Ted RE...First, the US would never tolerate or ignore such behavior for any length of time. And for good reason......when one country goes amok, the other countries in the neighborhood are threaten. <<<<
You say that, but France, Belgium, the UN and partially Bill, left the Rawanda tragedy go on with one million killed, even though they knew in advance. Maybe it was that tragedy which force action in Kosovo. France has had material interests in Africa for decades, but instead of cleaning Africa up and getting in stable gov.; France takes advantage of the situation, so as to gain materially. That is why Africa is the mess it is today.
https://mail.lsit.ucsb.edu/pipermail/gordon-newspost/2001-June/001352.html
Gordon-Newspost] Rawanda tragedy, French guilt, conniving, and cabals, the UN as a derelict institution, American-British reservations about UN interventions
michael gordon gordonm1@email.msn.com
Sat, 16 Jun 2001 19:37:56 -0700
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This is a very effective, scathing review of a recent book on the Rawandan
genocide. We, the US, don't come out looking good, but the French
government (under a Socialist President), where African policies were
directed by a cabal outside the official government---including Mitterand's
son---looks contemptible, as it has for decades in supporting some of the
grisliest regimes on earth . . . though, oddly, while the French left was
jumping up and down in front of the American embassy for this or that sin in
the third world, no jumping up and down appeared in the French media until
recently. And the UN looks like an especially unseemly, unlikeable, and
ineffective institution for carrying out human rights interventions. Then,
too, the Belgians---another EU country---played a contemptibel role in
dealing with that genocide too.
.
Fortunately, NATO is different. And when the British and Americans can't
get NATO support---as is the case over policing the no-fly zones in
Iraq---their governments are willing to go ahead and pay the costs of doing
something. To put this in theoretical terms that are hard to swallow no
doubt for both liberal institutionalists and constructivists alike, NATO is
a HARD institution: it has joint commands, it has forces at its disposal, it
rests on what were formerly common security problems, it continues to exist
because it has been endowed with a new mission---to expand solidify
democracy and market economies in East Europe right up to the Russian
border, as well as intervening in the Balkans militarily---and it continues
to work because it is also an effective instrument of American power on that
Continent, a view and a function largely shared by the British government,
whether conservative or liberal. It is, in other words, an institution that
fits the two strands of AMerican foreign policy---hardheaded realism and a
strong liberal bent on building and using international instittuions, the
latter tradition extending back to the end of WWI, the end of WWII, the end
of the Cold War.
Laying the blame: the scandal of Rwanda and the west
RW Johnson unravels the web of culpability behind the failure to prevent
genocide in Rwanda in this exclusive online essay from the London Review of
Books
Thursday June 14, 2001
A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda's Genocide by Linda
Melvern. Zed, 272 pp., £16.95, 5 September 2000, 1 85649 831 x
Jean de Dieu, 11, was curled up, a ball of flesh and blood, the look in his
eyes was a glance from nowhere . . . without vision; Marie-Ange, aged nine,
was propped up against a tree trunk . . . her legs apart, and she was
covered in excrement, sperm and blood . . . in her mouth was a penis, cut
with a machete, that of her father . . . nearby in a ditch with stinking
water were four bodies, cut up, piled up, their parents and older brothers.
Sights like this - recorded by an observer with Medecins sans Frontieres -
were common in Rwanda in April and May 1994, when Hutu extremists butchered
up to a million people, mainly Tutsis but also Hutu moderates who were seen
as 'sell-outs'. The small United Nations force under Major-General Romeo
Dallaire and the gallant contingent of the International Committee of the
Red Cross under Philippe Gaillard had to confront them over and over again.
This was one of the few real genocides of modern times. Apart from the
Armenian massacres and the Holocaust, Pol Pot killed around two million
people in Cambodia and the German administration of South West Africa killed
90% of the Herero people in the early years of the last century. Part of the
horror of Rwanda is that we think of genocide as belonging to an age we had
left behind.
