EXCLUSIVE
Former President Clinton said he never knew the
full extent of suffering during Rwanda's genocide. But U.S. diplomats
knew exactly what was happening -- and they warned Washington.
n March 25, 1998, President Bill Clinton expressed regret for failing
to halt genocide in Rwanda, saying that he didn’t “fully appreciate the
depth and the speed with which [Rwandans] were being engulfed by this
unimaginable terror.”
But U.S. officials in Rwanda had been warned more than a year before
the 1994 slaughter began that Hutu extremists were contemplating the
extermination of ethnic Tutsis, according to a review panel’s newly
released transcript and declassified State Department documents obtained
by
Foreign Policy from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
An August 1992 diplomatic cable to Washington, written by Joyce
Leader, the U.S. Embassy’s deputy chief of mission in Kigali, cited
warnings that Hutu extremists with links to Rwanda’s ruling party were
believed to be advocating the extermination of ethnic Tutsis. On the
morning the killing began in April 1994, there was little doubt about
what was happening in Rwanda.
“We
had a very good sense of what was taking place,” Leader told an
unprecedented 2014 gathering of former Rwandan officials and
international policymakers who managed the response to the world’s worst
mass murder since the Holocaust. “It was clear that a systematic killing of Tutsi was taking place in neighborhoods.”
Senior ethnic Hutu officials who favored reconciling with Tutsi
rebels refused to join forces with the extremists carrying out the
genocide and were also hunted down and murdered, she said.
Leader’s cable was part of the discussion of a three-day review last
year sponsored by the Holocaust Museum’s Center for the Prevention of
Genocide and The Hague Institute for Global Justice. A transcript of the
review’s findings — which runs more than 240 pages long, plus a 32-page
executive summary — was provided to
FP ahead of its public
release at 11am on Monday, April 6, the 21st anniversary of the start of the Rwandan genocide.
The event provided an extraordinary opportunity for 40 key players
and observers to review the missteps. They included former Rwandan
government and rebel officials; Belgian, French Rwandan, and U.N.
diplomats and peacekeepers; aid workers, journalists, scholars, and
Security Council ambassadors. U.S. officials who were directly involved
in the United States delivered a detailed insider account of the
American response.
Clinton’s envoys in Rwanda were clear-eyed about the nature of what
was unfolding in the hours and days following the April 6, 1994,
shoot-down of a plane carrying Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana and
his Burundian counterpart, according to the review’s transcript. That
set the stage for the mass slaughter of nearly a million ethnic Tutsi
Rwandans, and some moderate Hutus, by extremists among the country’s
majority-Hutu population.
As the killing began, terrified Rwandans fled their homes for safety,
to the grounds of U.S. Ambassador David Rawson’s residence. At one
stage, a small child seeking protection in the ambassador’s backyard was
shot and killed, Leader recalled.
She also warned her neighbor, Rwandan Prime Minister Agathe
Uwilingiyimana, who wanted to seek refuge at the American diplomat’s
home, to steer clear for fear that the Presidential Guard, who were
implicated in the killing, would come looking for her there.
Uwilingiyimana was murdered a day after the killing began.
The 2014 discussions, which took place from June 1 through June 3,
tracked the doomed Rwandan peace process, known as the Arusha Accords,
which were signed in 1993 and were designed to end civil war between a
Hutu-dominated government and a Tutsi-led insurgency based out of
Uganda.
The attendees identified plenty of culprits: Extremists within the
Hutu-led government who sought to sabotage peace efforts. Rwandan rebels
who launched a massive offensive in northern Rwanda a year before the
genocide, swelling the ranks of Rwanda’s community of displaced and
providing a breeding ground for radicalized recruits who carried out
ethnic slaughter of Tutsis. International diplomats who clung to false
hopes that a doomed peace process could reverse Rwanda’s slide from a
civil war.
Even the very notion of democracy came up for criticism, with Leader
noting that “we need to acknowledge the link between violence and
promotion of change, or democracy and peace in the case of Rwanda. We
should acknowledge the negative consequences that result in some cases
from the promotion of democratization.”
Britain’s then-U.N. ambassador, David Hannay, broke the failure into
two parts: what he called “sins of commission” and “sins of omission.”
“The sins of commission were mainly the work of the Rwandans themselves,” he said.
“It
is true that we were abandoned. But we abandoned our people, and
massacred our own people,” Jean-Marie Vianney Ndagijimana, Rwanda’s
ambassador to Paris during the genocide, said during the review. “Primary
responsibility for the genocide, and the crimes that accompanied it,
must be borne by us, Rwandans. We must accept that fact before we make
accusations against the international community.”
The indifference of outside powers, particularly the United States, was a central theme of the talks.
A lot of the criticism centered on the fact that the U.N. and other
world powers failed to respond to a clear warning, issued in January
1994, that a plan for the extermination of the Tutsi was underway.
The contents of that cable, drafted by the U.N.’s Canadian force
commander, Lt. Gen. Roméo Dallaire, were never shared with the U.N.
Security Council.
But the U.N.’s top officials in Rwanda shared the cable’s contents
with representatives of the United States, Britain, and Belgium.
