Lessons from Rwanda V: Recognise a mistake and react quickly

When Gen. Dallaire was first sent to Rwanda to plan the UNAMIR mission, he was told by Maurice Baril, the senior military officer at the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), not to recommend a brigade-sized deployment (4,000-5,000 personnel). The UN finally settled on 2,500, but it took many months to approach full strength, and even then the quality of the troops was mixed and lacked logistics support – they had too few vehicles, almost no working Armoured Personnel Carriers, only a couple of helicopters for only a part of the mission, and no heavy lift capability. As the war recommenced and the genocide began, rather than reinforce the mission, the UN wound it down.

A fortnight after the bloodshed had begun, and with tens of thousands already slaughtered in the streets and tens of thousands more cowering in UN compounds being protected by lightly-armed troops and unarmed military observers, Gen. Dallaire again reported to the DPKO:

“I received no solace when I raised the reinforcement option. Maurice [Annan and
Riza] simply responded that I should not expect anyone to wade into the mess in
Rwanda. The reinforcement option would never see the light of day, and that was
it… Early in the morning of April 22, [my military assistant] brought me… Security Council Resolution 912. The Council had finally voted for the skeleton force option. The resolution’s phrases were pure UN-ese: ‘…having considered…express regret… shocked… appalled… deeply concerned… stressing… expressing deep concern… concerns… strongly condemns… demands… decides… reiterates… reaffirms… calls upon… invites… decides to remain actively seized of the matter.

“As I write these words I am listening to Samuel Baber’s Adagio for Strings, which strikes me as the purest expression in music of the suffering, mutilation, rape, and murder of 800,000 Rwandans, with the help of the member nations of the only supposedly impartial world body. Ultimately, led by the United States, France and the United Kingdom, this world body aided and abetted genocide in Rwanda. No amount of its cash and aid will ever wash its hands clean of Rwandan blood.” (Shake hands with the Devil: The failure of humanity in Rwanda, Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, pp322-3)

The slaughter would go on for 100 days, yet 15 days in the UN passed up the opportunity to save hundreds of thousands of lives. Both Dallaire and Colonel Luc Marchel, the Belgian contingent commander, are clear that with four or five thousand well-equipped troops they could have imposed order on the warring parties and intervened to stop the slaughter. Marchel goes further: had the NATO nations that evacuated their troops in the second week then transferred the 1,500 well-equipped Belgian, French and Italian troops (plus 250 US marines to which Dallaire refers), “It was enough people to cease the situation inherent and to save the peace and to save the life from thousands of human beings.” (Frontline: The Triumph of Evil, interview with Col. Luc Marchel).

Marchel’s solution (I have not yet reached the conclusion and established whether Dallaire agrees) is “to have a standing force ready to move and ready to be on the ground as soon as possible.” But as even he admits, “we need a political will.” It is unlikely that national governments will hand their troops over to the UN with a clear writ to use them as they will, but if they would at least be more willing to deploy them when emergencies arose – be more willing to expend “blood and treasure” for the sake of peace and humanity – such terrible crises could be avoided in the future.

Lessons from Rwanda IV: force discipline is essential

In any multinational mission, it helps if there is a clear chain of command and all the national forces are singing from the same song-sheet. Sadly, that all too often fails to happen. UK and Canadian and Dutch troops in Southern Afghanistan have taken the brunt of the fighting there because other NATO nations refuse to deploy their forces to the South, to engage in peace enforcement or (in the case of the Germans) to leave their compounds after dark.

One particular problem is when national contingents contact their home nations to seek clarification of (or over-ride) the orders of their commanders. This, and some simple cowardice, hamstrung UNAMIR’s efforts in the opening day of the Rwandan genocide:

“[Brigadier General] Henry [Anyidoho, deputy force commander of UNAMIR,] was totally frustrated with the Bangladeshi troops. Their APCs [Armoured Personnel Carriers] were either mysteriously breaking down (we later found out that the crews were sabotaging the vehicles by placing rags in the exhaust pipes) or they couldn’t be reached (a confirmed tactic by some of the crews was to move a short distance from the headquarters, shut down the radio and return later, claiming they had been held at a roadblock.) Those who actually arrived at the place to which they had been sent exhibited a lack of zeal in pursuing their missions.