Gaillard, a medieval scholar, said that the apocalypse in Rwanda was
prefigured in the works of Breughel and in the cast of characters consigned
to the Inferno in The Divine Comedy. Each night at supper he would read to
his Red Cross workers from Rimbaud's Une Saison en Enfer, hoping that the
poem would have the calming effect of prayer. Rimbaud was a friend sitting
with them, he insisted. Though she resists the temptation to mount a soapbox
in this excellent and tersely written book - which was turned down by 20
British publishers and, until now, has not received a review in the UK -
Linda Melvern believes that the Rwandan tragedy represents the unravelling
of the new international order built on the defeat of Nazism. The Convention
on Genocide was, she points out, the world's first human rights treaty and
if the UN was founded with one aim, it was to prevent things like this.
Melvern is indignant that the conflict between Tutsi and Hutu is so often
seen as tribal. The two groups share the same language and cosmology and
have no distinct areas of residence. The Tutsi minority - Hutus make up at
least 80 per cent of the population of Rwanda and Burundi - were simply the
traditional ruling caste, historically controlling the monarchy, the army
and the administration. But rather as in Northern Ireland, these differences
of caste have gradually assumed tribal importance to the extent that the
protagonists believe they can recognise one another on sight - Tutsis are
taller and thinner - and because there is a historical accumulation of
resentments against the entire group. Tutsi simply means 'rich in cattle',
while Hutu means 'servant', and Hutu resentments are typically those of any
underclass: an anger against past social injustices, a partly justified
belief that all Tutsis condescend to them and prevailed on their Belgian
colonial masters to do the same, and a neurotic anxiety that perhaps they
are, indeed, inferior.
Once Rwanda and Burundi became independent democratic states in 1962, the
fact that the Hutus had a natural majority meant that Tutsi dominance could
hardly continue. The Tutsis remained in control in Burundi and the result
was an attempted Hutu coup in 1972 in the course of which 200,000 Hutus were
massacred - the Tutsis carefully targeted educated people, who might
threaten their position in the future. Neither the UN nor the Organisation
of African Unity had anything to say. In Rwanda, Hutu dominance produced
repeated Tutsi attempts to reverse the status quo, often with outside help;
in each case - in 1962, 1963, 1967, 1990 and 1993 - this resulted in
reprisals against Tutsis. The 1994 genocide was simply a repetition of that
pattern on a far greater scale, Hutu extremists having decided to do away
with the 'Inyenzi' (the Tutsi 'cockroaches') once and for all. As Melvern
shows, the 1994 genocide was planned in detail. Elaborate lists were drawn
up of those to be massacred; half a million machetes and huge numbers of
axes, hammers and razors as well as guns were purchased in advance and
stockpiled - the costs were met by cunningly diverted aid funds. Belgium and
France, both countries with expert knowledge of Rwanda, were aware of what
was coming; the Belgians issued horrified warnings. As early as the spring
of 1992 the Belgian Ambassador, Johan Swinnen, told Brussels that the
extremist Hutu clan, the Akazu, was "planning the extermination of the Tutsi
of Rwanda to resolve once and for all . . . the ethnic problem and to crush
the internal Hutu opposition". One of the organisers of the genocide,
Colonel Theoneste Bagosora, boasted that he was preparing "apocalypse deux".
The behaviour of the French was worse than that of the Belgians. Eager to
become the pivotal power in the Great Lakes region, they aided and abetted
the massacres at every turn. The Akazu death squads had received military
training from the French; Hutu extremists were always assured of a warm
welcome in Paris and the flow of French arms to the Hutus continued
throughout the genocide. Whenever the Tutsis regrouped sufficiently to
threaten Hutu power, France mounted a discreet military intervention to save
its friends. The French troops who arrived towards the end of the 1994
massacres were thoroughly confused by the reality of the million Tutsi dead:
they had been told they were coming in to prevent a massacre of Hutus by the
Tutsi minority.
Burundi's first Hutu president was assassinated in October 1993, on the day
before General Dallaire, the Canadian head of the UN Assistance Mission
(UNAMIR), arrived in Rwanda. His death triggered up to 50,000 deaths in
Burundi in reprisal and convinced Hutu extremists in Rwanda of the need to
act. From this time on "genocide hung in the air," as one observer put it.
Finally, on 5 April 1994, both the new president of Burundi and the
president of Rwanda were assassinated when the latter's plane was destroyed
by two ground-to-air missiles as it approached Kigali airport. In the
ensuing political vacuum no one was quite sure of who was giving the
orders - precisely the cover the murderous Interahamwe movement needed.
