Rwandans who suffered or saw others suffer while peacekeepers departed safe and sound from threatening situations did not know about the orders to avoid risk or the limitations on the mandate or the lack of supplies; they knew only that the soldiers to whom they looked for protection had disappeared.
When they had tried unsuccessfully to expand its mandate in late February, they had warned U. Not yet aware that Belgians had been killed in Rwanda, Claes also asked how the U. In the absence of the secretary-general, who was in Europe, the Belgian ambassador to the U. As a result of contacts with UNAMIR, Annan and his subordinate Iqbal Riza knew at this time that government troops were already carrying out massacres of Tutsi in addition to murdering political leaders.
Concerning foreigners, Annan specified that Dallaire could order peacekeepers to help them, but only if this did not entail increased risk. He remarked that whatever was done must be governed by the Rules of Engagement and that the peacekeepers could not use armed force to save Belgians if they themselves were not threatened.
At most, they could intervene by negotiation. In response to the Belgian interest in seeing UNAMIR play a more active role, Annan replied that such a decision would require troop reinforcements as well as a change in the mandate. He added that the member states which had contributed the troops would also have to be consulted. He emphasized again the need for the same treatment for Rwandans and foreigners:. Finally, it would be politically delicate to limit this broadening of the mandate to the protection of foreigners.
It would of course have to be meant for the whole Rwandan population. By the evening of April 7, U. Notes of the briefing that preceded the vote on the resolution make no mention of this information. Certainly the U. Both the Belgians and the U. Yet the U. They feared also creating a precedent i. They recalled the unfortunate consequences of a too assertive policy in Somalia, where the need for neutrality was ignored and failure ensued. Rather than intervene more actively to protect the population, all that the troops could do was to patrol and be visible in the city.
Claes once more used public opinion as a pretext for policy. He wrote from Europe to ask the council to change the mandate and Rules of Engagement and to plan for recruiting an additional two or three battalions in order to make this assistance possible. With the problems of troops to be resolved in this way, the question of mandate was no longer a problem. The U. If the U. The possibility that they might do so was greatest for Belgium and France, the two countries most likely to launch an operation to evacuate foreigners from Rwanda.
On April 8, the Belgian cabinet discussed the possibility of intervening with its own troops, if Rwandan authorities should request such an action. The Belgian ambassador believed it unlikely that the Rwandans would ask and the cabinet in the end found the idea inadvisable because it would constitute interference in an internal Rwandan conflict.
The Rwandan ambassador at the U. A French force, he said, would be welcome. But General Quesnot has a different recollection. At the French parliamentary inquiry on Rwanda, he remarked concerning stopping the massacres:. There was a French effort anyway to try to do it: there were conversations with the Belgians and with the Italians. There were American marines at Bujumbura. After a hope on the Italian side, it came to nothing. It was a political decision: France could not again intervene alone.
What would they not have said? Stealing the victory from the RPF Regardless of who should be credited with the idea and who blamed for its collapse, the plan was never realized. The evacuation force comprised some elite Belgian and French troops. They were backed up by an additional U. Some eighty Italians arrived somewhat later than the others. Had these troops been combined with the Belgian and the Ghanaians UNAMIR soldiers available in Kigali, they would have made a force of nearly 2, capable soldiers.
Had they needed reinforcements, there were another Ghanaians north of Kigali in the demilitarized zone, Belgian troops on standby in Nairobi, and hundreds of other U. A substantial number of the government soldiers were engaged in fighting the RPF. Others among them, recognizing that they were less well trained and armed thanthe foreign troops, would certainly have wished to avoid confronting them. In killing civilians, the military was backed by some 2, militia, but they had little formal military training and were armed at most with light firearms.
They were hardly the equal of a professional fighting force. They did not even stop to take the Belgian vehicles, some of which had been left with their motors running, and they caused no further trouble in the area for the next twenty-four hours. They would have gone home.
There were enough troops to do it or at least to have tried. The RPF seemed unlikely to oppose foreign military intervention, if it were limited to ending the slaughter of civilians.
Two days later they abruptly changed their position on the presence of the evacuation forces and warned the Belgians as well as the French to withdraw their troops within sixty hours or risk their being treated as hostile forces. In the days from April 8 to April 15, the very period when foreign governments were deciding on and executing the operation to rescue their citizens, Bagosora was in the process of establishing his power, winning support among military colleagues and installing a civilian government.