“I never knew about the genocide fax. I am not sure my colleagues in
the African affairs bureau knew about it,” said John Shattuck, the
then-U.S. assistant secretary of state for labor, human rights, and
democracy. “Had this fax become more widely known in the U.S.
government, it would have provided ammunition for those who were trying
to resist” efforts to constrain U.N. peacekeeping.
“I do think the genocide fax could have made a difference to those
like myself who were trying to impact on the debate,” he added.
But Dallaire, who attended the conference, cut Shattuck off.
“I must rebut rapidly. President Clinton did not want to know,” he said.
“I
hold Clinton accountable. He can excuse himself as much as he wants to
the Rwandans, but he established a policy that he did not want to know.”
Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs
Prudence Bushnell reinforced the view that top policymakers in the
Clinton administration paid little attention to events in Rwanda leading
up to the genocide.
“I was way down the totem pole and I had responsibility for the
Rwanda portfolio,” she recalled. “That shows you how important it was in
the U.S. government.”
Indeed, there had been other warnings that had been ignored or missed. As far back as August 1992, Leader wrote a
cable
to Washington citing local concerns that an extremist political party
linked to President Habyarimana was pursuing a “Ku Klux Klan-like
approach to ethnic relations” that was “widely interpreted as a call for
the extermination of Tutsis.”
In August 1993, Bacre Waly Ndiaye, a U.N. human rights researcher from Senegal, produced a troubling
report
about the prospects of genocide. And on Feb. 25, 1994, following a
visit to Rwanda by Belgian Foreign Minister Willy Claes, the Belgian
Foreign Ministry sent instructions to its United Nations envoy to
explore how to strengthen the U.N. peacekeeping mission.
That document cited the “possibility of genocide in Rwanda…. It will
be inacceptable for Belgians to be passive witnesses to genocide in
Rwanda.”
On April 6, the day the Rwandan and Burundian leaders’ plane was shot
down, French President François Mitterrand walked into the office of
his foreign affairs advisor, Hubert Védrine, and asked: “Have you heard?
It is terrible. They are going to massacre each other.”
U.N. officials and diplomats in New York said at the review that they
were unaware of the reports. Iqbal Riza, a retired U.N. official who
oversaw Rwanda for the U.N. Department of Peacekeeping, and Colin
Keating, a New Zealand diplomat who served as the president of the U.N.
Security Council, said they were unaware of the Ndiaye report.
The U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, meanwhile, never
provided the U.N. Security Council with a briefing of Dallaire’s
troubling cable.
The backdrop for America’s lack of interest in Rwanda went back to
the end of the Cold War, when then-Secretary of State James Baker sought
cuts in the State Department to fund the establishment of more than a
dozen new embassies in the former Soviet Union, Bushnell recalled. The
Africa bureau in the State Department saw its budget shrink. Clinton
also showed little interest in Africa.
“Early in the Clinton term, I was not able to get a new,
democratically elected president in Africa, a former human rights
activist, to see the president because, I was told, ‘President Clinton
would find him boring,’” Bushnell said.
The one initiative that sought considerable engagement was Somalia,
where President George H.W. Bush had authorized the deployment of U.S.
Marines to pave the way for a massive humanitarian relief effort.
Clinton inherited the operation, which gradually entangled American
military forces in a war with Somali militia challenging the
international presence.
The Oct. 3, 1993, the deaths of 18 U.S. soldiers in a botched raid in
Mogadishu put the Clinton administration on the defensive, and cooled
the Pentagon’s attitude toward U.N. peacekeeping.
As the genocide unfolded in Rwanda six months later, the White House
was finalizing a presidential directive, known as PDD-25, which placed
severe constraints on the conditions required for U.S. support for
peacekeeping missions. President Clinton, meanwhile, was preoccupied
with producing a health care bill and upcoming midterm congressional
elections — and was determined to keep America out of any foreign
military entanglements, said Shattuck.
“It was effectively a straitjacket for U.S. decision-making,
vis-a-vis various kinds of peacekeeping operations,” said Shattuck. “In a
sense, PDD-25 was the U.S. equivalent of the withdrawal of Belgian
forces after the killing of the peacekeepers, in the sense that it gave a
‘green light’ to the genocide planners.”
Even
after the killing began, the White House was focused more on getting
Americans and the U.N. out of Rwanda than coming to the aid of Rwanda’s
victims.
Thomas S. Blanton, the director of the National Security Archive, who
moderated the 2014 discussion, said that a review of declassified State
Department cables and logs of a task force set up to handle the crisis
showed that 80 percent of the discussion in the United States concerned
the evacuation of American citizens.
Most of the remaining 20 percent was about convincing the warring
parties to abide by a cease-fire and resume talks on a power-sharing
agreement, Blanton said.
The White House focus on protecting civilians was largely limited to
one individual, a Rwandan human rights activist named Monique
Mujawamariya, who had met with President Clinton in the White House in
December 1993, several months before the genocide began.
“Oh my god, all hell is breaking loose, and I am getting phone calls,
‘Where’s Monique?’” Bushnell recalled. “The greatest pressure from the
White House during the entire Rwandan affair was finding Monique.”
