Foreign Policy Exclusive: Rwanda Revisited
Former President Clinton said he never knew the extent of suffering during Rwanda's genocide. But America's diplomats on the ground knew exactly what was happening -- and they told Washington.
BY COLUM LYNCH APRIL 5, 2015
On March 25, 1998, President Bill Clinton expressed regret for failing to halt genocide in Rwanda, saying that he didn’t “fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which [Rwandans] were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror.” But U.S. officials in Rwanda had been warned more than a year before the 1994 slaughter began that Hutu extremists were contemplating the extermination of ethnic Tutsis, according to a review panel’s newly released transcript and declassified State Department documents obtained by Foreign Policy from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
An August 1992 diplomatic cable to Washington, written by Joyce Leader, the U.S. Embassy’s deputy chief of mission in Kigali, cited warnings that Hutu extremists with links to Rwanda’s ruling party were believed to be advocating the extermination of ethnic Tutsis. On the morning the killing began in April 1994, there was little doubt about what was happening in Rwanda. “We had a very good sense of what was taking place,” Leader told an unprecedented 2014 gathering of former Rwandan officials and international policymakers who managed the response to the world’s worst mass murder since the Holocaust. “It was clear that a systematic killing of Tutsi was taking place in neighborhoods.”
Senior ethnic Hutu officials who favored reconciling with Tutsi rebels refused to join forces with the extremists carrying out the genocide and were also hunted down and murdered, she said. Leader’s cable was part of the discussion of a three-day review last year sponsored by the Holocaust Museum’s Center for the Prevention of Genocide and The Hague Institute for Global Justice. A transcript of the review’s findings — which runs more than 240 pages long, plus a 32-page executive summary — was provided to FP ahead of its public release at 11am on Monday, April 6, the 21st anniversary of the start of the Rwandan genocide. The event provided an extraordinary opportunity for 40 key players and observers to review the missteps. They included former Rwandan government and rebel officials; Belgian, French Rwandan, and U.N. diplomats and peacekeepers; aid workers, journalists, scholars, and Security Council ambassadors. U.S. officials who were directly involved in the United States delivered a detailed insider account of the American response.
Clinton’s envoys in Rwanda were clear-eyed about the nature of what was unfolding in the hours and days following the April 6, 1994, shoot-down of a plane carrying Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana and his Burundian counterpart, according to the review’s transcript. That set the stage for the mass slaughter of nearly a million ethnic Tutsi Rwandans, and some moderate Hutus, by extremists among the country’s majority-Hutu population. As the killing began, terrified Rwandans fled their homes for safety, to the grounds of U.S. Ambassador David Rawson’s residence. At one stage, a small child seeking protection in the ambassador’s backyard was shot and killed, Leader recalled. She also warned her neighbor, Rwandan Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, who wanted to seek refuge at the American diplomat’s home, to steer clear for fear that the Presidential Guard, who were implicated in the killing, would come looking for her there. Uwilingiyimana was murdered a day after the killing began.
read more: https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/04/05/rwanda-revisited-genocide-united-states-state-department/
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Edmund Burke
