A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (59 page)

Zwerdling: Of course, in most of these battlegrounds, though, there is ancient ethn:_c hatred and something that surprises me actually is that you're blaming modern, contemporary African politicians for this divide and conquer, playing one tribe against another.3N

Still, for all the flaws in the coverage (especially by those stationed outside Rwanda), the major media gave anybody reading or watching cause for grave alarm. From April 8, 1994, onward, reporters described the widespread targeting of Tutsi and the corpses piling up on Kigali's streets. American journalists relayed stories of missionaries and embassy officials who had been unable to save their Rwandan friends and neighbors from death. An April 9 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."3v On April 10 a New York Times front-page article quoted the Red Cross claim that "tens of thousands" were dead, 8,000 in Kigali alone, and that corpses were "in the houses, in the streets, everywhere..""' The Post the same day led its frontpage story with a description of "a pile of corpses six feet high" outside the main hospital." On April 12 the American evacuees, many of whom were Christian missionaries, described what they had seen. Phil Van Lanen, a relief worker with the Seventh-Day Adventist Church mission in Rwanda, wept openly when he told William Schmidt of the Times of the murder of the eight Tutsi girls who used to work in his dental clinic." Chris Grundmann, an American evacuee who worked for the Center for Disease Control, was quoted as saying, "It was the most basic terror." He told how he and his family hunkered down in their house with mattresses against the windows and listened to the ordeals of Rwandan victims over a two-way radio. "The UN radio was filled with national staff screaming for help," he said. "They were begging: `Come save me! My house is being blown up,' or `They're killing me.'There was nothing we could do. At one point we just had to turn it off."43

On April 16 the New York Times reported the shooting and hacking to death of nearly 1,200 men, women, and children in the church where they had sought refuge.44 On April 19 Human Rights Watch, which, through Des Forges, had excellent sources on the ground in Rwanda, estimated the number of dead at 100,000 and called on the Security Council to use the term "genocide."45 The 100,000 figure (which proved to be a gross underestimation) was picked up immediately by the Western media, endorsed by the Red Cross, and featured on the front page of the Washington Post."' 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 harkened back to the Holocaust."" The Red Cross issued the most authoritative statement on the killings on April 26, declaring that "at least 100,000, but perhaps as many as 300,000" Rwandans had already been killed. On April 28 the British aid agency Oxfam warned that these estimates were too low and that 500,000 people had been reported missing."

The Tutsi rebels in the Rwandan Patriotic Front publicly appealed for a Western response. On April 13 they accused the Rwandan government of carrying out genocide.They invoked the Holocaust. In an April 23 letter to the head of the Security Council, the RPF representative, Claude Dusaidi, reminded Security Council members and the secretary-general, "When the institution of the UN was created after the Second World War, one of its fundamental objectives was to see to it that what happened to the Jews in Nazi Germany would never happen again.."" But as Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani had found in Iraq and as the Bosnian government was learning around the same time, those who are suffering genocide are deemed to be biased and unreliable. Besides, the analogy that most gripped American minds at the time was not the Holocaust but Somalia. Dusaidi met with Albright, the U.S. ambassador, four times during the genocide. He did not know it, but Albright was aware of her constraints going into the meetings. Before one of them, she received a briefing memo that reminded her, "You should be mostly in a listening mode during this meeting.You can voice general sympathy for the horrific situation in Rwanda, but should not commit the USG to anything."9'

The "G-Word"

The putrid smell in Kigali told Dallaire all he needed to know about the scale of the murders. Once he had made the mental leap from viewing the violence as war to viewing it as crimes against humanity, he had begun to employ the phrase "ethnic cleansing" to describe the ethnically motivated killing, a phrase he was familiar with from having presided over the dispatch of Canadian troops to the formerYugoslavia." He recalls his thought process:

I was self-conscious about saying the killings were "genocidal" because, to us in the West. "genocide" was the equivalent of the Holocaust or the killing fields of Cambodia. I mean millions of people. "Ethnic cleansing" seemed to involve hundreds of thousands of people. "Genocide" was the highest scale of crimes against humanity imaginable. It was so far up there, so far off the charts, that it was not easy to recognize that we could be in such a situation. I also knew that if I used the term too early, I'd have been accused of crying wolf and I'd have lost my credibility.

Two weeks into the killing, Dallaire telephoned Philippe Gaillard, who ran the International Committee for the Red Cross mission in Rwanda, and asked him for a book on international law. Dallaire leafed through the Geneva conventions and the genocide convention and looked up the relevant definitions." I realized that genocide was when an attempt was made to eliminate a specific group," Dallaire says, "and this is precisely what we saw in the field.... I just needed a slap in the face to say, `Holy shit! This is genocide, not just ethnic cleansing"'

Dallaire included the term for the first time in his situation report during the last week in April. Reuters quoted him on April 30 warning, "Unless the international community acts, it may find it is unable to defend itself against accusations of doing nothing to stop genocide"'' And he began using the term confidently in May. Even after he had adopted the label however, he left the semantic battles to others. "I didn't get bogged down in the debate over the genocide terminology," he remembers. "We had enough proof that it was genocide, and for those who didn't agree, we had crimes against humanity on a massive scale. What more did we need to know to know what we had to do?"

Even after the reality of genocide in Rwanda had become irrefutable, when bodies were shown choking the Kagera River on America's nightly news, the brute fact of the slaughter failed to influence U.S. policy except in a negative way. As they had done in Bosnia, American officials again shunned the g-word.They were afraid that using it would have obliged the United States to act under the terms of the 1948 genocide convention. They also believed, rightly, that it would harm U.S. credibility to name the crime and then do nothing to stop it. 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, "1. Genocide Investigation: Language that calls for an international investigation of human rights abuses and possible violations of the genocide convention. Be Careful. Legal at State was worried about this yesterday-Genocide finding could commit [the US. government] to actually `do something."'''

