And Thank You For Watching

by Mark Austin

  GETTING AWAY WITH IT… NO INTERVENTION AND NO JUSTICE

  IRAQ BECAME THE costly mess that still haunts Tony Blair to this day. The result: countless deaths of Iraqis and Western troops, the rise of ISIS and the ongoing trauma in that country. His disastrous decision to join the US in going to war, in some ways, has its roots in the Rwandan genocide.

  Rwanda is a scar on the conscience of the world. But could it have been prevented? Of course it could. All that was needed was a recognition of the moral imperative, a rapidly deployed force of a few thousand properly equipped fighting troops, and a willingness on the part of the UN to follow up with a meaningful plan for temporary occupation and stabilization. Scandalously, none of the above occurred. Nearly a quarter of a century on, it seems incredible that a genocide could have taken place without the international community doing something to stop it. But that is what happened.

  As the violence began, there was a UN force in Rwanda with a mandate to assist in the implementation of the Arusha Peace Accords which were reached in the summer of 1993. But when ten Belgian troops were killed, that country’s government pulled out the rest of its force and quickly the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) was further reduced from 2,100 to just 270. The slaughter progressed unimpeded by any outside forces.

  Just as my attention, and that of almost every other Western journalist in Africa, was firmly on Johannesburg and the election of Nelson Mandela, the United Nations was preoccupied with the war in Bosnia and attempts to get peace talks going there. Rwanda paid the price.

  It wouldn’t have taken much to halt the genocide. With 2,100 UN troops already in Rwanda, it would only have required a few thousand more to have given Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian commander of UNAMIR, a real chance to prevent the bloodshed, or at least the scale of it.

  General Dallaire insisted to his bosses at the UN in New York on many occasions that there was genuine evidence that ‘genocide’ was being planned by Hutu extremists. On 11 January 1994, three months before the violence began, Dallaire sent an urgent fax to New York, addressed to Major General Maurice Baril, the UN secretary-general’s military adviser. It quoted a reliable informant – a former security aide to President Habyarimana who became known as ‘Jean-Pierre’ and who had been responsible at one time for training the Interahamwe militia. He was considered by Dallaire to be a thoroughly credible source. Dallaire said in the fax that there was a plan for the ‘extermination’ of the Tutsis and that huge supplies of weapons had been brought into Rwanda and stockpiled for the purpose.

  Dallaire sought permission to do two things. He wanted to raid the arms caches around Kigali and elsewhere. ‘It is our intention to take action within the next 36 hours,’ wrote Dallaire. ‘Recce [reconnaissance] of armed caches and detailed planning of raid to go on late tomorrow.’

  The other issue he brought up was a request from Jean-Pierre that he and his family be protected by the UN and evacuated out of Rwanda. The reply was astonishing. Dallaire was not only denied permission to mount the raid, but he was told to tip off the government of President Habayrimana − the very president whose inner circle was behind the genocide plot. The UN also refused permission to evacuate Jean-Pierre from Rwanda. Needless to say, the raids never happened and the informant broke off contact, fearing for his and his family’s lives.

  Years later, Dallaire was quoted as saying: ‘If I had had one reinforced brigade – 5,000 men – well trained and well equipped, I could have saved thousands of lives.’

  I have spoken to at least three senior military men in the UK who agree with him and who believe the job could have been done with an even smaller force. One told me: ‘The problem is not manpower, or weaponry or money, the UN had all that was necessary at its disposal. The problem was political will. And when that is lacking, you’re dead.’

  It is a story of terrible blunders by an organization that failed the people of Rwanda.

  I’ve heard some argue that the United Nations could not have sent in a fighting force with an aggressive mandate because it would have been accused of committing aggression rather than promoting stability. That is nonsense. The evidence of an imminent, well-planned genocide was mounting, and in those circumstances any criticism of an intervention would surely have been muted and minimal.

  I have also heard the argument that it would have been illegal to send in troops because the government of Rwanda would certainly not have consented to such action.

  Well, that too is irrelevant. The UN could have invoked Chapter VII, which permits it to use force against the will of a party, even a member state. This has been done several times since the end of the Cold War and is feasible, but only if international support exists. The only military move by Western states was to send aircraft – not to get troops in, but to get their civilian nationals out.

  There is absolutely no doubt that, with the political will, there was a way. But there was precious little will. In fact, there was none.

  The two main international actors in this real-life tragedy were France and the United States – both, of course, permanent members of the Security Council. The French were never interested. They had long-standing links to the genocidal Hutu regime and had ignored many government atrocities before.

  And the United States was also hell-bent on staying well clear of Rwanda. Indeed, it went further, and blocked the authorization of reinforcements for UNAMIR. Why? Well it just so happened that Bill Clinton, president at the time, had learned a harsh lesson about intervening in African civil wars just a few months earlier.

  In October 1993, six months before the genocide, eighteen US Special Forces men were killed on a single night after a disastrous raid on the Somali capital Mogadishu. Two US Black Hawk helicopters were shot down, the bodies of US soldiers were dragged through the streets and the images were broadcast around the world.

