HOW UN MEMBERS FAILED THE RWANDAN PEOPLE
By David Kilgour
Embassy Magazine, Canada
April 11 2007
It is fitting that so many of us are commemorating the 13th anniversary
of the Rwandan genocide on the very day when the murder of more than
800,000 Rwandans over the ensuing 100 terrible days began.
If the international community as a whole is finally to cease
re-interpreting our "never again" pledges, made following the
Holocaust, Armenia, the Ukrainian famine, Cambodia, Bosnia, Kosovo
and Rwanda, as "again and again" in new catastrophes such as Darfur,
we must constantly remember what happened to the Rwandan Tutsis
and moderate Hutus, who were abandoned by the UN and rest of the
international community.
I’d like to first focus on the UN role in Rwanda, and the source
is James Traub’s recently published book, The Best Intentions: Kofi
Annan and the UN in an Era of American Power. A journalist for the New
York Times magazine, Traub has had good access to Annan and his staff
since 2003; the book is excellent on numerous topics, including Rwanda.
When Annan, with little experience in peacekeeping, became the UN
under-secretary-general for peacekeeping in early 1993, a number
of crises were already underway. One of them was in Bosnia where
UN peacekeepers proved unable to stop an unspeakable massacre at
Srebrenica and the killing of 37 people in a Sarajevo market. Only NATO
bombing for two weeks without UN Security Council approval persuaded
the Serbs to sign a draft peace agreement. Traub concludes correctly
that the UN "intervened timidly and clumsily" in the Balkans and did
not intervene at all in Rwanda.
Best Intentions describes the events in Rwanda which led to the
catastrophe and then focuses on the Jan. 11, 1994 "most notorious cable
in UN history" from Romeo Dallaire, commander of the UN Assistance
Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) to General Maurice Baril, military advisor
to then-UN secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali, about hidden
Interahamwe weapons, which some said could kill up to a thousand Tutsis
in 20 minutes. Annan soon signed the never-to-be-forgotten response,
directing that Dallaire do nothing "until clear guidance is received
from Headquarters"
The author is clearly sympathetic to Annan overall in the book,
but he quotes his subject looking callous, at least when in the
overall context he asked him why he did not refer the cable to the
Security Council: "Obviously we don’t take pieces of cables to the
Security Council." Annan then makes himself look both foolish and
weak when he attempts to convince Traub that his inaction in Rwanda
can be justified by the almost simultaneous problems in Somalia:
"It was probably not a good call."
Traub adds that ultimate responsibility for what later happened in
Rwanda was with secretary general Boutros-Ghali and that he, who
"has never expressed remorse over any of the catastrophes that took
place on his watch, blames the member states (and notes in his memoirs
that throughout January he was ‘away from New York and not in close
touch with the Rwandan situation’). And the key member states blame
the Secretariat for failing to keep them informed. Where did the buck
stop? Nowhere."
An independent inquiry into the UN’s role in Rwanda later concluded
that Annan’s peacekeeping department erred in not bringing Dallaire’s
cable to the Security Council’s attention. Even worse was its failure
subsequently to press Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana to take
action against the militias. At the end of January, when Dallaire
prepared a detailed plan to seize the illegal weapons, he received
yet another cable from Annan, in effect telling him not to move.
Dallaire later described this as "yet another body blow."
When the mass murders and rapes began on April 7, immediately after
Rwandan President Habyarimana’s plane exploded from a missile hit,
Dallaire was then told by Annan that he was not to side with moderate
Hutus in the hope of helping them to stop the genocidaires. Two
days later, compounding this irresolution, Annan told him that
UNAMIR might have to withdraw from Rwanda. The U.S. secretary of
state, Warren Christopher, was soon going along with the Belgian
foreign minister’s request for a complete withdrawal of UNAMIR after
Belgium’s government had withdrawn its 1,300 soldiers immediately
after 10 of them were killed by genocidaires. Traub notes that
the U.S. government was by then fully aware that "the killing was
systematic and widespread." Then-U.S. ambassador to the UN, Madeline
Albright, finally agreed to accept what she termed a "skeletal"
force of 270 led by Dallaire to remain in Rwanda.
