Samantha Power
Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Harvard University
"A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide"
April 9, 2002

Samantha Power: In January of 1994, more than eight years ago today, the UN commander of UN peacekeeping forces in Rwanda…a small central African country with a history of ethnic violence between Hutu, the majority, and Tutsi, the minority that had been privileged prior to independence by the Belgian colonizers…the UN commander, Romeo DeLair sent a cable, now notorious to Kofi Annan who was then the head of peacekeeping in New York at the United Nations. The cable said two very important things. The first thing it said was that on the basis of word he had received from an informant who was in tight with the militia and the paramilitary units were sort of spreading around Rwanda looking to de-stabilize Hutu-Tutsi power sharing arrangement…but that one of these informants had told them that the militias were now prepared to exterminate Tutsi at a rate of 1,000 every 20 minutes. 1,000 every 20 minutes.

He put this in the cable to Kofi Annan and put a second thing in the cable which was that the other thing that he had learned from his informants was that the Rwandan militants, the extremists had learned from Somalia that it would only take the killing of ten Belgians…ten white peacekeepers, basically…for the whole UN mission to unravel. That is there was an awareness among the hardliners that all you needed to do was target the white people in Africa and that was your way to cause again a mission breakdown. And if you are against power sharing and against peace, of course, what you want is a mission breakdown. You don’t want peacekeepers. They keep peace. You don’t want peace. You want them out.

So, these two warnings were made very explicitly. It is a jarring document that much has been made of since. But, that virtually nothing was made of at the time. Kofi Annan, his deputy initially greeted the cable and got back to DeLair very quickly. DeLair when he sent the cable wasn’t actually asking for instructions or permission, he was simply informing New York that in light of these two facts, he was going to disarm the militia who could exterminate 1,000, who were going to target the Belgians. And it was just a point of notification basically. There was an eruption in New York…no, no, no you can’t do that. Washington would never go for it. Washington would never, they won’t tolerate that. That is Somalia all over again when you try to disarm folks who don’t want their weapons taken away.

So, DeLair said, what? But, how can I enforce this peace? How can I be a peacekeeper with my 25,000 troops if I don’t have the capacity to get the guns and the machete’s away from the people who are intent on…in the sense…he didn’t use the word, but genocide.

But, the opposition was overwhelming. And I mention this for a few reasons. One, I think it is very important as we think about genocide and I am going to talk about genocide macro and the Rwandan case specifically, but to be aware to which early warning does exist. But, also the extent to which that warning is irrelevant because it is politically meaningless early warning. It stays in the kind of back channels instead of being leaked to the New York Times or Washington Post. Or if it is leaked, instead of being taken seriously by the New York Times or the Washington Post.

There was an old Fleet Street saying in England that if it bleeds, it leads. Well, the corollary to that is that until it bleeds, it tends not to lead. Either in the US government or in the American media or European media, indeed.

So, DeLair sends this. It gets, you would think into the right hands to Kofi Annan, but he says, whoa. And instead of forcing the issue…instead of saying to Washington, you know we have evidence of or warning of this, it seems kind of scary. We need to confront. What do you want to do? And leave it to Washington to say no confrontation…after Somalia we are not going to confront. Instead, back in the old days of the UN the tendency was to try to in a sense read minds. And read the weather and then make decisions accordingly. So then to self-censor on the basis of what Kofi Annan and others at the UN knew the Washington appetite to be.

Now, the problem with that is that the UN ends up the fault guy or the fall institution, the sort of the punching bag for the world, which is what it became in the 1990s not just in Rwanda but in Bosnia and elsewhere. So Kofi Annan doesn’t publicize this. DeLair gets on the phone several times, it wasn’t just the cable. He actually gets on the speakerphone, he is arguing with the now Secretary General of then, head of peacekeeping. He says we have got to be able to….No, no going. No doing.

So, a warning usually is present. The warning is often quite explicit but it is never entirely explicit. It is not prophetic. It is not full proof. So, even here as graphic as that was, what you don’t hear is that they are going to kill 800,000 between April and July of 1994. So, later what you will hear is, oh but we knew things were bad, but we didn’t know it would be that.

And there is a structural problem with genocide, which is that it tends to happen in places that are off the beaten path. So, actually places that don’t in and of themselves get high-level attention…Rwanda, Kurdistan, Cambodia, Bosnia…they are just a little off. And as a result, these kinds of warning even if they had made it into the US…into the sort of member state system…into any of the states, it would have probably been at a sort of desk officer level or if you are lucky a deputy assistant secretary level. It is not going to make it to the president. A warning about imminent violence in Rwanda, tell me something that I haven’t already heard would be the attitude.