It was the time when thousands of Rwandans were deciding how far they would oppose or collaborate with authorities whose program was genocide. Leading military officers opposed to Bagosora and his genocidal program made contact with Dallaire and with U. During this week, large-scale massacres began claiming thousands of lives. If foreign troops, alone or in combination with UNAMIR forces, had stopped the killers in the capital, assailants throughout the country would have ceased theirattacks.
In this highly centralized system, there was no alternative center of power to take over if the genocidal command structure had been dismantled in Kigali. An impressive show of foreign force would have demonstrated to all that the regime was not going to win foreign approval and would have swayed as yet uncommitted military officers and political leaders.
With foreign troops as a potential counterweight to the elite troops engaged in slaughter, officers in charge of other units would have been in a stronger position to demand that Bagosora stop the carnage. Assessing the role of foreigners who could have intervened and did not do so, Colonel Marchal wrote:. When people rightly point the finger at certain individuals presumed responsible for the genocide, I wonder if after all there is not another category of those responsible by If the international community, not France alone, had not been so shortsighted Even after the U.
Taking Rwandans out of the country was a solution that could help only a tiny number of those at risk, but the presence of the evacuation force and the convoys they organized presented a chance to bring Rwandans to places of refuge within Kigali. When plans were first discussed for evacuating U. In some cases, Dallaire was directed by headquarters to make an exception and rescue a particular Rwandan and he was deluged with similar demands from abroad as various governments sought to assure the safety of Rwandans whom they esteemed.
In other cases, one or another peacekeeper was so overcome by the human tragedy of the genocide that he simply ignored the orders and did what he could to save lives.
Luc Lemaire was ordered to evacuate only foreigners, he responded that the order was impossible to execute and that he and his men had already rescued Rwandans. But the government of Kenya, a long-time ally and supporter of the Rwandan government, refused entry to all those who did not have guarantees of safe conduct from other nations. Of course, none of the refugees had been able to obtain such documents before leaving Kigali.
The plane was sequestered for a time in a cargo hanger, making it possible for two or three people to escape. But all the rest were returned to Kigali. But some willing to take chances gave Rwandans an opportunity to escape. On April 11, for example, the Belgian peacekeeper Lieutenant DeCuyper was charged with escorting some fifty vehicles transporting some Rwandans as well as foreigners to the airport. After having passed through a barrier, Lieutenant DeCuyper noticed that Rwandan soldiers had halted the latter part of the convoy and were forcing the Rwandans to get out of their cars.
He intervened and confronted a crowd that at first just threw stones and then began threatening him with grenades. He stood his ground and got all the Rwandans back in their vehicles and on their way.
As he drove off, a sniper fired at him. He had to argue and bluff his way through several more such situations before delivering the convoy safely to the airport. The order was effectively countermanded the next day, however, when UNAMIR soldiers were told to include in airport covoys all Rwandans who wanted to go. In the allocation of resources, foreigners got priority, even though they were far less at risk than Rwandans.
Except for the Belgians who had been targeted over a long period by RTLM, most foreigners had not been even threatened, far less actually attacked. On April 11, Lt. Dewez ordered Lieutenant Lemaire to send part of his troops to Gitarama, some forty miles south of Kigali, to escort some Belgians back to the city. National governments also had to decide whether to evacuate Rwandans and, if so, whom to chose among the thousands who wished to go, including employees and friends but also others who had congregated on the grounds of embassies or ambassadorial residences.
Some, like the U. Others, like the Belgians and the Swiss, rescued hundreds of Tutsi and Hutu politicians, clergy, human rights activists, and other leaders of civil society. Many of those fortunate enough to be saved had persistent friends abroad who bombarded their own governments and the U.
The French were in a position to save Tutsi and others at risk with relatively little difficulty and yet they chose to save very few.