The scenes Melvern goes on to describe - the mass slaughter by machete, the
lopping off of limbs before the final death-thrust, the prodigious killings
in churches of those who had fled there for refuge, the mothers forced to
bury their children alive - are terrible. Ironically, there were never more
than 15 reporters in Rwanda to witness these atrocities - though no fewer
than 2500 were celebrating the birth of South Africa's new democracy a
little further south. Melvern believes that the west is deeply culpable.
When the Czech Ambassador to the UN Security Council likened what was
happening to the Holocaust, he was taken aside by British and American
diplomats and told that on no account was he to use such inflammatory
language again: it was "not helpful". As the reports of carnage began to
trickle through, the Republican leader Bob Dole was interviewed on CBS. "I
don't think we have any national interest here," he said. "I hope we don't
get involved . . . The Americans are out. As far as I'm concerned in Rwanda,
that ought to be the end of it."
Melvern sees Rwanda as "the defining scandal of the Clinton presidency". She
describes with contempt Clinton's playing to the humanitarian gallery as the
Hutu death-squads piled into refugee camps in Zaire. Suddenly there was
endless American sympathy for the refugees and, once the million dead had
been disposed of, Clinton even had some empty rhetoric to offer. "The
international community . . . must bear its share of responsibility . . . We
did not act quickly enough after the killing began . . . We did not
immediately call these crimes by their rightful name, genocide. Never again
must we be shy in the face of the evidence."
We have got used to the spectacle of Clintonite politicians around the world
making rhetorical flourishes as they apologise for slavery or what was done
to the Maoris, American Indians or Aborigines. It is the politics of remote
catharsis: you appropriate the moral high ground by showing an apparent
humility and contrition about sins which were not yours, about events safely
concluded before you were born. The extraordinary thing about Clinton's
apology for Rwanda was that the genocide really had happened on his watch.
But the apology cost him nothing. Rwanda was far away, obscure, it was only
Africa: nobody really blamed him and he knew it. Melvern is determined that
he should not get off the hook: she shows convincingly that he and his
advisers knew precisely what was happening, and decided to affect ignorance
and shut down the channels of communication until it was over. Clinton had
been traumatised by the fate of the US mission sent to Somalia in 1992. The
American force was then placed under UN command - a fact celebrated by
Madeleine Albright as "an unprecedented enterprise aimed at nothing less
than the restoration of an entire country". The result was that 18 US
Rangers were killed, their bodies dragged through the streets of Mogadishu;
more were trapped and wounded, saved only by Malaysian and Turkish troops
driving Pakistani tanks. It was an unspeakable humiliation. Clinton withdrew
his troops on the spot. After that, the last thing in the world he wanted to
hear about was an African crisis requiring American ground troops.
More reprehensible by far than anything Clinton did or didn't do in Rwanda
was what Mitterrand did. It is no surprise that his son, Jean-Christophe
Mitterrand, who ran the Elysee's Africa policy, has now been accused of
taking his cut as he kept arms flowing into Rwanda. But the ways of
Mitterrand pere et fils were nothing new. France's African policy has always
been run by a cabal operating out of a back door of the Elysee - this was
how Jacques Foccart ran it under de Gaulle and Pompidou, orchestrating coups
and mercenary interventions at will. Giscard dispensed with Foccart, but was
equally underhand. He continued the pattern of military intervention; Africa
was his true domaine reserve, where he went shooting lions and elephants,
even ending up with diamonds from Bokassa.
France has realised - and instrumentalised - the key fact about modern
Africa, which is that the nationalist elites have failed to build modern
states, and mainly aspire to get money offshore and bring up their children
in Paris, Geneva or New York. In the world of the dissolving African state,
an arms shipment here or there, two hundred well-trained mercenaries or a
million dollars for this or that politician can tip the balance in
territories rich in gold, diamonds, oil or uranium. It's absurdly cheap.
Everyone knows that Gaullist Presidential campaigns over the last thirty
years have benefited greatly from donations from Gabon, Cote d'Ivoire and
the two Congo states (Kinshasa and Brazzaville). It will doubtless be the
same in 2002 - which is why Chirac receives Robert Mugabe in such splendour
at the Elysee, conscious that Zimbabwe's 14,000 troops in the Congo make him
a key player in such marchandise. Not that France has a monopoly on playing
Machiavelli in Africa: Herman Cohen, Clinton's assistant secretary of state
for Africa, who was so busy in Rwanda in 1994, today has a multi-million
contract to tart up the image of Mugabe. Cohen has also had contracts to
promote Zaire's Mobutu, Gabon's Omar Bongo (whose government the state
department reports is guilty of a routine use of torture), and Liberia's
Charles Taylor - an adept in the use of child soldiers and the lopping off
of hands, legs, ears and lips.
