The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2017

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2017 25 land. In 2016, President Barack Obama laid a wreath in that peaceful place. What if no one had said, “You can’t do that”? Could we have picked up warning signs of a pending genocide in Rwanda had we asked good questions and listened? For my part, I was delivering démarches in the country until two weeks before the slaughter began; and I can attest that we and other foreign govern- ments were continuing to press our poli- cies as plans for the slaughter unfolded. 3 Grow teams and develop trust through meaningful goals. When violence erupted in the streets of Kigali, the interagency crisis team in Washington worked night and day to help American citizens leave Rwanda safely. We had concrete goals, realistic evacuation strategies designed by the people on the ground and a worldwide team. Once Ameri- cans were out and U.S. interest evaporated, we morphed into a cantankerous policy working group without goals, direction or authority. As thousands of people died, we tasked one another with reports. In Nairobi, before the bombing, the country team had set challenging goals to address corruption and promote peaceful presiden- tial elections in 1997. The experience of interagency and Kenyan and American work teams pursuing those goals together literally saved lives on Aug. 7-8. For the first 48 hours, we were on our own. As rescuers dealt with transport problems, Kenyan- American teams tended our wounded, assisted devas- tated families and combed hospitals, morgues and neighbor- hoods to locate the missing. When the senior team developed mission goals after the bombing, we published them in the embassy newsletter. “Put people first” headed the list of objec- tives, and we accomplished all of them. 4 Nurture a culture of leadership and mind your lead- ership business with passion. My business was to mul- titask the issues that helped others get their jobs done. If I got my job right—from getting the resources to overseeing the many moving parts of our reconstruction, policy and law enforce- ment efforts—everyone else did, too. Decisions got pushed down, and leaders emerged at every level. Amilitary post-office team that was in town to reconsider our mail privileges on the day we were blown up stayed to re-establish mail services in our office parking garage. No one asked them; they just did it. With not a dime of extra money—Con- gress was very specific about this—our U.S. Agency for International Development colleagues took on the creation and management of $30 million in assistance to Kenyan victims of the bombing even as they themselves were recuperating from it. I could not heal a wounded community, but I could help create an environment in which healing was possible. That was a good part of my business. So was visibility. I could not take away anyone’s anger or loss—Kenyans experienced both—but I could validate it. That meant showing up. To rebuild our organization and commu- nity, we asked for a lot of outside help and got it. Another piece of business was to ensure that “they” became “we.” Reminders of what we were accomplishing and celebrating milestones After 1998, the failure to review intelligence practices and policy failures meant that nothing would change in the way we were collecting and sharing intelligence— until al-Qaida attacked the homeland. The Memorial Park at the site of the embassy bombing in Nairobi was opened in 2001 to honor those who were injured and killed in the terrorist attack. ZWEIFEL/CREATIVECOMMOMS