French troops moved easily around the city, even when transporting Rwandans. Militia cheered them and gave them the thumbs up sign, while they greeted Belgian soldiers with a gesture of cutting their throats. In some cases, Belgian soldiers even removed insignia which identified them as Belgians and passed themselves off as French. French soldiers on one occasion balked at escorting some Rwandan clergy to a safe haven but in the end gave in to pressurefrom UNAMIR soldiers and did so. They evacuated Madame Habyarimana and her family as well as a number of adult men apparently inexperienced in child care who were passed off as caregivers for children from an orphanage associated with Madame Habyarimana.
Nor did they make any systematic effort to escort Tutsi from their homes to places of greater safety. The foreign troops returned home to general applause for a job well done, even as television coverage showed them standing by while Rwandans were slain just next to them. In the end UNAMIR would make its greatest contribution to Rwandans at risk not by getting them out of Kigali but by affording some of them protection within the city.
In the first days, this seemed unlikely to be the case. Former Rwandan fighters attempt to reintegrate 15 years after genocide. Alleged architect of the mass killings sentenced to life in prison. More from News. France hosts Libya conference ahead of polls in war-torn nation. El Salvador orders army into the streets after spike in killings. Water scarcity reaches crisis point in northern Syria. UN climate negotiations enter final day as differences remain.
Most Read. With each conversation Des Forges could hear the gunfire grow louder as the militia drew closer. Finally the gunmen entered Mujawamariya's home. Mujawamariya's instincts were correct. Within hours of the plane crash Hutu militiamen took command of the streets of Kigali. Dallaire quickly grasped that supporters of the Arusha peace process were being targeted.
Dallaire was especially concerned about Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, a reformer who with the President's death had become the titular head of state. Just after dawn on April 7 five Ghanaian and ten Belgian peacekeepers arrived at the Prime Minister's home in order to deliver her to Radio Rwanda, so that she could broadcast an emergency appeal for calm. Joyce Leader, the second-in-command at the U. She spent the early hours of the morning behind the steel-barred gates of her embassy-owned house as Hutu killers hunted and dispatched their first victims.
Leader's phone rang. Uwilingiyimana was on the other end. Minutes after the phone call a UN peacekeeper attempted to hike the Prime Minister over the wall separating their compounds. When Leader heard shots fired, she urged the peacekeeper to abandon the effort. Uwilingiyimana managed to slip with her husband and children into another compound, which was occupied by the UN Development Program.
But the militiamen hunted them down in the yard, where the couple surrendered. There were more shots. Leader recalls, "We heard her screaming and then, suddenly, after the gunfire the screaming stopped, and we heard people cheering.
The raid on Uwilingiyimana's compound not only cost Rwanda a prominent supporter of the Arusha Accords; it also triggered the collapse of Dallaire's mission. In keeping with the plan to target the Belgians which the informant Jean-Pierre had relayed to UNAMIR in January, Hutu soldiers rounded up the peacekeepers at Uwilingiyimana's home, took them to a military camp, led the Ghanaians to safety, and then killed and savagely mutilated the ten Belgians. In response to the initial killings by the Hutu government, Tutsi rebels of the Rwandan Patriotic Front—stationed in Kigali under the terms of the Arusha Accords—surged out of their barracks and resumed their civil war against the Hutu regime.
But under the cover of that war were early and strong indications that systematic genocide was taking place. From April 7 onward the Hutu-controlled army, the gendarmerie, and the militias worked together to wipe out Rwanda's Tutsi. Many of the early Tutsi victims found themselves specifically, not spontaneously, pursued: lists of targets had been prepared in advance, and Radio Mille Collines broadcast names, addresses, and even license-plate numbers.
Killers often carried a machete in one hand and a transistor radio in the other. Tens of thousands of Tutsi fled their homes in panic and were snared and butchered at checkpoints. Little care was given to their disposal. Some were shoveled into landfills. Human flesh rotted in the sunshine. In churches bodies mingled with scattered hosts. If the killers had taken the time to tend to sanitation, it would have slowed their "sanitization" campaign. The two tracks of events in Rwanda—simultaneous war and genocide—confused policymakers who had scant prior understanding of the country.
Atrocities are often carried out in places that are not commonly visited, where outside expertise is limited. When country-specific knowledge is lacking, foreign governments become all the more likely to employ faulty analogies and to "fight the last war.
On October 3, , ten months after President Bush had sent U. Army Rangers and Delta special forces in Somalia attempted to seize several top advisers to the warlord Mohammed Farah Aideed. Aideed's faction had ambushed and killed two dozen Pakistani peacekeepers, and the United States was striking back.
