The Foreign Service Journal, September 2019

36 SEPTEMBER 2019 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL International Peacekeeping: Too Little, Too Late International efforts to stop the fighting between the insur- gent Rwandese Patriotic Front and Rwandan government army fell first to chiefs of state of Zaire, Uganda or Tanzania, with France and Belgium in the margins. The Organization of African Unity took the lead in facilitating the Arusha negotiations, with neighboring African states and key donor states—France, Belgium, Germany and the United States—as observers. Finally, after the two sides signed the Arusha Accords, the United Nations Security Council established the United Nations Mis- sion for Rwanda (UNAMIR) in October 1993. Lamentably, the United Nations was slow in implement- ing the Arusha Accords; improvident in supplying UNAMIR Commander General Roméo Dallaire with the materiel he needed; and feckless in carrying out its political program. Commander Dallaire made early progress in force integration, but the UNAMIR operation, minimally equipped and manned, launched too slowly to co-opt events and maintain peace. Weeks dragged into months without the installation of the interim government specified under the Arusha Accords. Tragically, the well-intentioned, year-long negotiations that had produced the Arusha Accords were flawed. We underes- timated the determination of both sides, although engaged in peace talks, to win at all costs. The Rwandan government and the RFP agreed in a 2/3 vote on interim government arrange- ments that took away the Habyarimana regime’s political power and accepted a 50/50 split in security forces that equated RPF and government command and control. In demoting the militarily entrenched Habyarimana regime by the stroke of a pen, the conditions were set for reprisal and genocide when someone shot down the president’s plane on April 6, 1994. President Juvenal Habyarimana was the only interim official who had been sworn in under the 1993 Accords at that time. The self-proclaimed successor regime turned quickly to civil war and launched the genocide. I immediately called the State Department and reported that only with a change of mission and the matériel to carry it out could U.N. peacekeepers restore order. But expanding UNAMIR’s mandate took more than a month of Security Coun- cil wrangling, while getting troops and matériel to Rwanda took another three months. By that time, 800,000 innocents had been slaughtered. An inchoate U.S. policy matched lassitude in international action. It was, as Assistant Secretary for African Affairs George Moose commented, bureaucracy at its worst. At a late May 1994 interagency meeting on Rwanda, as departmental deputies fell to discussing what color to paint the armored personnel carriers we were lending to the U.N. forces, one observer concluded that, by intent, nothing of import was to be decided. While U.S. agencies and bureaus quibbled about strategies and game plans, the killings surged in Rwanda. We needed national com- mand determination on a workable action plan and never got it. Great powers are reluctant to intervene, especially in little countries off the radar scope of their national interests. Presi- dential statements and declarations are fine. Even declaring genocide, as the United States did in Sudan’s Darfur crisis, may help. But to prevent political meltdown in distant lands with attendant mass atrocities, presidential leadership is required. Moving from Prediction to Prevention Embassy Kigali warned Washington that massive politi- cal violence was likely to break out, though we did not foresee its magnitude or ferocity. We issued the warning more out of intuition than from any hard data pointing to a determined his- torical outcome. No matter what the levels of endemic malnu- trition, landlessness or economic regression in Rwanda, it was human choice on the part of the rebels to pursue civil war to upend the existing regime. Human decision, on the part of the Hutu extremists who took over after Habyarimana’s assassina- tion, also determined to use genocide as a means of holding on to power. Scott Strauss, in his book Making and Unmaking of Nations: War, Leadership and Genocide in Modern Africa (Cornell Uni- versity Press, 2015), studies five African states that approached the brink of genocide. Three of them pulled back, but Rwanda and Sudan fell into the maelstrom. The explanatory elements, in 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.