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?" Lieutenant Colonel Marley remembers the incredulity of his colleagues at the State Department. "We could believe that people would wonder that," he says, "but not that they would actually voice it." Rice does not recall the incident but concedes,"If I said it, it was completely inappropriate, as well as irrelevant."

The Clinton administration opposed use of the term. On April 28 Christine Shelly, the State Department spokesperson, began what would be a two-month dance to avoid the g-word, a dance that brought to mind Secretary Christopher's concurrent semantic evasion over Bosnia. U.S. officials were afraid that the use of the stinging term would cause demands for intervention that the administration did not intend to meet. When a reporter asked her for comment on whether Rwanda was genocide, she sounded an awful lot like her boss:

Well, as I think you know, the use of the term "genocide" has a very precise legal meaning.... Before we begin to use (the] term, we have to know as much as possible about the facts of the situation, particularly about the intentions of those who are committing the crimes.... I'm not an expert on this area, but generally speaking there-my understanding is that there are three types of elements that we look at in order to make that kind of a determination.

Shelly suggested that the United States had to examine "the types of actions" and the "kind of brutality" under way. It had to look at who was committing the acts and against whom (i.e., "whether these are particular groups, social groups, ethnic groups, religious groups"). And it needed to assess "extremely carefully" the intent of the perpetrators and whether they were trying to eliminate a group in whole or in part. "This one," Shelly said,"is one which we have to undertake a very careful study before we can make a final kind of determination."

It was clear that copies of the genocide convention had been circulating within the department, as Shelly possessed an impressive familiarity with its contents. In applying the convention's terms, Shelly said, "Now, certainly, in those elements there are actions which have occurred which would tit" She agreed that killings were being directed toward particular ethnic groups.The problem lay in gauging intent. Here she gave a largely indecipherable account and refused to commit herself or the U.S. government:

The intention;, the precise intentions, and whether or not these are just directed episodically or with the intention of actually eliminating groups in whole or in part, this is a more complicated issue to address. ... I'm not ab.e to look at all of those criteria at this moment and say yes, no. It's soniething that requires very careful study before we can make a final determination.

When asked whether a finding of genocide would oblige the United States to stop it, Shelly again referred back to the terms of the genocide convention, saying that the law did not contain an "absolute requirement ... to intervene directly." Pressed again to reveal whether the United States viewed events as genocide, Shelly stalled:

Well, I think it's-again, I was trying to get the point across that this is-in order to actually attach the genocide label to actions which are going on, that this is a process that involves looking at several categories of actions. And as I've said, certain of the actions very clearly fall into some of the categories that I've mentioned. But whether you can wrap this all up in a way that then brings you to that conclusion, I'm simply not in a position to make that judgment now."

The UN Security Council was becoming bitterly divided over whether to use the word. Czech Ambassador Karel Kovanda had begun complaining that 80 percent of the council's time was focused on whether and how to withdraw Dallaire's peacekeepers, the other 20 percent on getting a ceasefire to end the civil war, which he compared to "wanting Hitler to reach a cease-fire with the Jews "55 None of their energy was concentrated on the genocide. When the president of the Security Council drew up a statement that named the crime "genocide," the United States objected. The original draft read: "The Security Council reaffirms that the systematic killing of any ethnic group, with intent to destroy it in whole or in part constitutes an act of genocide.... The council further points out that an important body of international law exists that deals with perpetrators of genocide. 1116

But the United States was having none of it. In a cable sent from New York to the State Department, a political adviser wrote:

The events in Rwanda clearly seem to meet the definition of genocide in Article II of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. However, if the council acknowledges that, it may be forced to "take such action under the charter as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide" as provided for in Article VIII."

On American (and British) insistence, the word "genocide" was excluded from the Security Council statement. In a gesture that testified to both Lemkin's success in imbuing the term with moral judgment and his failure to change the policymakers' political calculus, the final statement read:

The Security Council condemns all these breaches of international humanitarian law in Rwanda, particularly those perpetrated against the civilian population, and recalls that persons who instigate or participate in such acts are individually responsible. In this context, the Security Council recalls that the killing of members of an ethnic group with the intention of destroying such a group in whole or in part constitutes a crime punishable under international law.54

The testy genocide debate started up in U.S. government circles the last week of April, but it was not until May 21, six weeks after the killing in Rwanda began, that Secretary Christopher gave his diplomats permission to use the term "genocide"-sort of. The UN Human Rights Commission was about to meet in special session, and the U.S. representative, Geraldine Ferraro, needed guidance on whether to join a resolution stating that genocide had occurred. The stubborn U.S. stand had become untenable internationally.

The case for a label of genocide was the most straightforward since the Holocaust. The State Department's assistant secretary for intelligence and research, Toby Gati, who had analyzed whether Bosnian Serb atrocities were genocide, again undertook the analysis, which she summarized in a May 18 confidential memo: Lists ofTutsi 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 200,000 to 500,000 lives" lost. Gati offered the Intelligence Bureau's view: "We believe 500,000 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."" The terms of the genocide convention had been met. "We can never know precise figures," Gati says,"but our analysts had been reporting huge numbers of deaths for weeks. We were basically saying, `A rose by any other name... "' The word-processing file containing the intelligence memo was titled "NONAMERWANDAKILLLGS " 60