But - and this is where I part company from Melvern - the reason toxic
outsiders can so easily play ducks and drakes with African lives is to do
with Africa's elite. And despite Melvern's attempt to lay the blame on the
west, Rwanda was a made-in-Africa tragedy, not just in the obvious sense
that the genocide was planned and carried out by Africans, but because
neither the Organisation of African Unity nor individual African heads of
state lifted a finger to stop it. Worse, they didn't even publicly condemn
it, just as the OAU said not a word in criticism of the atrocities of
Bokassa and Idi Amin - and remains silent now about the actions of Mugabe.
Significantly, this same African elite has become increasingly prominent in
international institutions of every kind, starting with the UN. If you think
about it, this is inevitable: it's a question of numbers. The UN today has
189 members. The OAU has 50. If you want to get elected as the head of any
international organisation you need 95 votes minimum. You look around - get
Africa and you're over halfway there. It's a nonsense, a travesty: India and
China each have higher populations than Africa, but they have only one vote
each and Africa has 50.
If, for example, you're Sepp Blatter bidding to be head of Fifa, you say:
the World Cup finals must be played in Africa. Forget the fact that soccer
stadium disasters occur with sickening regularity in Africa, that most
African teams won't qualify for the finals, that the crowds can't afford the
tickets, that they don't have the infrastructure, and so on. Because of
extreme balkanisation, the one thing Africa does have is the votes. The same
anomaly applies if you want to be head of anything from the International
Olympic Committee to the World Health Organisation. You have to court the
African elite and then, when you can't deliver the World Cup or the Olympics
or whatever it is to the continent, you register your profound
disappointment. The rest of the world is to blame, especially the west.
This is precisely what happened with the UN and Rwanda. Boutros
Boutros-Ghali, Egypt's foreign minister, was elected UN secretary-general in
November 1991 largely because he had campaigned throughout Africa for the
post and been able to make shrewd use of the 'special fund for co-operation
with Africa' he had introduced during his time at the foreign ministry in
Cairo. In addition he had studied in Paris and was a close friend of
Mitterrand, who saw him as 'his' Secretary-General. Boutros-Ghali made much
of being the first African to head the UN ("Africa is the mother of us all,
and Egypt is the eldest daughter of Africa. This is why I have loved Africa
and tried so hard throughout my life to help her"). It's true that he
lobbied hard for a UN force to be sent to Rwanda. Even so, he was the worst
possible person to be in charge of the crisis. He was 71 in 1994, concerned
largely with his own ego, had a confrontational manner and unhealthy links
to the Hutu extremists. He had single-handedly reversed Egypt's traditional
ban on selling weapons to Rwanda and was responsible for providing the Hutus
with a good deal of the weaponry later used in the genocide. Moreover, he
knew what he was doing: he had been visiting Rwanda since 1983 and was
perfectly aware that he was supplying matches for the powder keg.
Boutros-Ghali then chose for the key post of the secretary general's special
representative Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh, another francophone African and a
personal crony. No doubt this was cleared with Mitterrand. Booh-Booh was a
former Camerounian foreign minister, openly pro-Hutu, and tried
energetically to get the most extreme Hutu party into the Government. Long
after the danger of genocide had become clear, Booh-Booh continued to put an
optimistic gloss on developments. The effect was to provide cover as the
preparations for extermination went ahead.
Yet a third African occupied a key position: Kofi Annan,
under-secretary-general and head of the UN department of peacekeeping
operations. When Dallaire cabled Annan to tell him that secret weapons dumps
were being set up, Annan quickly forbade any reconnaissance or arms
inspection by UNAMIR. If the Hutu killers had wanted allies at the top of
the UN to help them organise their genocide in optimal conditions, they
could hardly have done better than Boutros-Ghali, Booh-Booh and Annan. To
top it all, from January 1994 the killers had their own representative
sitting as a non-permanent member on the security council, giving them
advance warning of UN intentions.
