INTERVIEW:
Nancy Soderberg
September 12, 2003 Episode no. 702
pbs.org
Read more of Phil Jones's interview with Nancy Soderberg, vice president of the International Crisis Group in New York City.
Q: You worked in the Clinton White House on national security. You were involved with the UN Security Council apparatus during the whole business of Rwanda. What was it like during that period? What were people thinking? What was the atmosphere?
A: In the case of Somalia, when 18 Rangers lost their lives, you look at those pictures sitting in the White House Situation Room, [and] you just feel sick. You say, "How did this happen? How did we let this happen?" You think of the families. In Rwanda, watching the bodies floating down the rivers, you say, "How did this happen? How could this be?" You realize we could have done more to prevent it, and it's just an awful feeling.
But when you're in a position of power in Washington, as things are unveiling they are never as perfect as they seem today -- particularly the case of Rwanda. The sense of responsibility that the world feels now in many cases in Africa didn't really exist then. It wasn't our job to stop that. Also, we didn't have perfect information. We didn't really know there was a genocide unfolding, even though some of the reports that you hear now would lead you to believe otherwise. I'm a big believer that the theory of chaos over conspiracy largely reigns at the center of power in Washington.
Q: Take me inside. You're there, and all of this information is beginning to come in on Rwanda. What is the information you have at the time, and what's the mindset?
A: The information that you have initially is that there are some reports of potential ethnic violence in a place in the middle of Africa; most people in the White House apparatus aren't really sure where it is: "Rwanda? Where's that? Burundi?" We've heard of Hutus and Tutsis somewhere in the back of our brains; it's not in the forefront. You're worried about war with North Korea. You're worried about trying to get some action going in Bosnia. This issue is not on your front burner.
I remember asking the CIA briefers who had come in the morning, "What's the worst-case scenario here?" And they said, "Well, probably another cycle of violence, where 20 to 40,000 people might get killed." You have to remember 100,000 people in Burundi had been killed that fall, and no one really even paid any attention to that. There are reports floating around [of] impending genocide, but, frankly, we didn't get those reports at the time. We didn't know that was what was happening. It was really inconceivable that a million people would be hacked to death in the weeks ahead, so we didn't really say at the time, "If we deploy troops, can we prevent a genocide?" It's much more chaotic as it evolves through the process.
Q: Did anyone say, "This may turn into genocide"? Did the word get used?
A: During the killing, there was a debate about whether to use "genocide," which I think none of us are particularly proud about. It was clearly genocide once it started. It took about two or three weeks to unfold. I think by the third week in April, it was very clear it was genocide. It took the State Department much longer than it should have to actually use the word, and we all deserve some blame for that. I don't think that would happen again. It was clearly genocide. As it unfolded -- I would say within two or three weeks -- it became clear.
At the time, though, the last thing you want to do is insert troops into the middle of a genocide. Nobody really knew what to do at that stage. The lessons from that period are you have to do a lot more early on: preventive deployments -- get the UN deployments right. Those lessons have actually been learned, I think. You're seeing very strong action in Liberia today, although I personally think it's too late. But there is movement there that will prevent widespread killings and chaos that could easily emerge in the aftermath of Charles Taylor's departure. The British went into Sierra Leone. The French have gone into Ivory Coast. We are making progress, although not as much as I' d like to see.
Q: What's the reluctance, the fear, of using the word "genocide" -- because of what it would have actually required?
A: Well, in theory. You know, you can parse words, but it was clearly genocide. There's no excuse for not having labeled it that early on, and there was, I think, some concern that we would be required to do something; but there was no definition of what we're required to do, either. We should have said much earlier on, "This is happening" and put a stronger force in there.
Before the genocide erupts -- that's the way to present these things. Once they start, it's very hard to convince troops to go into the middle of a very chaotic situation, particularly troops that are not from the region. If you look at the history of intervention in conflicts, it's almost always troops from the neighboring countries. NATO and the U.S. went into Bosnia and Kosovo. The Nigerians are the ones who have been going into Sierra Leone and now Liberia; you had the Australians going into East Timor. They're the ones who are the first-trigger troops, who are willing to go. They're willing to take the casualties. They understand very quickly -- much more quickly than troops from other parts of the world -- how dangerous this is.
Q: But there you are, officials in the embassy and in a presidential administration, and you're talking on a rather routine basis about 20 to 40,000 people who might be killed. Does that happen every day? Every week?
