events, the UN at last openly admitted its responsibility. The admission came after the final report of an independent inquiry headed by Sweden’s former prime minister Ingvar Carlsson. The inquiry had examined the United Nations' own deliberations at the time of the massacres, and the conclusions of the Carlsson report are strongly worded. For the UN community—accustomed to diplomatically worded critiques—they must have seemed extremely hard.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, speaking at a press conference after he had received the report, expressed bitter regret and deep remorse. Annan acknowledged the organization's failure to prevent just the thing the United Nations was set up to prevent the reoccurrence of after World War II - genocide. Though clearly far too late for the victims, the report, and the response to it, shows signs of a new culture of openness to which the UN is now slowly adjusting itself.

The UN’s involvement in Rwanda began in August 1993, after the signing of the Arusha peace agreement between the government of moderate Hutu president Juvenal Habyarimana and Paul Kagame’s Tutsi rebels of the Rwandan Patriotic Front. The UN deployed a peacekeeping force— the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR)—later that year. But it was hard to find nations willing to contribute troops. Kagame and Habyarimana wanted 4,500 UN soldiers; by December only 1260 were in place. The Carlsson report concluded that in addition to being too small even in theory, the UNAMIR force was seriously under-staffed and badly equipped, its mandate was vague and the troops had to deal with too much bureaucracy.

As early as January 1994, UNAMIR’s commander, Canadian brigadier-general Romeo Dallaire, began receiving reports from an informer that the main Hutu militia, Interahamwe, was planning a massacre of the country’s Tutsi inhabitants. UNIMIR patrols, meanwhile, were revealing the existence of weapons caches. Dallaire cabled the military adviser of then-secretary general of the UN Boutros Boutros-Ghali requesting permission to "take action". Boutros-Ghali didn’t move on this; nor was any move made either to beef up UNAMIR or to expand the force’s mandate.

On 6 April, Hutu hard-liners shot down a plane carrying Habyarimana and the president of neighboring Burundi. That was the signal for the killing to begin. Rather than reinforce UNAMIR, the participating nations began to pull out—speeding up the process after 10 Belgians were tortured and killed.

On 20 April, Boutros-Ghali offered the Security Council three options: reinforce heavily, down-size drastically, or withdraw altogether. The Security Council went for option three. Boutros-Ghali begged the council to reconsider. On 9 May, in an interview with the US news program Nightline, he ventured the word "genocide" for the first time to describe what was going on in Rwanda.

Then the tide began to turn in favor of intervention. The Security Council didn’t authorize a new force, UNAMIR II, until 18 June; France, mean-while, launched a unilateral operation (with token Senegalese support) on 9 July. But not until 18 JuIy, when Paul Kagame’s rebels had completely overrun the country, was the killing brought to an end.

According to the Carlsson report, one of the key factors that allowed the massacre to occur was the UN’s reluctance to use the word genocide. A UN human rights report published in the midst of the planning for UNAMIR discussed—albeit briefly— the notion that genocide could happen in Rwanda, and UNAMIR commander Dallaire also used the term in his cables to Boutros-Ghali's office. But it didn’t enter into the UN's official terminology until May.

Any official admission that what was occurring in Rwanda was a genocide would have entailed an obligation for the international community to take action to stop the killing. With the 1948 Geneva Convention, signatories took upon themselves the responsibility to prevent and punish the crime of genocide. But over the 50 years of its existence, the UN has consistently demonstrated that this is easier said than done.

Why didn’t the UN brass push more forcefully for international intervention? During the initial planning and deployment of UNAMIR, Boutros-Ghali was conspicuous by his absence. But if the technocrat secretary general wasn’t quite up to this task, it’s also clear that he was left dangling by his deputies, in particular then-undersecretary Kofi Annan, who regularly neglected and delayed passing on messages to Boutros-Ghali, including the crucial Dallaire cable.

The report states that "the Security Council bears a responsibility for its lack of political wiIl to do more to stop the killing." When Boutros-Ghali finally moved to strengthen UNAMIR and its mandate, the Security Council took almost three weeks to agree on the issue, "a costly delay in the middle of the genocide" to say the least. For this, the Americans are largely to blame. UNAMIR was organized during the aftermath of the US-led, UN-flagged Operation Restore Hope in Somalia. That operation, undertaken with a good amount of fervor quickly degenerated into a Wild West-style manhunt when the US decided to apprehend widely popular warlord Mohammed ‘Farah’ Aideed after Aideed’s forces had ambushed and killed 24 Pakistani peacekeepers.