But in the firefight that ensued the Somali militia killed eighteen Americans, wounded seventy-three, and captured one Black Hawk helicopter pilot. Somali television broadcast both a video interview with the trembling, disoriented pilot and a gory procession in which the corpse of a U.
Ranger was dragged through a Mogadishu street. On receiving word of these events, President Clinton cut short a trip to California and convened an urgent crisis-management meeting at the White House. When an aide began recapping the situation, an angry President interrupted him. Republican Congressional pressure was intense. Clinton appeared on American television the next day, called off the manhunt for Aideed, temporarily reinforced the troop presence, and announced that all U.
The Pentagon leadership concluded that peacekeeping in Africa meant trouble and that neither the White House nor Congress would stand by it when the chips were down. But President Habyarimana had traveled to Washington in 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. Even so, U. Somalia and another recent embarrassment in Haiti indicated that multilateral initiatives for humanitarian purposes would likely bring the United States all loss and no gain. Against this backdrop, and under the leadership of Anthony Lake, the national-security adviser, the Clinton Administration accelerated the development of a formal U. 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 , 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. 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.
There was no support for it in the U. Each of the American actors dealing with Rwanda brought particular institutional interests and biases to his or her handling of the crisis. Secretary of State Warren Christopher knew little about Africa. At one meeting with his top advisers, several weeks after the plane crash, he pulled an atlas off his shelf to help him locate the country. Belgian Foreign Minister Willie Claes recalls trying to discuss Rwanda with his American counterpart and being told, "I have other responsibilities.
Prudence Bushnell, the deputy assistant secretary, was one of them. The daughter of a diplomat, Bushnell had joined the foreign service in , at the age of thirty-five. With her agile mind and sharp tongue, she had earned the attention of George Moose when she served under him at the U. When Moose was named the assistant secretary of state for African affairs, in , he made Bushnell his deputy.
Just two weeks before the plane crash the State Department had dispatched Bushnell and a colleague to Rwanda in an effort to contain the escalating violence and to spur the stalled peace process. Unfortunately, for all the concern of the Americans familiar with Rwanda, their diplomacy suffered from three weaknesses. First, ahead of the plane crash diplomats had repeatedly threatened to pull out UN peacekeepers in retaliation for the parties' failure to implement Arusha.
These threats were of course counterproductive, because the very Hutu who opposed power-sharing wanted nothing more than a UN withdrawal. One senior U. Second, before and during the massacres U. Because most official contact occurs between representatives of states, U. Those in the U. An examination of the cable traffic from the U. The U. Rawson had grown up in Burundi, where his father, an American missionary, had set up a Quaker hospital. He entered the foreign service in When, in , at age fifty-two, he was given the embassy in Rwanda, his first, he could not have been more intimate with the region, the culture, or the peril.
He spoke the local language—almost unprecedented for an ambassador in Central Africa. But Rawson found it difficult to imagine the Rwandans who surrounded the President as conspirators in genocide. He issued pro forma demarches over Habyarimana's obstruction of power-sharing, but the cable traffic shows that he accepted the President's assurances that he was doing all he could.
The fact that negotiations can't work is almost not one of the options open to people who care about peace. We were looking for the hopeful signs, not the dark signs.
In fact, we were looking away from the dark signs One of the things I learned and should have already known is that once you launch a process, it takes on its own momentum. I had said, 'Let's try this, and then if it doesn't work, we can back away. Once the Washington side buys into a process, it gets pursued, almost blindly.
The third problematic feature of U. And because the U. When the massacres began in April, some U. Rawson had read up on genocide before his posting to Rwanda, surveying what had become a relatively extensive scholarly literature on its causes. But although he expected internecine killing, he did not anticipate the scale at which it occurred. I couldn't have known that they would do each other in with the most economic means.
As the American ambassador, he was concerned primarily for American citizens, who, he feared, could be killed or injured in any outbreak of fighting. The United States made the decision to withdraw its personnel and nationals on April 7. Penned into his house, Rawson did not feel that his presence was of any use. Looking back, he says, "Did we have a moral responsibility to stay there?