“A mob of angry locals, fired up by extremists, were blocking the entrances to the Amahoro Staduim complex [which was the UNAMIR force HQ and main base, and] to which thousands of Tutsis and moderate Hutus were attempting to flee. Henry kept urging the Bangladeshi [contingent of UNAMIR] to clear the area, but their commander was not responding to his orders and was seeking direction from Dhaka. The couple of APCs that had returned to the stadium were sitting idle while Kigali Sector was pleading for them to respond to calls for help from other UNAMIR personnel and Rwandans at risk. I ordered Henry to inform the Bangladeshi commander that he was contributing to the potential deaths of Rwandans and UNAMIR personnel and that he would be held accountable. That night I found out that he had received direct orders from his chief of staff in Dhaka to stop taking risks, stay buttoned down, close the gates and stop carrying Rwandans in the APCs. He did exactly as he was ordered, ignoring the UNAMIR chain of command and the tragedies caused by his decisions.” (Shake hands with the Devil: The failure of humanity in Rwanda, Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, pp243-4)

Lest the reader think that this was a problem among the developing nation’s troops alone, however, Dallaire was equally scathing of aspects of the Belgian forces that were his most capable troops. Upon arrival the Belgian Para-Commandos, fresh from Somalia, were caught “bragging at the local bars that their troops had killed two hundred Somalis and that they knew how to kick ‘nigger’ ass in Africa” (p112). Later, during a visit from the Belgian army’s inspector general and the commander of the Para-Commando Brigade from whom the troops were drawn, Dallaire “broached the serious deficiencies in leadership, discipline and training of the Belgian battalion… Belgian soldiers were often frustrated by the patient negotiations required of peacekeepers… They saw themselves as the crème de la crème, as vastly superior soldiers to their UNAMIR colleagues. They seemed to view the mission as a sort of Club Med assignment…

“There had been dozens of incidents of disciplinary infractions. The Belgians were constantly being caught out of bounds in nightclubs that had been restricted for their own safety. They drank on patrol and got into barroom brawls…dancing and drinking in… the local hot spot, with their personal weapons… The Belgians often refused to salute or pay proper respect to officers of other contingents, especially officers of colour. There were Belgian soldiers who went absent without leave to Zaire and got up to heaven knows what until they were detained by the authorities…
“At the beginning of February, on of my Belgian patrols had roughed up [a senior Rwandan army officer and leading hard-liner, and later a] group of Belgian soldiers in civilian dress forced their way into the home of one of the heads of the extremist CDR party… assaulted him in front of his family… and, just before they left, one of them aimed a gun at his head and warned him that if he or his party or the local media ever again insulted or threatened Belgium, Belgian expatriates or the Belgian contingent of UNAMIR, they would return and kill him.” (ibid. p182-4)

Later, these men would order the murder of ten Belgian prisoners.

These contingents were not uniformly terrible: he describes both the Bangladeshis and the Belgians as “immensely impressive” for an operation they conducted before the conflict began (p195); Colonel Luc Marchal, the senior Belgian officer and Kigali sector commander, “understood and lived the mission” and stayed on for an extra six months following Dallaire’s personal request to the Belgian defence ministry (p205-6); and the Belgian troops who died during the mission “were and remain heroes of Rwanda” (p240).

But all too often a failure to treat the mission and its commanders with the same military professionalism that soldiers and officers would automatically show in a national operation hamstrung the mission, undermined the safety of UN personnel and abandoned Rwandans to their fate.

Lessons from Rwanda II: A half-hearted commitment gives a half-baked outcome

Too often we hear the cry that "Something must be done", but all too often what we do is more about making ourselves feel better than allieviating the problem. We want to feel that we've done out bit, but we lack the necessary committment to do it properly. We do a half-harted job, and when the chips are down, we run away.

Thus, while the UN were planning their mission to stabalise Rwanda and uphold the peace, the member states were not really committed to the task.