And the problem with those folks who get the messages, whether in New York at the UN or in Washington, would be the folks who work Rwanda day to day, would be those who would be expecting violence because they know of ethnic polarization, the ethnic violence that had gone on. So, they are almost too prepared. And you saw this in the Bosnia case. You would see violence in Croatia and Slovenia. When genocide came to Bosnia or when mass violence against civilians targeted killing of Muslims and ethnic cleansing of Muslims and Croats came, the folks who worked the Bosnia issue in the State Department said, it arrived on schedule because there has been so much early warning.

April 6^th, four months later, a plane crashes in Rwanda. The Hutu president is shot down along with the president Burundi. Killing starts immediately. US officials are in Kigali as are French and Belgian officials, lord knows…as are DeLair’s peacekeepers. His troop strength by then is up to 2500. He has 2500 peacekeepers under his command. The plane goes down. Lists have been prepared in advance. Checkpoints go up. And immediately the militia, teaming up with the Rwandan government, the Hutu government, that didn’t want to power share, that didn’t want the Tutsi back in the government at all…the hardliners anyway who had the power at that time…began systematically murdering every Tutsi they can lay their hands on.

So, when you get stopped at a checkpoint, and you are asked to present your ethnic, it is like you know presenting your ID, said Tutsi, they were stuck with what they were born as. They never owned this, they never claimed it. They just were, what they were born as. If it was Tutsi, it was enough for a death sentence from day one. US officials cable back to Washington that this is the case. They say there are two forms of killing. And there usually is when genocide happens. One is war…conventional conflict between Tutsi armed rebels who had been invading the country periodically for the last…for the previous then four years in the hopes of getting back their homes and basically forcing the government into a peace settlement. So, the Tutsi rebels once the Hutu started killing the Tutsi, immediately recommenced the war. So, you had the Hutu government fighting the Tutsi armed force…conventional war.

But, under the cover of war, the Hutu government began to systematically exterminate the Tutsi. So, these two things are going on and US diplomats, journalists and others are reporting this explicitly back to the respective capitals. Two days into the killing the estimates are as high as 10,000 murdered in Kigali alone…that is the capital. And these reports again are going back…I have to stress. They are not just incubated in this place, which is quickly turning miserable and terrifying.

The part that I want to read you is on April 8^th, back in Washington. Washington’s focus as it will be in every genocide is getting the Americans out. Now, it sounds pretty awful in retrospect especially when you know that the tally is 800,000 of people who end up murdered. But, at the time, you know when the US government sends it’s officials to serve overseas, it is the responsibility of the government to look out for their welfare. And that is what happened. So, Prudence Bushnell, the deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs oversaw the evacuation of US personnel. That was not just US embassy personnel, but also missionaries and folks that who are out in the countryside working for non-governmental groups, relief agencies and charities and the like.

Bushnell is the head of the Rwandan Task Force. On April 8^th, again the same day that they are already estimating 10,000 dead in the capital alone, she is summoned to speak to the Washington Press Corp. And we all know Hutu and Tutsi now, or we vaguely know. But, then I mean, imagine you know if you had never read Philip Graveich or if you had never read the Atlantic Peace or if you had never heard President Clinton apologize…supposedly apologize for what had happened, would you know who Hutu-Tutsi? If there hadn’t been the genocide, would you know Hutu-Tutsi? Well, nobody then did.

So, when she came before the Washington Press Corp., the questions were in effect, is it Hutu killing Tutsi, or Tutu killing Hutsi? That was the level of understanding. It is not surprising, small country, the middle of central Africa, never in the US sphere of influence, not even a cold war pawn in the way that so many other countries had been.

So, Bushnell gets up in front of the Press Corp. at the State Department and answers questions about the ethnic dynamic. But, as she said in reflecting what she focused on was the fate of US citizens. She says today, "I felt very strongly that my first obligation was to the Americans. I was sorry about the Rwandans, of course. But, my job was to get our folks out. Then again, people didn’t know then that it was a genocide. What I was told was look Prudence, these people do this from time to time."

These people do this from time to time. Again, this kind of expectation of a certain level of brutality. A kind of acceptable level of brutality. And then she says, understandably, "We thought we would be right back." So, the expectation even with 10,000 dead in a couple of days, and even with the systematic extermination and the proof that all it took was having Tutsi on your ethnic identity card, it was filtered by the most knowledgeable…one of the most knowledgeable people in Washington through the prism of history and through a kind of again, sort of bare expectation that this kind of behavior would happen. That there would be a spike and then it would sort of calm down.