A: Well, in that part of the world, it does tend to happen on occasion. What was so wrong about [Rwanda] was they thought it was just going to be another contained cycle of violence. There's a famous genocide fax that was sent back from the UN rep on the ground, Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire. [Now people say,] "Oh, this genocide fax went all around the UN."
Actually, if you read that cable, it was asking for permission to go and seize an arms cache. The cable itself didn't really set off alarm bells: "Oh, there's a coming genocide." When you read it with hindsight, there was possible prediction of genocide in there. But until it really was about two or three weeks into it, there was not a large-scale sense that there was going to be genocide on that scale.
With hindsight, I think the lesson of Rwanda is the need to act quickly and firmly. The fear of another Somalia -- the response to that is not, "Never go in again," which was a little bit of what was going on in Rwanda, really; not "Forget it, we're not looking at that again," but look at those signs, have a genocide alert network where people see these signs. Rwanda was not the first time people invented genocide. It's in the evil side of human nature, and it could pop up anywhere around the world. In its traditional signs, you see ethnic targeting, minority targeting, the use of hate radio. And when you see those signs, the world needs to move in quickly and forcefully to stop it. That is the lesson from Rwanda being applied today in many of the African conflicts. Although it took a decade to be implemented, I think it is being implemented now.
Q: What's the tipping point between what appears to be ethnic cleansing and possible genocide?
A: People who haven't sat in the seats of power fail to realize just how messy the decisions are. You don't really know. You're guessing. The military comes in with some assumptions that may or may not be real. You get on the ground, and you don't really know. Those who want quick action have to understand that militaries are reluctant to put their own men on the ground in a situation where they don't know what they're going into and they certainly have no idea how they're getting out.
That's why early action is so much easier, because it's easier to prevent things than to contain them once they've broken out. What policy makers faced in the early nineties was a new kind of warfare -- not between states like we had in the Cold War, but these interethnic, messy things. It took us a while to figure it out. And, certainly, in the early days of the Clinton administration, we did not have it right. In Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Haiti -- all of those early crises -- we hadn't gotten the balance of force and diplomacy right in these areas.
But over the course of the last ten years, we have figured it out to a large extent. What you're seeing in the Bush administration in Liberia is the need to act now before it erupts. And to their credit, they're doing it -- although too late and too little, in my view. But I think it is working, and it's moving slowly. They're beginning to do nation building and peacekeeping in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and those are all the lessons we learned in the last decade that are now being applied.
Perhaps the most important shift in the last 10 years is [the question of] whose responsibility it is to stop genocide around the world. What you've seen is a shift recognizing that the international community has a responsibility to protect innocent civilians when their own governments fail to do that. That is a major shift, really, in the last five years. Many haven't noticed it, but it has made a huge impact on the psyche of those who are making these decisions.
Q: Yet, time after time, when it comes to finding a consensus on this, the UN has failed.
A: This is not necessarily a job that the UN itself can do. You have to remember that the UN is a bunch of member states who have to agree; it's really the permanent five members of the Security Council who have to agree. If you can get China, Russia, the U.S., the UK, and France together on an issue, the UN works great. If they're divided, as we saw in Iraq, it's embarrassing; it's a mess. That's not Kofi Annan's fault. If you can work it out, basically, between Moscow, Washington, and Europe, China usually will go along.
What you've seen in these conflicts is disagreements in some of these cases, but increasing agreement. They've just voted a UN Security Council resolution on Liberia. There were a couple of abstentions on that one, but, overall, they've agreed to authorize this force there.
In Kosovo, there wasn't agreement in the Security Council, because the U.S. felt that the Chinese and the Russians would veto the resolution; but they acted. And in East Timor, there was agreement to send the international force in once the Indonesians agreed to do so.
There's a different case for each place, and it's really not the UN's fault that the member states can't agree. Until the Security Council and the permanent five members agree to authorize an action, the UN is hamstrung. The focus needs to be on the recognition in the key capitals of the need to move quickly and forcefully in some of these areas. It's moving in the right direction, but it's not there yet in key cases.
Q: What is the fallout from Iraq on future situations where these key members of the Security Council need to have a consensus?
A: I think you'll see the pendulum swing back. Iraq was really a mess in the Security Council. The U.S. was isolated in wanting to go to war. They' d gone to the council asking for unanimous support and got unanimous support for sending the inspectors back. The inspectors were back in. Everyone wanted to give it time, and the U.S. pulled the plug, failed completely on the diplomacy side, and went to war.
