It all started with a little article in the May 11 issue of The New Yorker about a fax that a lot of people at the United Nations would dearly love to forget.
Only weeks ago President Clinton became teary-eyed in Rwanda recalling how he was busy “sitting at his desk” while 900,000 Africans were being slaughtered four years ago. And this past week while Secretary-General Kofi Annan was visiting Rwanda to see what else the UN could possibly do for that benighted country, the magazine was printing the story of the little fax that could have stopped the 1994 killing, if only . . .
For, it wasn’t, as we have been so soberly reassured, that no one knew what was going to happen that awful April in Kigali, when Hutus went on their first murderous rampage against Tutsis. Some insisted at the time that the UN should have known that the Hutu leadership was planning to exterminate the long-dominant Tutsis. Now we have proof that the UN did know.
In The New Yorker story, “The Genocide Fax,” Philip Gourevitch writes with unimpeachable detail of how Canadian Maj. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, the UN force commander in Rwanda in 1994, learned from a highly paid informant that the Hutu leadership, with its vicious militias, planned to “provoke a civil war,” kill Belgian and other peacekeepers, and then start the process of extermination.
Dallaire’s informant, a man within the government, had been “ordered to register all Tutsis in Kigali,” according to the Canadian general, and “he suspects it is for their extermination” because “in 20 minutes his personnel could kill up to a thousand Tutsis.” All of this, and much, much more, was included in an urgent fax sent to UN headquarters in New York as early as Jan. 11, 1994.
And what was done in New York? Dallaire was expressly instructed from protecting the informant and from taking any direct preventive action. He was told to report any infractions of the UN’s bureaucratic rules to the Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana, who in fact was already the author of the genocide. Dallaire was silenced.
Kofi Annan remarked only recently to the French newspaper Liberation of the sad events in Rwanda: “I remember saying at the time, `If a genocide does not push us to intervene, what can make us budge?’ “
It was remarks like these–plus the memories of too many destroyed both physically and morally–that led to the curious press conference at UN headquarters in New York this week, immediately after the controversial New Yorker publication.
First, UN spokesman Juan Carlos Brandt read a statement from Kofi Annan–ironically, traveling to Rwanda. While the article raises “important questions,” the secretary-general said, “the failure to prevent the 1994 genocide was local, national and international. . . . The fundamental failure was the lack of political will, not the lack of information.”
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Even if it could actually do anything, one demanded, should not the UN have warned the world of what was about to happen? Was this not at heart a question of the “moral voice” of the United Nations, which had failed at a critical time? Had there not been enough time that winter to resolve any confusion over the UN’s “political mandate,” for instance, by bringing the question urgently before the Security Council for it to act?
Not to be put off by such questions, the good spokesman merely went on to say in the UN’s ever-polished bureaucratic “internationalese” that actually “everyone in the international community was guilty for that sad chapter in history.” The failure had to be “shared collectively.”
Beyond these pesky correspondents, coming on top of that troublesome New Yorker magazine, not to speak of the persistent Canadian general and his busy informants, what does this newest scandal at the UN really mean?
This entire syndrome of Rwandan horrors is much too clearly a repetition of Bosnia for us to think that the UN just makes mistakes. No. The moral corruption, resting on the absurd ideas of UN “neutralism” in conflicts of clear aggression, dooms this UN to eternal falsity and to repeated failure. The Third World bureaucratism of the organization has, sadly, been unimproved by the leadership of Kofi Annan, a good man, but . . .
With these kinds of mandates and missions, in which there is no machinery and no will to halt aggression either before or after, the UN today is not defending the poor of the world but dooming them. Finally, we are seeing not a failure in one situation, but the failure of an entire system.
Much could be done, of course, if the powers of the world, in particular the United States, would show the leadership that the times cry out for. The moral neutralism that is at the heart of the problem could indeed be changed, if only . . . But the leaders of today are pusillanimous men who have neither the vision nor the guts for such controversial and transformative work.
Meanwhile, however, UN officials could do immeasurably better than they have. At the very least, they could pick up their moral swords and inform the world of what is really going on instead of hiding behind their bureaucratism. For Rwanda is hardly the end of their–and our–tribulations.