The Foreign Service Journal, September 2019

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER 2019 35 • Tracking exogenous factors like rainfall, per capita income, regime duration or political instability (to take The Economist ’s categories) increases our understanding of other societies, but it may not point us to when, where or how cataclysmic violence occurs. • In a system of sovereign states, preventing the over- throw of a recognized govern- ment or stopping its violations of human rights may require foreign intervention in that state’s domestic affairs. • Countries committed to the preservation of the system of nation-states are particularly hesitant to intervene in distant lands outside the sphere of their own interests. • The iron law of unin- tended consequences applies in all social actions; accord- ingly, forceful interventions will beget violent unintended consequences. When Knowledge Isn’t Enough Let me apply these prin- ciples to what happened in Rwanda a quarter-century ago. Rwanda’s long history of autocratic rule and central state violence laid the basis for the 1994 genocidal uprising. Yet the social caste system engendering the categories of Tutsi, Hutu and marginalized Twa was so complex that it took jurists of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda two years to deter- mine whether the killings were genocidal under the terms of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. And while President Paul Kagame’s government has spent years working to extirpate these deeply rooted social iden- tifiers, they are still socially salient. Getting rid of conflict-laden social markers is a complex process. At the opening of the Arusha political negotiations in August 1992, one could sense deep distrust and animosity between the Rwandese Patriotic Front and the Government of Rwanda. Indeed, at a roundtable organized earlier that year by the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, I had referred to works on genocide by Leo Kuper and others, caution- ing that rapid political change, with deep division within the body politic and security forces capable of mass killings, had set the scene for a potential genocide in Rwanda. Throughout my tenure at the negotiations and dur- ing the early weeks of my ambassadorship in 1994, I admonished both sides that a return to combat could have horrendous consequences. I have been wrong about the tenacity and capacity of Afri- can regimes more often than I have been right. Sadly, I was right this time, though neither I nor anyone else had any inkling of the scope and feroc- ity of the violence that a return to fighting would unleash. Many factors went into our calculations. Embassy Kigali’s economic reporting on harvests, mineral extractions, export/import ratios and bud- get imbalances, all aggregated into national accounts, showed how terribly poor Rwanda was. But so were other African states. We knew of land penury in Rwanda as early as 1973, through comprehensive studies the Ministry of Planning had conducted. For its part, the U.S. Agency for International Development had compiled a 14-year database on food insecurity in the country. Embassy reporting during the early 1990s had traced the spread of political instability, including the training of militia. We had information on Rwandan military capacities through occa- sional visits from our defense attaché and our French colleagues, who supported the Rwandan Army; but we had collected only scattered information on the capacities or ambitions of the exile forces, the Rwandese Patriotic Front. Bilateral démarches, the tracing of political alignments, assessments of military capacities, biographic analyses and reporting on recrudescent nongovernmental organizations all revealed political disintegration, but could not gauge the effect, timing or extent of that decline. ISTOCKPHOTO.COM/MHJ