  Among the consequences of the failed assault were a 2001 Hollywood film called Black Hawk Down, and more immediately and far more seriously, a complete re-evaluation of America’s relationship with Africa – in particular, a new wariness when it came to interventions in humanitarian crises on that continent.

  To make matters worse, the doctrine of only using ‘overwhelming force’ was the predominant thinking in Washington at the time. The task of moving a huge US contingent to a remote, land-locked African country that they didn’t particularly care about and where their national interest was certainly not threatened, was something they simply were not up for taking on.

  Of course, they could have mounted an airlift of UN or even US forces into Rwanda. They didn’t want to do it. They even refused to allow American technology to be used to jam the Hutu extremists’ radio broadcasts that were the key to spreading the messages of hatred and prolonging the killing.

  Bill Clinton and the then US representative at the UN, Madeleine Albright, have since recognized their mistake and apologized for their part in withdrawing UN forces from Rwanda as the genocide started. Kofi Annan, then under-secretary-general for peacekeeping, who was responsible for the communication with the UN force commander in Kigali, has also expressed regret that he personally didn’t do more.

  It was an appalling, collective failure of international politics and diplomacy. But the media must share the blame, too. As I’ve already said, journalists, including myself, totally failed to appreciate what was happening in Rwanda until it was too late. We all thought, or most of us did, that it was a typical central African story of tribal bloodletting. It wasn’t. It was genocide. The outside world got it wrong.

  And a few years later, I personally witnessed a good example of just how simple an effective intervention in Rwanda could have been.

  In May 2000, a fresh bout of savagery was threatening to engulf yet another African country. This time it was the former British colony of Sierra Leone, where a civil war had been raging for ten years or so, but this time the outcome was very different. And that was largely due to the foresight and actions of a young, little
-known, British military commander, David (now Sir David) Richards.

  It was, I’m afraid, a typically African scenario. A rebel militia, in this case the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), was terrorizing vast areas of Sierra Leone and were on the verge of taking the capital, Freetown. When we arrived in the country, an assault on Freetown was expected at any moment. Many people were fleeing, fearing the butchery of the drug- and drink-fuelled rebels, whose signature atrocity was to hack off the limbs of their enemies and any civilians who stood in their way, including women and children.

  Just for good measure, the RUF fighters were also holding scores of Zambian UN peacekeepers prisoner. The Foreign Office in London and the US Department of State were advising their nationals to leave Sierra Leone as quickly as possible. The British government went further and ordered a task force of naval ships and helicopters to evacuate hundreds of stranded Britons and other nationalities before the capital fell.

  So it was that, under cover of darkness, I watched RAF Chinook helicopters descend from the night sky to pick up several groups of very relieved expats from the grounds of the Mammy Yoko Hotel, where they had been advised to gather for their safety.

  They were flown to Lungi Airport on the coast, which had been secured by a couple of hundred British paratroopers, and then transported by RAF Hercules aircraft to the safety of Dakar in Senegal. It was a smooth operation that lasted through the night and into the next day.

  The evacuation complete, that was supposed to be it. The British forces were meant to withdraw from Sierra Leone and leave the people of Freetown to their fate at the hands of the much-feared Revolutionary United Front. That was the plan… until David Richards decided otherwise.

  I was preparing to talk to Brigadier Richards about the evacuation when he postponed the interview and disappeared for several hours. I was mystified by his behaviour, but the BBC correspondent on the ground, Allan Little, had heard a suggestion that Richards was planning a more extensive operation than a simple evacuation.

  ‘I think he’s up to something,’ said Little, without giving away what that ‘something’ was. Little was one of a handful of BBC correspondents I hugely admired. He was competitive, but not unpleasantly so, a thoughtful and quite brilliant writer, and unusually trustworthy and communicative for a rival reporter.

  It turned out that Richards had nipped off to see the country’s president, Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, who was in hiding somewhere and preparing to scarper in his helicopter, parked readily on the lawn of his safe house.

  Richards had gone to inform him that the British force of eight hundred heavily armed paratroopers would not be leaving after all. Instead, they would be overseeing the battle against the approaching rebel army. The Brits would stay there, supply arms and ammunition to government forces, train them as best they could in the time available, and Brigadier Richards would take personal command of the war. In other words, this ambitious young British army officer had just decided to take sides in an African civil conflict, without any serious consultation with a senior politician in the UK.

  It was a quite extraordinary intervention, and one that changed the course of the war and reshaped the future of the country.

  When Richards returned to see us at the hotel in Freetown, he had made his mind up. He told Little and me what he was planning, we both looked at each other in some surprise and then realized the story was about to get an awful lot more interesting. Richards told me he had taken the decision because he was convinced he had everything he needed to win the war very quickly. The rebel army was basically a brutal but disorganized rabble who were only equipped with AK-47s and machetes. He believed, rightly, that the fear they instilled in the wider population was not born of any great military prowess, but rather of an inhuman savagery that Richards felt could not be left unchecked. However, he also recognized it was a risk. ‘If this goes wrong I’m done for,’ he said. ‘But I promise you, it won’t.’

