Donate Here By Secure Server
Posted on 04/03/2004 9:49:48 AM PST by don-o
For seven days in February, Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian general who commanded the United Nations peacekeeping forces in Rwanda 10 years ago, sat on a witness stand in a small courtroom in Arusha, Tanzania.
Dallaire had served in Rwanda during one of the worst massacres in modern history. In 100 days, some 800,000 Tutsis and Hutus viewed as sympathetic to them were murdered, and Dallaire was powerless to stop it.
During those months, his waking hours were a living nightmare. The bodies were everywhere, strewn in fields and latrines and stacked in neat rows next to the road as if someone were keeping score. Countless times, Dallaire had to get out of his four-by-four and move remains from the middle of the road to avoid driving over them.
Denied authority by the United Nations to intervene, Dallaire tried to broker a cease-fire, protect the innocent, prick the world's conscience through the media. But his real mission, it came to pass, was personally far more devastating -- to be a witness.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/09/power.htm
This paragraph caught my eye, in light of current news in another area:
Against this backdrop, and under the leadership of Anthony Lake, the national-security adviser, the Clinton Administration accelerated the development of a formal U.S. peacekeeping doctrine. The job was given to Richard Clarke, of the National Security Council, a special assistant to the President who was known as one of the most effective bureaucrats in Washington. In an interagency process that lasted more than a year, Clarke managed the production of a presidential decision directive, PDD-25, which listed sixteen factors that policymakers needed to consider when deciding whether to support peacekeeping activities: seven factors if the United States was to vote in the UN Security Council on peace operations carried out by non-American soldiers, six additional and more stringent factors if U.S. forces were to participate in UN peacekeeping missions, and three final factors if U.S. troops were likely to engage in actual combat. In the words of Representative David Obey, of Wisconsin, the restrictive checklist tried to satisfy the American desire for "zero degree of involvement, and zero degree of risk, and zero degree of pain and confusion." The architects of the doctrine remain its strongest defenders. "Many say PDD-25 was some evil thing designed to kill peacekeeping, when in fact it was there to save peacekeeping," Clarke says. "Peacekeeping was almost dead. There was no support for it in the U.S. government, and the peacekeepers were not effective in the field." Although the directive was not publicly released until May 3, 1994, a month into the genocide, the considerations encapsulated in the doctrine and the Administration's frustration with peacekeeping greatly influenced the thinking of U.S. officials involved in shaping Rwanda policy.
Every time the world's liberals/socialists do something like this, they just get up, walk away, and say 'oops!' and the world keeps letting them do it. Makes me sick.
< / heavy sarcasm >
False. He had the power to stop it. He did not have the political support. Personally, I think he and his Canuck troops should have acted 'unilaterally' and stopped it rather than being a 'witness'. But I don't blame Dallaire too much, I blame Kofi and Klintoon...but it was NOT a lack of power. There were first world peacekeepers on location through it all. It could have been stopped. Which makes the fact that it was not that much worse and more gruesome.
Precisely.
Which is why it falls to the USA to take all necessary measures, in coalition if possible or unilaterally, if necessary to provide for the common defense.
Tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide comes at an opportune moment. One only hopes that that people will learn that the U.N. is not the solution; it is the problem.
The secretary-general basically came to the Security Council with three options: either to reinforce this UNAMIR group, which really was inadequate; to withdraw it completely; or to have a kind of medium option of some reinforcement of it. My instructions were to support full withdrawal. I listened to the discussion very carefully in the Security Council. I could see that our position was wrong, and especially in listening to the African delegate, Ambassador Gambari from Nigeria, [who] was very moving on this.
[So] I had these instructions which made no sense at all. These were in informal meetings of the Security Council, where the real discussion goes on. I asked my deputy to take my seat while I left, and went out into the hall into these phone booths and called Washington. I decided not to call the State Department from whence my instructions really came, but the National Security Council, because they were dealing with it on a very imminent basis. Tony Lake, the national security adviser, was somebody that certainly knew a lot about Africa. He was the great expert.
I felt that I would get a better hearing if I called the National Security Council, which I did, and they said, "Well, no, we're worrying about this, and these are your instructions." I actually screamed into the phone. I said, "They're unacceptable. I want them changed." So they told me to chill out and calm down. But ultimately, they did send me instructions that allowed us to do a reinforcement of UNAMIR; not a massive changing of the mandate and enlarging it or withdrawing it, but the middle option allowed me to support that.
I have been told you talked to Richard Clarke, that the conversation was with him.
That is correct.
Why Clarke?
Because he was in charge of peacekeeping. The way the National Security Council was set up was that this was coming through those people that had been studying what the appropriate role of peacekeeping was at the United Nations. Now, this was a truly interesting time at the U.N., in terms of trying to figure out what the role of peacekeeping was. There had been a number of peacekeeping operations throughout the history of the UN, but they were primarily operations that came in to monitor cease-fires, to make sure that there was separation between contending sides. They didn't often have authority to get involved in any fighting. They were definitely the neutral observers.
All of a sudden, in the early 1990s, there was the recognition that the United Nations could have a much larger role. So we were looking generally at the role of peacekeeping, and Dick Clarke and others were in charge of developing a new peacekeeping policy that had begun to be discussed under the Bush administration, that ended up being this Presidential Decision Directive 25. And that listed how, and under what circumstances peacekeeping operations would be supported by the United States.
I must ask you-- Tony Lake says he has no recollection of anybody raising objections to the instructions [on voting on the UNAMIR withdrawal]. He's not disagreeing with what you say. He just said it never reached his level.
Well, that may be. I didn't talk to him. I talked to Dick Clarke. I did not talk to Tony Lake.
SniP~
You talked about your conversation with Richard Clarke. Did you have a chance at other points in this to raise objections to other Cabinet members, to Warren Christopher or to the president? At the time, yes, I'm sure. But we were all in various principals meetings. But I was not the secretary of state. So I was not actually involved in some of the discussions of that time between the two resolutions, so to speak, when there was a discussion about Boutros's plan for military action versus the Pentagon's plan for military action. There was a disagreement between the Pentagon and the U.N. about how to do what [and] when.
I can't cite moments, but we talked about-- I thought it wasn't working well, and I was troubled generally by-- I happen to believe in the United Nations and peacekeeping operations, and I wanted to see it work. I was troubled by the fact that it was very hard to get support in Congress for what we were doing.
SniP~
So it's the question of how the information filters up about a particular problem in a region. I had gone to Angola. We were working on very serious other issues within Africa and in Europe. It's so awful, in retrospect, to think that this did not filter up; but it did not. .
Interesting, but who is talking to whom?
Bill Clinton, our first Black President. He feels their pain!
I am confident that God will deal with BC!
Clarke is a master of bureaucratic short speak. That is, of sticking to the talking points. He's a master of a control freak of that strain found in Federal Bureaucracies and less frequently in our 2004-era internally socialistic large corporations.
His words cast a spell of myopia and pleasant gee-he-knows-what-he's-talking-about on the listener. That's the devil -- almost impossible -- for the usual Catholic boyo to throw off.
Plus Clarke's a complete rolodex man, CFR to boot.
I think the imaginary theatrical staging I put him in pegs him, the more I heared him cast his net of careful words. Useful was a pullback camera shot that shewed his arms and hands, tensed and laid straight on the chair's arms, at variance from his relaxed belly. Hubris is king of his mind's house..
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.