Everyone was furious. Bush isn't talking to the Germans, and the French are getting criticized from all sorts of quarters. And poor little French fries are not accepted anymore in some quarters in Washington. But that's changing, because reality tends to intrude on the politics of these things. The U.S. needs the United Nations, and it needs the other allies. You can see what's happening in Iraq already. Already, they're bringing the UN in, in much stronger terms than they expected. They're trying to get the Germans and the French to send troops. They're going to have to go back to the Security Council to get a resolution for that. They're probably going to have to share some of the lucrative contracts that have been going primarily to the U.S. The pendulum will swing back, and all of a sudden, the UN will seem like a pretty good thing to use, but you have to use it correctly.
Q: Kofi Annan has said, "Who's going to decide these things? Who's going to make the rules? Under what circumstances?" He's almost pleading, isn't he?
A: I think he is. His role in life is to prevent armed conflict. That was what the UN was established for, and he views it as his job. He saw the failure of diplomacy in Iraq, which he felt was working. I don't think that the UN generally shared the threat assessment. They felt the inspectors could contain Saddam Hussein. I think it was one of the most difficult, depressing times ever for Kofi Annan.
That said, he's also the best secretary-general we've ever had, probably ever will have. He understands that the United States is the most powerful member of the United Nations, and he's smart enough not to confront the U.S. on this issue, but to work closely with them and try to come up with a way forward that works and that helps him fulfill his mandate. With respect to Iraq, that's getting the UN into the political situation, so that in politics the Iraqis feel a sense of ownership; first and foremost, [that's] getting the security situation right, which means getting other troops there, which probably means going back to the Security Council.
Kofi Annan put his best man on the ground there, Sergio Vieira de Mello, who was the most experienced the UN had. He pulled him out of Geneva and the Human Rights Commission job [and] put him [in Baghdad]. He did what he needed to do to make it work.
I would predict that within a year, you'll see the UN bashing stop in Washington and [the realization that], in fact, these are pretty important partners we have, and, frankly, we need each other. I think you'll see more and more of a partnership, despite the rhetoric that you hear. That's diminishing now, and you'll see it diminish even further over the next year.
Q: Even if President Clinton had wanted to intervene in Rwanda, could he have found the support to do it?
A: I think so -- particularly if he had said, "We're troubled about these reports coming out leading into the genocide. We need to strengthen the UN force there, give it a stronger mandate so that we don't have another cycle of killing," and if he had gone to the Congress. Probably he could have done it.
It would take a lot of capital. It would take a lot of pushing. Right then, we were trying to push things in Bosnia, and we had a crisis on North Korea. It's very hard to put issues that don't look like a crisis right away on the top of your queue. But, you know, if he' d had perfect vision at the time and saw what was coming and said to people, "Look, you may not know it, but there's a genocide coming here," we could have acted earlier.
Because of the genocide in Rwanda, it's easier for future presidents to say, "We need to act now. Invest now with a smaller but forceful intervention so that we don't have to do a much larger, messier thing later."
When we did act in Rwanda, after the genocide was in full force, our focus was on trying to help those who had survived and to make sure that the crisis didn't evolve. You had millions of refugees. We were trying to feed them, house them. We got troops on the ground right away there. We went to Congress to authorize $50 million for training an African force that would go in to the next genocide. [We] got that right away.
There was, I think, a willingness to try and act that still exists. If you look at what the Bush administration has done, it's actually kept training the African forces to try and develop a regional force in Africa that could go in, in recognition of the need that you've got to have some responsibility to act here. They are continuing that funding, which is just the right thing to do.
Q: How deep is the guilt about Rwanda?
A: Some members of the Clinton administration, I think, went through very deep emotional trauma, feeling that they hadn't done enough and asking, "What more could we do?" In hindsight, we all wish we had done more. As you're going through it, you're all learning, and you make the best judgments at the time. We recognize now that those judgments were not right. We're all human. People forget that it is human beings making those decisions. You're sitting around with imperfect information and reluctant militaries and a reluctant Congress, and you are not sure that it's really as bad as you think it might be.
What you have to do in situations like this is learn from your mistakes, and make sure that the next time you implement the [lessons]. That's why what's going on in Liberia today is so important. Same with Sierra Leone and the Ivory Coast. That whole region could blow. The Congo is a mess. We need to make sure that Africa is on the map much earlier in these crises, and then you don't have to make those very difficult decisions.
Q: Did the Somalia debacle paralyze the government?