'...the hard-liners I had met on my reconnaissance of Rwanda had attended the same schools that we do in the West; they read the same books; they watched the same news; and they had already concluded that... the West did not have the will, as it had already demonstrated in Bosnia, Croatia and Somalia, to police the world, to expend the resources or to take the necessary casualties. They had calcultated that the West would deploy a token force and when threatened would duck or run. They knew us better than we knew ourselves.' (Shake hands with the Devil: The failure of humanity in Rwanda, Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, p79)

Lessons from Rwanda I: "Situating the estimate"

I have started reading Shake hands with the Devil: The failure of humanity in Rwanda, by Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire. As head of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), he was the man who was left holding the ring while the UN and its member states turned their back on the Rwandan genocide.

Having skipped over the fist half century of his life at a mercifully brisk page a year, on p56 he describes how from day 1 his peacekeeping mission was hobbled. He was asked to prepare an assessment for a mission to support the newly signed Arusha Accords, but describes how the head of the Military Division of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations

'...told me not to come back to him with a request for a brigade sized mission.
His words were roughly "This thing has to be small and inexpensive, otherwise it
will never get approved by the Security Council." I was taken aback. He was
asking me to "situate the estimate," as we say in the military, to design the
mission to fit available resources rather than to respond to the actual demands
of the situation we were being sent to assess.'

I've several hundred pages left to read, but I already know that Gen. Dallaire spent six weeks during the genocide begging his superiors to give him just a single brigade, with which be believed he could stop the slaughter and save hundreds of thousands of lives.

Sadly, the United Nations does not lend itself to swift, decisive action. For that, nation states are still required, perhaps forming (none-too-fashionable) "Coalitions of the willing".

And as George Santayana noted, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

British government timorous in the face of death

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the Labour government has no sense of principle or decency. Nevertheless, I am saddened to read that British diplomats have been ordered to torpedo plans in Europe to propose the abolition of the death penalty to the UN General Assembly.

That it would have been an example of gesture politics is without doubt. There is no likelihood that the General Assembly, where unanimity is required, would have passed such a motion. The death penalty remains popular in much of the globe; tyrannical regimes use it as the ultimate deterrent against dissent; and nations without a Christian heritage have entirely different underlying views of punishment, retribution and the sanctity of human life.

It is also true that the proposal has more to do with Romano Prodi’s efforts to shore up his fragile coalition than it does with evangelical zeal.

Yet neither of these are reasons not to promote our values abroad. While we may question the right of nations to dictate to one another by what standards they should live, spreading our beliefs by peaceful means is both a right and an inevitable consequence of interaction. There is an ocean of difference between the work of missionaries and that of conquistadors (to wit, the Atlantic!).

Slavery had a longer history in Africa and the Middle East than it did in Britain and America, but was largely stamped out when Britain and later America banned the practice (though even today there are thriving slave markets in Southern Sudan, among other places). And by-and-large, action on the international stage may be legitimised by international law or natural justice, but it is fuelled by the private interests of the actors: the efforts by 34 countries to liberate Kuwait in 1991 were no less justified because selfish interests motivated their involvement.

The case against the death penalty is strong, and we should consider it a duty to share that case with our neighbours. Admittedly, last month I sounded a note of caution around the time of the execution of Saddam Hussein. I argued that the moment when a nation emerging from tyranny executes its tormentor is not the best time to lecture them on the limitations of the state – the state did not appear very limited under Hussein! As Shami Chakrabarti has commented (in a different context), just because one has a right to say something does not mean one always should.

It does not follow, however, that because there are times when one would be wise not to hector a particular nation, one should hesitate to make a general point to a wide audience. It will always be a difficult moment for somebody. There is in fact a rather pusillanimous air to the government’s reluctance to bring this proposal to the General Assembly on the grounds that it might create difficulties for the Americans.

Britain should welcome an opportunity to advocate, along with our European partners, a noble cause. Sadly, the present government is suffering from a peculiar form of self-censorship: afraid to upset the American administration despite there being no indication from America that they do, in fact, object.

Anyway, the government should not be shaping its foreign policy purely on the basis of American opinion. As I have argued before, a true friend is one that tells you when you are wrong; we will not be doing either the United States or any other country a favour if we keep our counsel to ourselves because of concern that the truth might hurt. This takes courage, however, as well as honesty. Neither of these are virtues associated with the Labour government.