Would it have made a difference? I don't know, but the killings were taking place in broad daylight while we were there.
I didn't feel that we were achieving much. Still, about Rwandans from the neighborhood had gathered at Rawson's residence seeking refuge, and when the Americans cleared out, the local people were left to their fates. Rawson recalls, "I told the people who were there that we were leaving and the flag was coming down, and they would have to make their own choice about what to do Nobody really asked us to take them with us. His chief steward, who served dinner and washed dishes at the house, called the ambassador from his home and pleaded, "We're in terrible danger.
Please come and get us. We can't come. Assistant Secretary Moose was away from Washington, so Prudence Bushnell, the acting assistant secretary, was made the director of the task force that managed the Rwanda evacuation. Her focus, like Rawson's, was on the fate of U. Then again, people didn't know that it was a genocide. What I was told was 'Look, Pru, these people do this from time to time. At a State Department press conference on April 8 Bushnell made an appearance and spoke gravely about the mounting violence in Rwanda and the status of Americans there.
After she left the podium, Michael McCurry, the department spokesman, took her place and criticized foreign governments for preventing the screening of the Steven Spielberg film Schindler's List. Neither journalists nor officials in the United States were focused on the Tutsi.
On April 9 and 10, in five different convoys, Ambassador Rawson and Americans were evacuated from Kigali and other points. Marines had been dispatched to Burundi, there were no plans to send them into Rwanda to restore order: they were in the region as a safety net, in case they were needed to assist in the evacuation. Dallaire, too, had been ordered to make the evacuation of foreigners his priority.
The UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, which had rejected the field commander's proposed raid on arms caches in January, sent an explicit cable: "You should make every effort not to compromise your impartiality or to act beyond your mandate, but [you] may exercise your discretion to do [so] should this be essential for the evacuation of foreign nationals.
This should not, repeat not, extend to participating in possible combat except in self-defense. Avoiding combat was paramount, but Dallaire could make an exception for non-Rwandans. While the United States evacuated overland without an American military escort, the Europeans sent troops to Rwanda so that their personnel could exit by air. On April 9 Dallaire watched covetously as just over a thousand French, Belgian, and Italian soldiers descended on Kigali Airport to begin evacuating their expatriates.
These commandos were clean-shaven, well fed, and heavily armed, in marked contrast to Dallaire's exhausted, hungry, ragtag peacekeeping force. Within three days of the plane crash estimates of the number of dead in the capital already exceeded 10, At that point he commanded Belgians, Bangladeshis, Ghanaians, 60 Tunisians, and others from twenty countries. He could also call on a reserve of Belgians in Nairobi. If the major powers had reconfigured the thousand-man European evacuation force and the U.
Marines on standby in Burundi—who numbered —and contributed them to his mission, he would finally have had the numbers on his side. The consequences of the exclusive attention to foreigners were felt immediately. In the days after the plane crash some 2, Rwandans, including children, had grouped at the Ecole Technique Officielle, under the protection of about ninety Belgian soldiers. Many of them were already suffering from machete wounds. They gathered in the classrooms and on the playing field outside the school.
Rwandan government and militia forces lay in wait nearby, drinking beer and chanting, " Pawa, pawa ," for "Hutu power.
Knowing they were trapped, several Rwandans pursued the jeeps, shouting, "Do not abandon us! When the peacekeepers had gone out through one gate, Hutu militiamen entered through another, firing machine guns and throwing grenades. Most of the 2, gathered there were killed. In the three days during which some 4, foreigners were evacuated, about 20, Rwandans were killed.
After the American evacuees were safely out and the U. Just when did Washington know of the sinister Hutu designs on Rwanda's Tutsi? Writing in Foreign Affairs last year, Alan Kuperman argued that President Clinton "could not have known that a nationwide genocide was under way" until about two weeks into the killing.
It is true that the precise nature and extent of the slaughter was obscured by the civil war, the withdrawal of U. Nonetheless, both the testimony of U.
A determination of genocide turns not on the numbers killed, which is always difficult to ascertain at a time of crisis, but on the perpetrators' intent: Were Hutu forces attempting to destroy Rwanda's Tutsi? The answer to this question was available early on.