With the massacre just hours away - and despite clear warnings of what was
coming - Boutros-Ghali presented an optimistic report to the council,
stating that all parties 'remain committed to the peace process'.
Afterwards, when a million deaths had proved him wrong, Boutros-Ghali
excused himself by saying that he'd been travelling a lot and had not
actually been in touch with the Rwandan situation for quite a time. Given
that he was the organisation's chief executive, this amounted to an
admission that he had not been doing his job. When the tidal wave of killing
began, he had refused to break off from his European tour to deal with the
situation and didn't allow any change in UNAMIR's role on the grounds that
he wasn't sure what was going on.
What Boutros-Ghali really liked was being the guest of honour at diplomatic
receptions, whence his incessant travels. When criticised for these lengthy
absences, he would insist he could deal with crises by phone and fax, but
when asked for decisions he would either claim he needed more information or
make clearly inappropriate suggestions, such as that UNAMIR might respond to
the killing by quitting Rwanda altogether. His officials had already found
his prolonged absences a fatal handicap in dealing with the Bosnian crisis,
but his steady refusal to alter his three-week progress from one reception
to another while the murder of the Tutsis proceeded - and while UNAMIR, for
which he was responsible, took serious casualties - was an act of criminal
self-indulgence. As the casualties mounted and the Nigerian ambassador to
the UN asked in desperation if "Africa had fallen off the map of moral
concern", Boutros-Ghali did not even get back to attend key security council
meetings. Moreover, UNAMIR was under-equipped, under-trained and
under-manned, with no intelligence function. Boutros-Ghali also continued to
produce late and misleading reports to the Council which were so far from
depicting the reality of the situation as to be a disgrace of staggering
proportions.
Kofi Annan was not much better. On receiving Dallaire's cable of 11 January,
which - three months in advance - gave clear warning of the horror to come,
Annan simply failed to pass it on either to the security council or to
Boutros-Ghali. There was no reason or excuse: he simply didn't do his job
and was rightly censured in a later UN report. The result was that for the
first month of the slaughter, the Security Council never once discussed
Rwanda at length.
Eventually, realising the enormity of what had happened, Boutros-Ghali
scurried back from his tour of Europe and tried to lay the blame on the US
and the security council, producing some bitter exchanges with Madeleine
Albright, who made no secret of her contempt for him. The Bush
administration's delegation had abstained on his election as
secretary-general and Clinton now determined to veto his attempt to win a
further term. Naturally, this was presented as evidence of further bad
American behaviour towards Africa and Paris quickly made him the head of its
association of French-speaking states - la Francophonie. Inevitably, he now
heads Unesco's special panel on democracy-building.
Melvern is clearly critical of America's unwillingness to enter into any
overseas commitments and disapprovingly quotes Colin Powell's attitude
towards a UN standing army: "As long as I am chairman of the joint chiefs of
staff, I will not agree to commit American men and women to an unknown war,
in an unknown land, for an unknown cause, under an unknown commander, for an
unknown duration." America, of course, will not even commit ground troops
under its own command if it can avoid it. That's the lesson of Kosovo. On
the issue of a UN command, however, its position is more understandable.
Would any mother aware of what she was doing willingly entrust her son's
life to the sort of mismanagement which seems endemic in the UN? Although
Britain and America have been tight-lipped about their reasons for ignoring
the UN and relying increasingly on Nato in their dealings with Iraq or
Kosovo, or for Britain's refusal to put its troops in Sierra Leone under UN
control, it is clear that Anglo-America, at least, has lost all confidence
in the UN - and with reason. What does one make of an organisation which has
rewarded Kofi Annan for his inglorious role in Rwanda by appointing him
secretary-general? Or - whatever you think of George Bush Jr - which votes
the US off its human rights commission and puts Sudan on it, despite the
fact that the government in Khartoum has killed two million of its own
citizens, is suspected of sponsoring terrorists and tolerates slavery? The
UN is only a failure to the degree that the US is unwilling to make it a
success. Meanwhile, it has begun to resemble a ramshackle third world state
itself: corrupt, ineffectual, eternally in debt.
• To read more online essays from the current edition of the London Review
of Books visit the LRB. The extensive online archive of essays from past
editions includes John Lanchester on the rise of Microsoft, Alan Bennett's
Diary and much more
gordonm1@msn.com
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