The hunt for the warlord led to another one those CNN images from the 1990s burned onto many people’s cataracts, that of dead American soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. After that failure Clinton swore never again "to cross the Mogadishu Iine". Restore Hope was the first UN mission to be withdrawn before completion, and the memories of the operation in Somalia continue to hobble the UN’s capacity to respond swiftly and decisively to crises.

The Carlsson report on Rwanda is the second report in a short time to condemn the United Nations. A few months earlier Annan himself released a report in which he blasted the UN’s behavior during the siege of Srebrenica in 1995. There, Dutch troops presumed to be from an elite unit were left behind with only small arms and without air support, against a bigger Serb force armed with heavy artillery. In the aftremath of the non-battle that ensued, the Dutch UN troops watched powerlessly while the Serbs marched an estimated 8000 Bosnians to their deaths.

Later incidents in former Yugoslavia elicited a stronger international response, notably the NATO’s actions in Kosovo. When ethnic cleansing appeared to be happening close to the European heartland, the international community (albeit not UN) took action.

But Rwanda is not in Europe. The Carlsson report summarizes the lack of political will in the East African genocide devastatingly: "It has been stated repeatedly during the course of the interviews conducted by the Inquiry that Rwanda was not of strategic interest to third countries and that the international community exercised double standards when faced with the risk of a catastrophe there compared to action taken elsewhere."

The report nevertheless goes farther than noting the inaction of the UN and the western world—as it should. Western countries, and especially the United States, still have an unequivocally heavy influence in the UN, while developing countries remain the underdog in this worldwide forum of supposedly equal voices. But developing countries themselves seem too eager to shift the blame for any mishaps onto their more influential peers in the UN and especially onto the five permanent members of the Security Council. A wider perspective on who played a role in the Rwandan emergency should not only take into account the actions of France and Belgium, but also those of neighboring countries like Uganda, as well as regional actors, including Egypt.

Belgium seriously undermined UNAMIR by unilaterally withdrawing its contingent from the force. The country had initially volunteered for the mission because Rwanda is its former colony. Admittedly, the withdrawal came after Hutu militia forces had tortured and killed 10 Belgian peacekeepers, but Belgium’s withdrawal, arguably, was exactly was these murders were meant to achieve. Moreover, while Belgium evacuated its own expatriate citizens, the departing soldiers abandoned some 2000 civilians who had sought their protection. Those 2000 were murdered in the school compound where they had been accomrnodated.

France strained the credibility of foreign intervention in a slightly different way. During the genocide, Iate French president Francois Mitterand opted for Operation Turquoise, ostensibly to establish a humanitarian protection zone but essentially protecting Hutus from the advance of the Rwandan Patriotic Front. A brief face off, however, made the French reconsider their position and establish their "safe haven" in a safer place.

Both Uganda’s and Egypt’s roles lay in facilitating the genocide before it actually happened. Uganda supplied arms to the Tutsi rebels, while Egypt sold weapons to a Hutu hardline government whose members later helped organize the militias. In a report issued in early 1994, the New York-based Human Rights Watch publicized various arms flows to Rwanda, mainly from South Africa, France and the US, but also from Uganda and Egypt.

Clearly no single organization, country or person bears sole responsibility for the East African holocaust of the 1990s. And in that sense, the Carlsson report—however damning—and the UN’s new openness could provide a way out for past and present players in Rwanda. While a witch hunt for single guilty parties might not help prevent future atrocities, spreading the blame evenly—and thereby avoiding repercussions for everyone concerned – also does not help.

The Carlsson report makes a whole list of recommendations for changes in UN procedures. In the end, however, it is those who hold the key offices who wilI make the decisions. As the killers pass their final days in Rwandan prisons (where many have already been executed), the international decision-makers who did too little far too late continue to spend their time in plush offices. The United Nations does show signs that it has learned lessons from both Rwanda and Srebrenica, but hopefully the world won’t witness another catastrophe to find out that it hasn’t.