I knew they were going door to door. Dallaire's early cables to New York likewise described the armed conflict that had resumed between rebels and government forces, and also stated plainly that savage "ethnic cleansing" of Tutsi was occurring.
In an April 11 memo prepared for Frank Wisner, the undersecretary of defense for policy, in advance of a dinner with Henry Kissinger, a key talking point was "Unless both sides can be convinced to return to the peace process, a massive hundreds of thousands of deaths bloodbath will ensue.
Whatever the inevitable imperfections of U. And they certainly warranted directing additional U. Though there is no evidence that senior policymakers deployed such assets, routine intelligence continued to pour in. A May 9 Defense Intelligence Agency report stated plainly that the Rwandan violence was not spontaneous but was directed by the government, with lists of victims prepared well in advance.
The DIA observed that an "organized parallel effort of genocide [was] being implemented by the army to destroy the leadership of the Tutsi community. From April 8 onward media coverage featured eyewitness accounts describing the widespread targeting of Tutsi and the corpses piling up on Kigali's streets. American reporters relayed stories of missionaries and embassy officials who had been unable to save their Rwandan friends and neighbors from death.
On April 9 a front-page Washington Post story quoted reports that the Rwandan employees of the major international relief agencies had been executed "in front of horrified expatriate staffers. On April 14 The New York Times reported the shooting and hacking to death of nearly 1, men, women, and children in the church where they had sought refuge.
On April 19 Human Rights Watch, which had excellent sources on the ground in Rwanda, estimated the number of dead at , and called for use of the term "genocide. On April 24 the Post reported how "the heads and limbs of victims were sorted and piled neatly, a bone-chilling order in the midst of chaos that harked back to the Holocaust.
Even after the reality of genocide in Rwanda had become irrefutable, when bodies were shown choking the Kagera River on the nightly news, the brute fact of the slaughter failed to influence U. American officials, for a variety of reasons, shunned the use of what became known as "the g-word.
They also believed, understandably, that it would harm U. A discussion paper on Rwanda, prepared by an official in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and dated May 1, testifies to the nature of official thinking. Regarding issues that might be brought up at the next interagency working group, it stated,.
At an interagency teleconference in late April, Susan Rice, a rising star on the NSC who worked under Richard Clarke, stunned a few of the officials present when she asked, "If we use the word 'genocide' and are seen as doing nothing, what will be the effect on the November [congressional] election? The genocide debate in U.
The stubborn U. The case for a label of genocide was straightforward, according to a May 18 confidential analysis prepared by the State Department's assistant secretary for intelligence and research, Toby Gati: lists of Tutsi victims' names and addresses had reportedly been prepared; Rwandan government troops and Hutu militia and youth squads were the main perpetrators; massacres were reported all over the country; humanitarian agencies were now "claiming from , to , lives" lost.
Gati offered the intelligence bureau's view: "We believe , may be an exaggerated estimate, but no accurate figures are available. Systematic killings began within hours of Habyarimana's death.
Most of those killed have been Tutsi civilians, including women and children. We were basically saying, 'A rose by any other name Despite this straightforward assessment, Christopher remained reluctant to speak the obvious truth. When he issued his guidance, on May 21, fully a month after Human Rights Watch had put a name to the tragedy, Christopher's instructions were hopelessly muddied. Notably, Christopher confined permission to acknowledge full-fledged genocide to the upcoming session of the Human Rights Commission.
Outside that venue State Department officials were authorized to state publicly only that acts of genocide had occurred. Christine Shelly, a State Department spokesperson, had long been charged with publicly articulating the U. For two months she had avoided the term, and as her June 10 exchange with the Reuters correspondent Alan Elsner reveals, her semantic dance continued. The same day, in Istanbul, Warren Christopher, by then under severe internal and external pressure, relented: "If there is any particular magic in calling it genocide, I have no hesitancy in saying that.
Once the Americans had been evacuated, Rwanda largely dropped off the radar of most senior Clinton Administration officials. In the situation room on the seventh floor of the State Department a map of Rwanda had been hurriedly pinned to the wall in the aftermath of the plane crash, and eight banks of phones had rung off the hook. Now, with U. Cabinet-level officials focused on crises elsewhere.