Burundi had just erupted the previous year. And somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000 people had been killed. That also colored people’s response. No body had written an Atlantic Monthly piece about that. Nobody had even complained about that. No president had to go and apologize for it. So, the expectation among folks who even cared about the Rwandans was that there was a certain amount of violence you know that just was not going to make it up the chain of command. It wasn’t just in and of itself important.

The most interesting thing happens after Bushnell leaves the podium. The State Department spokesman then was Mike McCurry who later went on to become White House Spokesman. And he takes the stand and without pausing, Bushnell has done the Rwanda thing. And he is just on to the next subject at the Press Conference. And he ends up turning immediately to that subject, which was his demarche, his criticism of foreign governments who were failing to screen the film, Schindler’s List. So, what he says is, he denounces these governments or condemns them, urges them to reconsider. And he says, you have to understand, this film movingly portrays the 20^th Century’s most horrible catastrophe. And it shows that even in the midst of genocide, one individual can make a difference. He urges that the film be shown worldwide and he says, "The most effective way to avoid the recurrence of genocidal tragedy is to ensure that past acts of genocide are never forgotten."

This book for me was an effort to understand this contradiction. How, in a sequence of…in this case, seconds…one could shift from the discussion of the systematic murder of a people to a discussion of the importance of remembering the Holocaust without making any kind of connection at all. And the interesting question for me was not why do people who believe that America only stands for profit and you know protecting it’s own borders, why do they do nothing about genocide? That isn’t a terribly interesting question. That actually flows naturally from a set of priorities.

What was the interesting question for me was to understand why do people or how is it that people who really believe that if they were in government and had the power or the potential to denounce, to sanction, to intervene, small "i", big "I", you know troops or not troops to intervene in some way who believe that they would be people who would do that. What happens? What snaps? What changes? What insulates when genocide actually happens such that they don’t do any of those things that they thought that they would do?

And that was the question basically that I set out to answer and looking at US responses to genocide, not only in the Rwanda case…Rwanda is just a small…just one of five or six cases…But I begin with the Armenian Genocide at the beginning of the century. I look at the Holocaust itself which has been this great scholarship on that. But, I think when it is put in the larger context of other genocides, you can also learn more about what was going on, what measure anti-Semitism, what measure needing to fight the war against Hitler…you know, what is it exactly that causes us to go into this sort of phase of denial again and again?

I look at the effort to ratify the genocide convention in this country, which I will talk a little bit about. Cambodia…the Pol Pot’s killing of about 2 million people between 1975 and ’79. Iraq, very fashionable to talk about these days. But, Iraq…Saddam systematically gassed and murdered between 100 and 200,000 Kurds between ’87 and ’88. And at the time we were actually aligned with Iraq, giving him nearly a billion dollars a year in agriculture and manufacturing credits while these atrocities were being carried out. And no sanction was imposed when we learned about it beyond a shadow of a doubt. Bosnia I mentioned. I was a reporter there but had to come back and learn what was going on this side of the ocean when I was over there watching the NATO planes fly overhead and not do anything about the systematic targeting of Muslim civilians. And then of course, Rwanda which is the starkest case since the Holocaust.

Rwanda is the one that I think…tell me if I am wrong…but brings many of you into the room. It is the one with the Holocaust earns the capital G, Genocide. It is the systematic extermination of every last one. The others you know, you can argue was it genocide…it certainly wasn’t quite like the Holocaust in a variety of ways, but Rwanda especially since the President did come out and kind of express his remorse for it, is one that ranks up there atop the hierarchy of the horribles. And I think because it is the 1990s. Because it was in 1994. Because we had already had the Internet revolution and CNN and because we had Democrats in the White House who talked a good game. There was a lot around that specific case. Because it was 800,000 in 100 days that were killed which is a faster killing spree than the Holocaust. I mean they were better at it than Hitler even with their more primitive weapons. So, that I think burns…that case more than any I think people really want to know about.

First again, just another layer of detail on the book, what I did was I interviewed victims, perpetrators and bystanders in the societies in question. So, each of the sort of genocidal places that I mentioned. Probably more than a thousand people I interviewed over the course of the last seven years. But, the emphasis was not there. It was here. This is very much a book and a story about America and American foreign policy, American Empire, and a lot of again, the new re-claimed catch phrases in recent days.

