PROLOGUE
On the evening of April 6, 1994, a full moon shone on Kigali Hill across the valley from the American residence. My wife Sandra and I had just stepped in from the front porch when we heard a huge boom followed by a smaller explosion. Sandra, accustomed to small-arms fire and grenade explosions after three months in country, exclaimed, “That was not a grenade!”
Within minutes, the president’s cabinet director Enoch Ruhigira called me from the airport. “They have shot down my president,” he said in a broken voice.
“Who is they?” I asked.
“The RPF of course!” was his instant and grieving response.
We later learned that two air-to-ground missiles hit the Dassault Falcon jet bringing President Juvénal Habyarimana back home to Kigali from a regional summit in Dar es Salaam. Three months earlier, Habyarimana had been sworn in as interim president under terms of the Arusha Accords, signed August 4, 1993, between the then Government of Rwanda (GOR) and the insurgent Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF).1 When the president perished with all aboard that plane, the two contending parties returned to war instead of working out the arrangements of democratic governance and power sharing based on the Arusha principles. A Hutu extremist faction grabbed the reins of government and launched a genocide in which over eight hundred thousand victims were slaughtered within one hundred days.
International Humanitarian Intervention in Rwanda
What was the context in which the downing of the presidential aircraft engendered genocide? What was the role of the international community in structuring that context? This study looks at the international humanitarian intervention in Rwanda2 and asks what lessons might be learned from the nearly four-year international effort to halt the conflict between the Rwandan government and the Patriotic Front, and to restore peace and security to Rwanda’s people.
From the outbreak of civil war in October 1990, regional states and international partners sought to broker a ceasefire. Once a durable ceasefire was secured in 1992, international Observers accompanied political negotiations in Arusha, while diplomatic missions pushed the peace process in Kigali.3 After the parties signed a peace agreement in August 1993, the United Nations Security Council deployed a peacekeeping mission, UNAMIR, to accompany the establishment of a transitional government with a peacekeeping force.
The international community took the signing of the Arusha Accords as warrant of the negotiation’s success and guarantee of peace and progress for Rwanda.4 But attempts to implement the accords revealed political chasms that international mediation had not bridged. Only Habyarimana had been sworn in as transition president; the organization of other institutions established by the accords was still in dispute. When the president’s plane went down, the peace process blew apart in the renewal of civil war and the launching of genocide.
What seemed a model negotiation had fallen apart in endless political point and counterpoint. Within eight months of the peace agreement, the international community, including the largest part of the UNAMIR mission, was fleeing Rwanda, leaving in tatters a carefully knit humanitarian intervention. What went wrong? What lessons for other humanitarian endeavors might we learn from this well-intentioned but tragic effort?
Participant-Observer
As a diplomat of the United States government, I was a participant in those tragic events. My own encounter with Rwanda’s political strife began in 1973 during my first overseas posting in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital. As second secretary at the US embassy, I witnessed, in the spring of that year, the outbreak of ethnic violence, born out of passions stirred by the prospect of elections in the summer. On July 5, a committee of ranking National Guard officers, self-designated as “The Committee for Peace and National Unity,” took power, abolished political parties, dissolved the government, abrogated the constitution, and named the chief of staff, Major General Juvénal Habyarimana, as chief of state.5
Before I left Kigali in August 1975 for onward posting to Bamako, Mali, Habyarimana had installed a largely civilian government and established the Revolutionary National Movement for Development (Mouvement Révolutionaire Nationale pour le Développement, or MRND).6 Adoption by referendum of a new constitution in December 1978 and the election of Habyarimana as president that same month completed the transition to a single-party state.
Habyarimana was still in power in 1990 when exile forces, brought together in the Rwandese Patriotic Front, launched an insurgent movement from Uganda, seeking to overthrow the regime. Distant from Rwanda by postings in West and East Africa and at the Department of State, I was drawn back to the region as a discussant at a State Department conference in March 1992 that presaged a new policy toward Rwanda. Actively directing this new policy was the assistant secretary for African affairs, Ambassador Herman (Hank) Cohen, who, in August 1992, asked me to delay my next assignment and become the US Observer at the political negotiations in Arusha, Tanzania, following the establishment of a ceasefire between the contending parties. Although these negotiations lasted from August 5, 1992, to August 5, 1993, my own engagement ended in November, when negotiations stalled and headed into impasse.
In March 1993, President Clinton named me as his intended ambassador to the Republic of Rwanda, presumably to be accredited to a transition regime as structured in the Arusha negotiations. Arriving at post in January 1994, I found that only the president had been sworn in to his transition position under the Arusha Accords. Three months of intensive diplomacy thereafter could not bring the parties to establish the transitional government or national assembly. When the president’s plane was shot down on April 6, Hutu extremists rushed to fill the power vacuum, launching war and genocide in their quest to hold onto power.
The Rwandese Patriotic Army (RPA) vanquished government forces and stopped genocide in four months of fighting. In the meantime, some eight hundred thousand innocents had been brutally slaughtered as states debated how to restore an international force within Rwanda. Having on April 10 evacuated Americans and closed the embassy in Kigali under orders from Washington, I was now asked on July 24 to establish the base for cooperation with the new government and to oversee the launching of a humanitarian airlift, in effect reopening the US mission. For the next eighteen months, our embassy was engaged in providing humanitarian relief, rebuilding infrastructure, promoting justice, and increasing the capacities of the new government. I passed these responsibilities to my successor, Robert Gribbin, on January 6, 1996, and went on to West Africa as the US ambassador to Mali.
From Memories to Documents
Memories abound, but they are often selective, sometimes inaccurate, and always circumscribed by one’s personal experience. More reliable are observations refined and inscribed, fixed in the official record. Upon my retirement from the US Foreign Service in 1999, I was encouraged by the late Senator Paul Simon to write about US engagement in Rwanda—policies and actions in which he had taken a personal interest. His recommendation evolved into a proposal to the United States Institute of Peace to look at the documentary record of international humanitarian intervention of that period, especially the US classified documents that were accessible to me as a former presidential appointee. Following reinstatement of my security clearance, I began the perusal of those documents in the summer