  I believe the mere fact the decision was made and publicized probably delayed the expected assault by the RUF. It bought much-needed time.

  There remained the small problem of getting permission from London for the rapidly conceived escapade. But timing is everything, and in Tony Blair he had a prime minister emboldened by Britain’s role in the NATO intervention in Kosovo a year or so earlier, and who was prepared to see Sierra Leone as another early test of a fresh approach to foreign adventures. It fitted Blair’s new attitude of ‘liberal interventionism’.

  This was a bold doctrine outlined in a speech the previous year in Chicago. In it, Blair proposed a set of guidelines for military action that stressed Western morality and humanitarian values. He identified five major conditions that should be satisfied when considering intervention and confronting dictatorships:

  • Be sure of the case; sure it will do more good than harm.

  • Exhaust all diplomatic options.

  • Be sure that the military options can be prudently, effectively and sensibly undertaken.

  • Be sure it will endure for the long term.

  • It should serve national interest.

  He also said, ‘Non-interference has long been considered an important principle of international order… But the principle of non-interference must be qualified in important respects… Now our actions are guided by a more subtle blend of mutual self-interest and moral purpose in defending the values we cherish.’

  So, Sierra Leone seemed a pretty good fit; most, if not all the conditions were met, particularly if you agree that a peaceful former colony served the national interest better than a war-ravaged one.

  Richards certainly persuaded Blair of the case for action. And most importantly of course, it worked. Within a few weeks the country was tugged away from the brink of mayhem. The rebels were forced back, the captured UN troops were rescued, some basic functions of government were restored and eventually the peace held. David Richards’s force gave way to thousands of UN blue helmets; British advisers began training the police force and a new Sierra Leonean army; and eventually the enemy was largely subdued.

  Within a couple of years, elections were taking place, the RUF leader, Foday Sankoh, was on trial for multiple murders and 65,000 rebels had surrendered their arms.

  Every time I think about Sierra Leone, and every time I have talked to Sir David Richards since, I can’t help thinking of Rwanda.

  I’m convinced that a similar intervention there would have unquestionably saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Like Sierra Leone, the aggressors were largely ill-equipped, untrained peasants. A rapid intervention by a professional force would surely have contained the violence, or if the deployment was early enough, pre-empted it. And if a large UN force had followed, deployed right across Rwanda, stability would have returned. It would have been hugely difficult, but some sort of political agreement may have been possible. Genocide in Rwanda was not inevitable. Something could and should have been done.

  But the truth is the world’s approach to intervention shifts with circumstances and time. As I said earlier in this chapter, America’s bad experience in Somalia governed its approach to Rwanda. The US basically decided it was pointless sending troops to what they considered third-world hellholes when there was no real national interest at stake. And in Rwanda, there was no national interest.

  It was, in part, the shame of the West over Rwanda that led to Blair’s more open-minded approach – discussed at some length, I should add, with Bill Clinton.

  So, Blair was right before he was wrong; because just as his Chicago doctrine was used to justify the successful interventions in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, so it also underpinned Blair’s rationalization of the Iraq War. Blair certainly thought there was a case for war and he certainly thought it would do more good than harm.

  To understand his thinking, you have to remember the context. And for that you have to listen to what he said to the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War in 2010. The crucial thing, he argued, was that the 9/11 attacks changed everyt
hing:

  If September 11 hadn’t happened, our assessment of the risk of allowing Saddam any possibility of him reconstituting his [weapons of mass destruction] programmes would not have been the same… The point about [9/11] was that over 3,000 people had been killed on the streets of New York, an absolutely horrific event, but this is what really changed my perception of risk, the calculus of risk for me: if those people, inspired by this religious fanaticism, could have killed 30,000, they would have done.

  It led Tony Blair to make three assumptions: that Iraq was, at least, capable of making weapons of mass destruction; that it was deceiving the UN inspectors; and that any WMD produced by Saddam Hussein could be acquired by terrorist organizations who could use them to mount devastating attacks.

  Hindsight, of course, is crucial in all this, and when I interviewed Mr Blair after the Chilcot Report was published, he repeatedly made two points: he did not have the benefit of hindsight, and if presented with the same set of circumstances again, he would make the same decision.

  And to the Chilcot Inquiry, he said this:

  It is a decision, and the decision I had to take was, given Saddam’s history, given his use of chemical weapons, given the over one million people whose deaths he had caused, given the years of breaking UN resolutions, could we take the risk of this man reconstituting his weapons programmes, or is that a risk that it would be irresponsible to take? The reason why it is so important… is because, today, we are going to be faced with exactly the same types of decisions.

  And he was right. We have been faced with those types of decisions since – most seriously and recently, the question of whether to intervene in Syria; and to a lesser degree, whether to pre-emptively assassinate terrorists and their leaders who are believed to be planning atrocities.

  Following the disaster that Iraq became, ‘intervention’ was a dirty word once again. Politicians and strategists are thinking twice about committing troops and resources, and as a consequence, vulnerable and oppressed people living under ghastly regimes across the world are paying the price right now.