So, I mainly spoke, spent my time with US officials. And I worked with a group called the National Security Archive in Washington. One of the great non-governmental groups on the planet. And what they do is they de-classify…they submit Freedom of Information Act requests and they get government documents de-classified. So, so much of this story is made possible by my having the goods. Not all of the goods, by any means because we only get what the little guy with the black magic marker will give you…that is they tend to black out the worst stuff. But, the beauty of genocide…sadly…the beauty of America’s non-response from the standpoint of learning what goes on behind the scenes is the person with the black magic marker as far as I can tell says to the person next to him…well, Rwanda okay…request for Rwanda…we didn’t do anything there, so let’s just give her the documents, give them the documents. We didn’t do anything. It is not like Nicaragua or Chile or you know. We didn’t do anything. So, these stocks of the most extraordinary documents which in turn made it possible to again get access to the US officials who might otherwise been quite reluctant to speak to me.

So, I talked to about 300 US officials and those who had great influence on them. Looked at the documents, thousands of pages of government documents. I also did press content analysis to try to look at what the newspapers were saying both in terms of reportage and in terms of the editorial boards because that is so important in terms of understanding…terror. That is very important in terms of understanding you know where the accent mark is placed. You know, it is one thing to see okay, you know in 1941 the Daily Telegraph reported that 1 million Jews had already been exterminated. It is another thing to note that there was no accompanying editorial or there was no editorial that week in the New York Times, which repeated that claim. But, it was buried on page A17 and there was no editorial saying, look at page A17.

So when you look at the press and you look at knowledge, it is important also to see who is prioritizing knowledge, and how. So, I tried to do that. Bushnell ended up being one of the more active…she is the woman I mentioned who said she was told that these people do this from time to time. She was one of the more active, spirited US officials. She managed the evacuation. Got the Americans out within about five days of the genocide. They came out by land.

What happened is in accordance with DeLair’s warning, the militia and the government in the very first day of the genocide, targeted the Belgians…and killed guess how many…10. Knowing and having warned you know it just took double digits. Belgium came to the United States after learning of this atrocity, this massacre and said, either we are going to stay but we need reinforcements if we are going to stay. Or we are going to get out. What should we do? You know, and Warren Christopher said, could somebody help me find Rwanda on the map? Someone did. They pulled the atlas…I am serious…sadly…I am really actually serious…It can be funny too, but this stuff is scary but this is what happened. And again, he is Secretary of State. There are a lot of countries on the earth. But, so somebody pulls the atlas off and shows him where it is. And there is a very quick sizing up of the stakes. And there are none. There are no perceived stakes. If anything, it is just…learning more makes you less likely to care. Because occasionally you might learn more and you learn there might be some oil well buried somewhere, in some peripheral…nothing. Bananas and lots of fertility.

So, Christopher said to Clase…Willie Clase the Belgian foreign minister, no reinforcements, we won’t pay for them…don’t forget the US is paying a disproportionate share…31% of peacekeeping costs at that time. The overarching lesson of Somalia learned in the US bureaucracy was not what we think it is. It was not don’t send US troops to Africa. It was not even don’t send US troops to participate in UN peacekeeping. The lesson of Somalia was don’t let…if you let anyone else in, you are going to end up having to go in and bail them out. So, no matter who goes from what country, it is going to be on you to do the rescue mission. And this is quite profound because what had happened…we forget about some of this…US troops actually went in, so a lot of people left. And then the Pakistani’s were left there sort of tying, basically holding down the fort. And the US actually insisted from afar in expanding the mandate, pursuing Hadeed, going on a manhunt and the Pakistanis ended up targeted. And then US reinforcements came in to help rescue the mission and the Pakistanis and it was then and only then that you had Black hawk Down in October of ’93, six months before the Rwandan genocide began.

So, Somalia looms as a big, dark shadow. But, it is not the full story by any means. And I think if you looked at what the US response would have been in April ’93 or April ’95 or April ’99 or April ’82, you were going to see a lot of the same patterns. And again, that is the advantage of having looked at several cases across time.

So, what happens? The US doesn’t enlist reinforcements. It is terrified that if it does and they get into trouble, that it would be called upon to go rescue. So what it does shockingly is it insists of the withdrawal of the UN peacekeepers who are already there. It agrees with Belgium. Belgium wants a full withdrawal because it doesn’t want to look like cowardly colonial power pulling out, leaving courageous African peacekeepers to hold off…to hold down the fort and hold off the killers. So, Belgium is sort of relieved by this but it is the US that goes to the security counsel and goes, full withdrawal. We demand a full withdrawal.