Anthony Lake recalls, "I was obsessed with Haiti and Bosnia during that period, so Rwanda was, in William Shawcross's words, a 'sideshow,' but not even a sideshow—a no-show. Clarke believed that another UN failure could doom relations between Congress and the United Nations.
He also sought to shield the President from congressional and public criticism. Donald Steinberg managed the Africa portfolio at the NSC and tried to look out for the dying Rwandans, but he was not an experienced infighter and, colleagues say, he "never won a single argument" with Clarke. The Americans who wanted the United States to do the most were those who knew Rwanda best.
Joyce Leader, Rawson's deputy in Rwanda, had been the one to close and lock the doors to the U. When she returned to Washington, she was given a small room in a back office and told to prepare the State Department's daily Rwanda summaries, drawing on press and U. Incredibly, despite her expertise and her contacts in Rwanda, she was rarely consulted and was instructed not to deal directly with her sources in Kigali.
Once, an NSC staffer did call to ask, "Short of sending in the troops, what is to be done? In contrast, those with the most pull in the bureaucracy had never visited Rwanda or met any Rwandans. They spoke analytically of "national interests" or even "humanitarian consequences" without appearing gripped by the unfolding human tragedy.
The dearth of country or regional expertise in the senior circles of government not only reduces the capacity of officers to assess the "news. As it happened, when the crisis began, President Clinton himself had a coincidental and personal connection with the country. He had been struck by the courage of a woman who still bore facial scars from an automobile accident that had been arranged to curb her activities. Clinton had singled her out, saying, "Your courage is an inspiration to all of us.
In the meantime She was evacuated to Belgium, and on April 18 she joined Des Forges in the United States, where the pair began lobbying the Clinton Administration on behalf of those left behind.
With Mujawamariya's rescue, reported in detail in the Post and The New York Times , the President apparently lost his personal interest in events in Rwanda. During the entire three months of the genocide Clinton never assembled his top policy advisers to discuss the killings.
Anthony Lake likewise never gathered the "principals"—the Cabinet-level members of the foreign-policy team. Rwanda was never thought to warrant its own top-level meeting. When the subject came up, it did so along with, and subordinate to, discussions of Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia. Whereas these crises involved U.
The editorial boards of the major American newspapers discouraged U. They, like the Administration, lamented the killings but believed, in the words of an April 17 Washington Post editorial, "The United States has no recognizable national interest in taking a role, certainly not a leading role.
Some in Congress were glad to be free of the expense of another flawed UN mission. Others, including a few members of the Africa subcommittees and the Congressional Black Caucus, eventually appealed tamely for the United States to play a role in ending the violence—but again, they did not dare urge U.
Members of Congress weren't hearing from their constituents. Pat Schroeder, of Colorado, said on April 30, "There are some groups terribly concerned about the gorillas But—it sounds terrible—people just don't know what can be done about the people.
Human Rights Watch supplied exemplary intelligence and established important one-on-one contacts in the Administration, but the organization lacks a grassroots base from which to mobilize a broader segment of American society.
When the killing began, Romeo Dallaire expected and appealed for reinforcements. But the United States opposed the idea of sending reinforcements, no matter where they were from. The fear, articulated mainly at the Pentagon but felt throughout the bureaucracy, was that what would start as a small engagement by foreign troops would end as a large and costly one by Americans.
This was the lesson of Somalia, where U. The logical outgrowth of this fear was an effort to steer clear of Rwanda entirely and be sure others did the same. Only by yanking Dallaire's entire peacekeeping force could the United States protect itself from involvement down the road. We thought leaving the peacekeepers in Rwanda and having them confront the violence would take us where we'd been before.
It was a foregone conclusion that the United States wouldn't intervene and that the concept of UN peacekeeping could not be sacrificed again. A foregone conclusion. What is most remarkable about the American response to the Rwandan genocide is not so much the absence of U. Indeed, the United States resisted intervention of any kind. The bodies of the slain Belgian soldiers were returned to Brussels on April One of the pivotal conversations in the course of the genocide took place around that time, when Willie Claes, the Belgian Foreign Minister, called the State Department to request "cover.
Dallaire had not anticipated that Belgium would extract its soldiers, removing the backbone of his mission and stranding Rwandans in their hour of greatest need. The Belgian decision caught me totally off guard.
I was truly stunned.
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