Why were the hopes for peace set within the framework of the Arusha Accords so quickly crushed by political realities? This question drives our backward look over those events.
DIPLOMATIC PERSPECTIVES
A partial answer is to recognize that mediators, facilitators, and Observers involved in the international intervention did not fully comprehend the context of the crisis.50 Our purchase on core dynamics was deficient in several regards.
We were too sanguine about African societies’ vaunted capacity to endure. But the pressures of population growth, pluralistic politics, a deteriorating economy, and competition for power stretched Rwanda to its breaking point. In this context, pushing forward a peace agreement that required major structural change and redistribution of political and economic power brought not peace but civil war and genocide.
We misconstrued relations of force in a seemingly powerless country. The UN Security Council deployed a peacekeeping force of minimal size and mandate. When President Habyarimana’s plane was shot down, extremist partisans quickly proved that the UN force had neither the mandate nor the materiel to counter determined opposition to the Arusha process.
We glossed over the emotional roots of conflict, which, in the Rwandan case, were fear and loathing—fear that the “other,” once empowered, would be a perpetual oppressor, and the loathing that comes from devaluing one’s neighbor. The contenders were caught in an emotional recreation of self-images generated by diminution and demonization of the other side.
We underestimated the will to power. Determination to control the political process brought an impasse to power-sharing talks; commitment to ascendancy brought disequilibrium to military negotiations; unwillingness to compromise blocked the installation of the transitional institutions. So when the president was killed, Rwanda was left without institutional authority, a void quickly filled by extremists who would hold on to power at all costs, even the slaughter of innocents.
As we reflect on the historical complexity of Rwandan society, so also we should consider the capacity of the diplomatic intervention to restore peace. The mediators were focused on democratic practice and power sharing; the negotiating parties were contesting for power. Diplomats proposed classic peacemaking devices for bringing the parties together; the parties negotiated out of deeply rooted cultural dispositions. Thus, deficient understandings of Rwandan culture and traditional peacekeeping modalities framed international intervention in the Rwandan conflict. As an Observer remarked at the time, “We are, after all, diplomats, not social psychologists.”51
MODES OF REPRESENTATION
Interventions to bring peace to Rwanda moved through different modes.52 At the start of the Rwandan crisis, states with representation in Kigali negotiated with the Rwandan government, often comparing notes among embassies and following similar approaches but keeping to a traditional, bilateral mode. Meanwhile, states represented in Kampala held separate discussions with leaders of the Rwandese Patriotic Front.
When political negotiations started in Arusha in August 1992, a parallel diplomacy emerged based on the conference principle.53 Here the Observer group worked together in evaluating issues and jointly sharing their views with the Facilitator or with the parties themselves. As this study will show, the understandings arrived at in Arusha through this conference system were often out of touch with the bilateral discourse going on in Kigali, in Kampala, or in the capitals of concerned states.
In August 1993, the conference negotiations produced the accords that took the peace process back to Rwanda under the aegis of the United Nations Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR). At this point, the conference was over and bilateral diplomacy was subsumed within a framework established by an international organization. The vital exchanges of bilateral negotiation and the collective wisdom of multilateral diplomacy became subservient to international collaboration in the project of implementing the accords and the “technical” program of peacekeeping as outlined and captained by the United Nations.54
This intervention on behalf of international peace and security and in the interest of rehabilitating the Rwandan state took on the cultural expectations of international diplomacy: giving status to arguments from both sides, seeking a middle ground, and urging compromise with a view to establishing an institutionalized agreement between contending parties.
However, this was not just an international diplomatic intervention to restore international peace and security. It was also a humanitarian intervention to save lives and comfort the hungry, sick, and homeless while protecting individual human rights on both sides of the conflict. The international intervention in Rwanda was driven by concern for the displaced and refugees, as well as by preoccupation with statecraft in Central Africa. The central question was whether the intervention could achieve its objectives in each domain. Obviously, it grievously failed in both regards.
Does “Humanitarian Intervention” Work?
In an insightful analysis, Anthony Lang has looked at international interventions taken for purported humanitarian purposes and found them wanting. Such interventions are, he finds, essentially self-serving, undertaken to heighten the image of those intervening rather than to succor the helpless. Echoing Hedley Bull’s reflections on the ambiguous status of human rights within the state system, Lang concludes that humanitarian interventions concentrate more “on saving the state than on saving people.”55 Lang is not the only one to point out the failures of international humanitarian intervention; a plethora of recent studies take up the theme, many pointing to Rwanda as the demonstrative case.56 However, Lang was one of the first in the genre, and he makes more explicit than most the connection between the failure of humanitarian action and the structural nature of state action.
Lang’s thesis is that the space of international action is “the province of the states themselves,” and that the language of international politics, including discourses on international humanitarian interventions, “is constituted and controlled by state interpretations.”57 Moreover, in humanitarian crises caused by collapsing state structures, intervening states are concerned with reestablishing the disintegrating state so as to repair the breach in the state system.58 Once reestablished, a revived state also contests within the interstate arena.
Meanwhile, the interests of individual citizens, victims of the humanitarian crisis, are secondary to the playing out of initiatives designed to establish state identity and state persona (including that of human rights advocate) in the interstate arena. According to Lang, “State agents focus more on other state agents in an intervention rather than on people who need assistance.”59 The dynamics of state agency in an international crisis thus intrinsically conflict with the humanitarian aims of intervention. Nicholas Onuf echoes the theme: “The institutional machinery which governments have authorized for the protection of human rights greatly favors states over nationals; in effect, states’ rights trump individual rights.”60
A Look Forward
A glance forward at the record in this study will show that a state-centric agenda driven by a diplomatic ethos of negotiation, fair play, and power sharing prevailed over the claims of humanitarian intervention that would put the real needs of people first. Diplomats did seek policy responses that met human need. But they persisted in deferring to sovereign choice, in treating both sides as equal parties, in holding faith in power sharing, and in promoting democratic choice as the antidote to conflict. These approaches, reflecting the essential values of the twentieth century, obviously did not work.
Yet, internecine conflict was not new to world leaders, nor was the quest for peace.61 Moreover, international peacekeeping had built up considerable experience and expertise since the Second World War. Thus, the unrolling of the Rwandan peacekeeping peace process as recorded