Now General DeLair, remember DeLair, the guy who had sent the cable and warned that this was going to happen, almost exactly, precisely without being capable of being fully precise, DeLair is there and what he has done is he has stationed peacekeepers throughout the country. Mainly in the city but also in various de-militarized zones. And Tutsi had gathered at these UN collection posts, you know, sort of at stadiums and at schools and at churches with just a couple peacekeepers present. There was never a very big mission but you know, maybe fifty if it was lucky or five. And what you saw again and again is apart from the one killing of the one massacred of the Belgians the first day, which seemed more of a kind of you know, illustrative massacre than part of some larger campaign, a way of getting the peacekeepers out, you saw that actually unarmed westerners succeeded in deterring large scale massacres. So, as awful as it was and as many bodies that were piling up, his claim anyway was that the deterrent presence of these peacekeepers was doing some good and that some of these…most of these posts were being left alone arguably because the killers were going to kill elsewhere and might have made their way there eventually, but that was never tested. Because what happened was the US eventually compromised and agreed to a 90% withdrawal. And DeLair’s force was cut from 2500 to 450. What this meant was that all of the Tutsi who had gathered under the baby blue and white flag were left completely exposed as the peacekeepers left through one gate and the killers came in through another.

There was no chance to go and hide out in the woods or try to flee to Tanzania or Burundi or some neighboring country. They were stuck because they trusted. And they didn’t just trust in the baby blue and white, they trusted in the member states who sent them. And that is the tragedy and the sort of perversity not only of this particular crime but also the massacre that would occur in Serbanitza the following year. Which is actually the massacre that drove me to law school because in covering it for the Washington Post, I realized that it didn’t…it just didn’t matter. You could know step by step how a UN…again how a place where folks had come to rely on the promise of UN protection that it could be overrun day by day by day. And you could just see it. You could even know that Rwanda…it had just happened in Rwanda. And it was the same old same old everyday.

And that one, you know, I knew something about what the coverage was like because I was supplying it. And it was relatively detailed and relatively alarmist I mean, as much as one can be. But, it had singularly no impact whatsoever on the policy that was made here or in the European capitals.

So, what do we have so far? We have lots of early warning. We have a fear that if you dip the toe in the whole body will get submerged. That is a strong characteristic of the US response. You have this withdrawal on this sort of false promise of protection. And then related to the point about wanting the peacekeepers out…if you view foreign policy as or foreign policy makers as folks who have like toolboxes, and in these toolboxes they have a number of tools. They have the possibility of high-level denunciation. Use the G word, call it genocide. You are committing genocide. Stop, we are going to prosecute you. Threaten prosecution. We are going to freeze your foreign assets. Freeze their foreign assets. Many of them have bank accounts in western European countries, even in the United States. We are going to close your embassy. Close the embassy of the genocidal regime. They are not going to inhabit Washington while I am president. We can expel the genocidal ambassador from the United Nations. Team up with our security counsel to do that.

The United States also had a unique capacity at that time to potentially jam the hate radio that was being used by the killers to broadcast the names and the addresses of victims. So, if a Tutsi did get away, he got away from one of these UN posts or from his own home or her own home, and was in a vehicle, somebody would spot the vehicle with the Tutsi behind the wheel, call the radio station and that would be broadcast. He is in the red van with license plate, 67VWQ. The US had the capacity to jam that hate radio. And chose not to. It cost $8500.00 an hour. There was some concern about interfering with freedom of speech. And mainly though…I mean those were sort of I think cosmetic things…mainly it was the same fear. That if you go in with the radio, go in and jam the radio, that you can’t dip a toe in when it is genocide. That if you go in with the radio, you can’t say it is genocide and we are going to jam your radio. Can you? Well, this is what I think a partial explanation anyway for the very stark fact and this is true of most of the cases with the exception of Bosnia which is that it is not that the United States doesn’t send it’s troops. That is not surprising. It is disappointing to me in many of the cases because I think a troop presence with troops from other countries might have made a significant difference, but what is shocking is number one, in this case and in most of the others is troop deployment is never discussed. And number two; the US does virtually nothing along the continuing intervention.

The tool kit that I mentioned stays closed. And that softer sanctions that one can look back on and say, gosh wouldn’t those have been cost free, and they wouldn’t have probably brought a permanent end to the slaughter. I think it is unlikely that radio jamming and denunciation would have stopped every perpetrator of genocide. But, the one thing that I hadn’t realized before I started this project…and I don’t know if this will be revelatory to you, but is the perpetrators…the worst perpetrators of genocide in the 20^th Century had never killed before. They had never done it before. And every day they were getting up and deciding just as bystanders were, just as up standers were how far they were going to go. And they were looking left and they were looking right and deciding and incorporating the world’s responses, particularly Washington’s response. And even though it is a shame that this is true, silence is often taken as consent. Because there is a sort of you know, a narrative that the perpetrators are employing that they are doing the world a favor, that they are purging the undesirables. It is important I think for some country or some influential body to step forward and try to actually negate that impression. You are not actually doing the world a favor indeed, you know, this is an affront to humanity.