According to Traub: "By the end of April, estimates of deaths had
reached as high as half a million, and the newspapers and airwaves
were filled with accounts of unspeakable savagery, and yet the UN
continued to behave as if Rwanda presented a conventional problem
of political reconciliation … Boutros-Ghali did not use the word
‘genocide’ until early May …. The Clinton administration was by then
twisting itself into rhetorical knots to avoid using the word at all
for fear of triggering the provisions of the UN Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which requires
signatories to ‘prevent and punish’ such crimes."
The slaughter ended only three months later when Paul Kagame and his
Rwandese Patriotic Front soldiers finally took the capital city Kigali,
declared a cease-fire and formed a new government without international
or UN help. In short, the roles of the UN Security Council, the member
governments, the secretary general and Kofi Annan during the genocide
were all but unforgivable to the Rwandan people and many others across
the world who thought that the UN, under its Charter, was supposed
to represent all of its member states equally in peacekeeping crises.
Canada’s Role in Rwanda
Romeo Dallaire published his book, Shake Hands with the Devil, in 2003
and is no doubt familiar to most of you. We can only wish that every
high school and university graduate in our country and everywhere
else had to read it. Some days, one wonders if any of the governments
and diplomats dealing with the ongoing Darfur debacle-which has aptly
been termed "Rwanda in slow motion"-even know that the book exists.
The thesis of Dallaire’s book is that Rwandans and his small group of
UNAMIR peacekeepers were abandoned by the UN and the international
community, including the Canadian and other home governments. He
makes many important points, but I’ll only repeat two of them:
Almost 50 years to the day that his father and father-in-law "helped
to liberate Europe-when the extermination camps were uncovered and
when, in one voice, humanity said, ‘Never Again’-we once again sat
back and permitted this unspeakable horror to occur. We could not
find the political will or the resources to stop it…. It is my
feeling that this recent catastrophe is being forgotten and its
lessons submerged in ignorance and apathy. The genocide in Rwanda
was a failure of humanity that could easily happen again."
Today, on Easter weekend, it seems appropriate to refer to the title of
the book and the concluding note of its preface. Asked if he can still
believe in God after all that he saw in Rwanda, Canada’s national hero
writes: "…there is a God because in Rwanda I shook hands with the
devil…I know the devil exists, and therefore I know there is a God."
I’d like to conclude with two personal observations.
First, Dallaire has said frequently that he thinks that a few
thousand well-trained peacemakers could have prevented the massacre
in Rwanda. Jean Chretien’s then-new government in 1993 clearly failed
Rwandans, UNAMIR and Dallaire by not sending a decent contingent
of Canadian soldiers with him. As Dallaire notes in the book, it
is expected that the home government of every UN mission commander
will send a respectable number to demonstrate that it is pulling its
weight. How else can other governments be persuaded to send necessary
numbers as well?
Second, in the period 1992-1994, the Canadian Tutsi communities in
Montreal and Ottawa sought repeatedly to raise awareness with the
Mulroney and Chretien governments about what was being prepared
in Rwanda, with no visible success. As a Member of Parliament,
I recall visiting the Pearson building with some of them on two or
three occasions. We’d leave shaking our heads at the indifference
and general ignorance about conditions in Rwanda among supposed
specialists in the Foreign Affairs ministry. After Kagame formed a
new government, I recall that one of his ministers had considerable
difficulty in obtaining a visa to visit Canada.
Sadly, we Canadians-aside from Dallaire, his colleague in Rwanda
Major Brent Beardsley, Dr James Orbinski, who saved "hundreds,
perhaps thousands, of people," says Dallaire, working at the King
Faisal hospital in Kigali throughout the genocide, a group of brave
and dedicated staff of Rwandan nationals at the Canadian mission in
Kigali, and other mostly unknown persons (I recall a Rwandan nun at
settlement on the road to Lake Kivu telling me in 1997 that her life
was spared by a mob coming to kill her because of the bravery of a
Canadian priest who persuaded them to leave) have little to be proud
about over the Rwandan Tutsi genocide. Will we make up for it with
our actions as we face future crises?
The preceding was an edited version of a speech given by former MP
David Kilgour at the Canadian War Museum on April 7.