A: People always say that. It certainly didn't help the situation, but I would argue that, had Somalia not happened, we wouldn't have done anything differently in Rwanda. Deploying troops to stop a genocide in Rwanda was not something that was really at the forefront of our thinking at the time, nor did we know there was a genocide happening until it was happening. It's very difficult to make that decision in the middle of a genocide. Everyone always points to the Somalia syndrome, but my own judgment -- and this is not necessarily a good thing -- is that Somalia was not the key determining factor there; without Somalia, we wouldn't have gone in, either.
Q: As you look out now and see what's on the horizon, are we vulnerable to another one of these situations?
A: Absolutely. Burundi could go any minute. South Africans, thankfully, did deploy a battalion in Burundi to try to keep the lid on things. A hundred thousand were people were killed there in the fall of ' 94. Nobody even knows that.
Rwanda is still unstable. A million people have been killed in the Congo in recent years. We've got major problems in Liberia if we get that wrong. If the British pull out of Sierra Leone, that might erupt again. They're all interrelated. The longest civil war is in Sudan right now, with a million people regularly at risk there. It's been going on for 30 years. Chechnya is still a nightmare. Afghanistan is still very unstable, although I don't think you'll have a genocide there.
In all these cases, what the U.S. needs to do is lead -- occasionally to put our troops on the ground, but generally to provide the strong impetus and leadership to have early preventive action.
One of the most courageous speeches that the secretary-general has given was in September of 1999 at the UN General Assembly, where he turned the argument about "sovereignty rules" on its head and said that where governments fail to protect their people, it is the responsibility of the international community to step in and do that. That sent shudders up the backs of the repressive regimes whose representatives sit in the General Assembly, because they don't want the UN necessarily intervening in their affairs. But in the 10 years since the end of the Cold War, that is the most important thing that has evolved in international policy -- you do have a responsibility to act.
The U.S. has to take the lead on that responsibility. Like it or not, we're the ones that have to do it. You have to remember that throughout this whole Rwanda issue, Bosnia was burning as well, and that was in the heart of Europe. We sat and watched 7,000 people in Srebrenica get slaughtered as well -- didn't do anything about that.
The whole failure of the first five years after the Cold War, as awful as that was, has taught the world a lesson [about] the need to intervene and the need for U.S. leadership in galvanizing the world to do it.
I know that's frustrating for people who want to pull back and not have so many wide commitments. But if you look at the world's communities today, they all look for U.S. leadership. That doesn't mean we have to put our troops on the ground. It doesn't mean we have to necessarily lead the charge, but we have to be the strong moral voice to push others into doing it. And we have to do it consistently. It's hard, and it's tiring: "Why us all the time?" But that's the privilege and the burden of being the world's only superpower. We absolutely have to do it.
George Bush is learning that lesson very reluctantly, but he's slowly getting there, beginning in Africa, sending troops into Liberia, albeit very few at the moment. I suspect more will follow.
Q: Do you see a change in President Bush?
A: Yes. This is a man who came to office deriding peacekeeping and nation building, saying he's not going to send his troops into Africa. And he's doing all of the above. Reality has a very annoying way of intruding into presidential campaign rhetoric. He's definitely evolved in that direction.
Q: And all of this is complicated by the threat of nuclear weapons and terrorism.
A: The issue of terrorism has made it much more complex, because we think we can solve everything by a military campaign. As we've seen in Afghanistan and Iraq, diplomacy has to go with it, nation building has to go with it; the pendulum swings back to the paradigms that were learned in the last decade of hard-slogging diplomacy. Yes, occasionally the use of force, certainly. But the only way we're going to defeat terrorism is to get at the root causes of it, which are, to a large extent, the problems in the Arab world: no democracy. It's not an accident that 15 of the 19 [Sept. 11] hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. They have not addressed those problems. They may be arresting terrorists, but there are more sprouting up every day. And that's not going to be a military solution. It's going to be a hard-fought diplomatic solution.
Afghanistan's going to take a long time of occupation and nation building, and the same with Iraq. We're there for the next generation, most likely, in some numbers.
Q: Americans, though, sit and watch this and say, "Enough! We can't do all this stuff."
A: Well, they do and they don't. If you have the right leadership explaining to the American people why they're doing it, they're proud. They want to help. Certainly in Afghanistan and Iraq, we've committed American forces there, and no American's going to say, "Pull them out," until the job's finished. We're also a generous, rich, wealthy country that can afford to do these things. With the exception of Iraq, we're not talking about a lot of troops. It's leadership. It's some aid.
These are things that are in America's interest. A small investment now saves a lot of money and certainly American lives down the road. With the right leadership and explained right, Americans are very altruistic and proud of that they're doing. They see that it's in their interest, so I'm an optimist on that front.
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