Mujawamariya fled Kigali in one of the last flights by foreigners out of
the country.
The U.S. military, meanwhile, showed little interest.
The Defense Department “did not want to spend money,” Bushnell
recalled. “I used to call them the ‘nowhere, no how, no way, and not
with our toys’ boys.”
“Boy, oh boy, did the shooting down of the plane on April 6 and the
withdrawal of the Belgians give us the excuse we need to pull the plug,”
she said. “It was an unfortunate period in my government’s history. I
regret it greatly, as I think all of us do.”
The U.N. peacekeeping mission was woefully unprepared for the
violence, and Rwandan government troops killed 10 Belgian peacekeepers.
During an initial visit to Rwanda in August 1993, Dallaire had
recommended a force of 8,000 peacekeepers to oversee a tenuous peace
process. The U.N. peacekeeping department shrunk that number down to
5,000, before the U.N. Security Council cut it in half, leaving a force
of about 2,400 on the ground when the violence started.
“I was instructed that this mission had to be on the cheap,” Dallaire
recalled. “The Americans had not paid [their U.N. dues], there was no
money, and nobody was particularly interested in the mission to start
with.”
When the genocide began, the United States launched a diplomatic
campaign aimed at bringing the U.N. peacekeepers home. Initially,
Washington sought to shutter the mission entirely. On April 15, 1994,
Edward Walker Jr., then the U.S. deputy permanent representative to the
U.N., relayed instructions from Washington to withdraw the entire U.N.
mission.
But later that day, Nigerian U.N. Ambassador Ibrahim Gambari and
Hannay, the British U.N. envoy, convinced Walker’s boss, then-U.S.
Ambassador to the U.N. Madeleine Albright, to change her position.
“You
simply cannot do that,” Hannay recalled telling Albright. “The idea
that we should simply withdraw the troops and leave these people to be
murdered was not right. It won’t do.”
Albright agreed, and called Richard Clarke, the senior director on
the U.S. National Security Council, to change her instructions. The
United States reversed itself. On April 20, the council adopted a
resolution providing a minimal presence of 270 peacekeepers.
Inside Rwanda, the United States, France, and Belgium were fielding
desperate appeals from Rwandans to maintain a diplomatic presence there.
Dallaire said more than 1,000 elite foreign troops were mobilized to
evacuate foreigners from Rwanda during the genocide. He appealed to
Belgian and French commanders “to modify their orders to let me
establish a force that would stop the massacres of threatened people,
particularly in Kigali.”
“The answer was a categorical no,” Dallaire said.
Védrine, Mitterrand’s foreign affairs advisor, said he was unaware of
Dallaire’s request, and “in hindsight, perhaps we can say this was a
huge pity.” In late June, France ultimately did send troops into Rwanda
in an intervention mission that undoubtedly saved lives. But it also
faced criticism for protecting the fleeing forces of the Rwandan army, a
longtime ally whose most extremist elements orchestrated the killings.
The Pentagon explored plans to set up a peacekeeping force outside of
Rwanda, to protect refugees crossing the border. The proposal was
dismissed by other Security Council members as a “joke,” recalled
Hannay, noting that people were being killed inside Rwanda.
Col. Leonidas Rusatira, the head of the military college in Rwanda,
appealed to U.S. and European diplomats to stay. “He said our presence
would help calm the situation,” Leader recalled. “I had to be very firm
and say, ‘These are our orders, we are leaving, please help us get out
safely.’”
Back in Washington, Bushnell said she heard that U.S. Marines who
were stationed in Burundi were eager to enter Rwanda to help evacuate
Americans.
They wanted to go, but I was on the phone with my colleagues, saying,
‘No, no, no, no, do not leave the airport in Burundi,’” Bushnell said.
“The last thing I wanted was somebody in Burundi shooting down an
American helicopter.”
Instead, she arranged the Americans’ evacuation by land across the border.
“I do not apologize for that. The first obligation of a government is to its citizens,” Bushnell said.
“We were terrified of what was going to happen to our citizenry and
so indeed we went into action,” she said. “…We had no concept that we
would not be going back and not helping. I regret my government’s
actions with regards to the citizens of Rwanda. I do not regret my
government’s actions with regards to the citizens of the United States.”
Gen. Henry Anyidoho, a Ghanaian officer who served as the
second-highest ranking U.N. peacekeeper in Rwanda, said the diplomatic
community’s departure from Rwanda “affected us very badly.”
“They left too early,” Anyidoho said. “Once the killers knew there
was no referee, they had a free hand to do whatever they wanted. We were
overwhelmed by the effort of saving lives.”
“We felt abandoned,” Anyidoho said.
The 2014 review, which was organized with the help of the National
Security Archives, was modeled on the group’s oral history series, which
has previously brought key figures like former U.S. Defense Secretary
Robert McNamara, Cuban leader Fidel Castro, and Russian generals to
discuss the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The new documents add to a collection of more than 2,000
declassified U.S., U.N., French, and Belgian cables about the Rwandan
genocide. Additionally, the group plans to declassify cables from the
White House in the coming days.
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