The world looks to the US as a final enforcer in humanitarian interventions. But Obama will only act when success is highly likely, writes James Traub.
When we think about Rwanda today, it is not the genocide that began 20 years ago that we are likely to recall, but the much more recent incidents of repression which President Paul Kagame is alleged to have perpetrated against opponents at home and abroad, and his exploitation of the chaos in the next-door Democratic Republic of Congo. Kagame has undermined Rwanda’s reputation, and its victim status.
We should not, however, allow Kagame’s misdeeds to obscure the extraordinary achievement of the Rwandan people over the past two decades – thanks in part to Kagame himself. At an event at Yale University commemorating the mass killing, I had a long conversation with Yvette Rugasaguhunga, a Rwandan diplomat who as a Tutsi teenager survived the killings by hiding with a succession of Hutu families, almost all of whom were at the same time actively slaughtering her own people. Her father, her brother and her grandparents were murdered.
Yvette described all this with great composure until the conversation turned to the accusations against Kagame, at which point she furiously interjected that in the months and years after the genocide she had been so full of hate that had anyone given her a weapon, she would have happily killed any Hutu she came across. She mastered her own vindictive rage, she said, only because Kagame demanded that Tutsis seek reconciliation, in part through the use of local gacaca courts which turned the whole country into a sort of truth and reconciliation commission.
Kagame has earned the right to continue drawing attention to his role in preventing reciprocal massacres, as he did in a recent interview in Foreign Affairs.
The Rwandan atrocities were bigger and far more intensely personal than those in the Balkans; but Rwandans have moved past them much more effectively than Bosnians have. No doubt that has a good deal to do with the dominant position Tutsis now enjoy in Rwanda, and the enforced meekness of Hutus; but it would not have been possible without an ethos of reconciliation.
This is an essential part of the legacy of the genocide in Rwanda. What about the international legacy? Asked whether Rwanda could happen again, one of the panelists at the Yale event, Edward Luck, the former special adviser on atrocities to UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, pointed out that the shame over the failure there, and the rise of norms like the “responsibility to protect”, had made the UN and states react much more quickly to incipient atrocities than they had done 20 years ago.
In the Central African Republic, to take one current example, a combination of French and African Union forces have prevented the mutual massacres of Muslims and Christians from dissolving into wholesale slaughter. That is a success, if a tenuous one.
The world really is better at preventive action, if still not very good. Today, the UN peacekeeping department would probably not bury a desperate telegram warning of an imminent pogrom, as it did in the case of Rwanda.
But the fact remains that “another Rwanda”, if that expression refers not just to genocides but to coordinated programmes of mass murder, is happening right now in Syria, and there is no reason to hope it will stop soon.
Rwanda is not the most useful analogy to help us think about the world’s failure to respond to the atrocities in Syria. The Rwandan genocide might have been prevented by decisive action beforehand, but the killings happened so fast that, once they had begun, the world’s hesitation doomed the Tutsi people.
On the other hand, the mayhem in Bosnia, as in Syria, was carried out by a national army and paramilitaries as a matter of state policy, which made it harder to prevent. And both went on for years, and thus offered outsiders innumerable opportunities to intervene.
President Barack Obama has also said repeatedly that the situation in Syria is hopelessly intractable. In a recent interview, Obama insisted that it was “a false notion that somehow we were in a position to, through a few selective strikes, prevent the kind of hardship that we’ve seen in Syria”.
Of course, no one has suggested that “a few selective strikes” would have toppled the Syrian regime. Rather, in 2012, several of his most senior advisers, including secretary of state Hillary Clinton and CIA director David Petraeus, proposed a much more serious effort to arm Syria’s moderate rebels. Obama declined to act, just as Bill Clinton did until the killings in Srebrenica finally forced his hand. Obama, too, has hoped for a negotiated solution which has never had a ghost of a chance of succeeding without the threat of force.
We can’t know for sure what’s going on inside Obama’s head. What we do know is that he delayed acting as long as he could after his own Srebrenica moment – the chemical attacks which killed 1 200 Syrians and thus crossed his “red line” – and then seized on a Russian offer to remove the regime’s chemical weapons rather than launch air strikes.
Obama is convinced that a deeper American engagement will fail, and he knows that such a failure would have grave political costs. Put otherwise, his acute awareness of the costs has predisposed him to listen to advisers who say that intervention of any kind won’t work. The number of the dead in Syria now exceeds 150 000, with the regime in Damascus rolling barrel bombs out of helicopters into civilian areas. Obama has chosen not to destroy those helicopters with air strikes, or to equip rebels with the capacity to shoot them down.
And yet this is the president who has established an Atrocities Prevention Board and who has surrounded himself with leading advocates of the responsibility to protect, including Susan Rice and Samantha Power. Obama did, of course, agree, if reluctantly, to join the Nato coalition assembled to prevent the expected mass killings in Libya were Muammar Gaddafi to have taken Benghazi in 2011. Yet Syria has proved too hard, as Bosnia did for Clinton until Srebrenica.
What, then, is the legacy of Rwanda? First, that reconciliation is possible even after the most horrific violence. Secondly, that the world has now developed mechanisms, and diplomatic reflexes, that may be deployed to prevent violence from exploding into mass killing. Regional organisations like the AU are now prepared in some cases to send troops to quell such violence.
But when the killing can be curbed only by the kind of force the West can bring to bear, the world will look to the US, which means to the president. And a sad legacy of Rwanda that we witness now in Washington is a president who looks at his options much more sceptically than advocates of action, including those in the White House – both because he is fully aware of the kinks and weak spots of every plan, and because he fears the costs of failure. He will act only when the probability of success is very high.
The price of failure will remain prohibitively high as long as voters feel little urgency about stopping atrocities abroad. If, on the other hand, broad publics, and not just newspaper columnists and political opponents, clamour for some kind of intervention, the president’s political calculus will change. But no leader can wait for public opinion on so agonising an issue to change by itself.
* This article first appeared on foreignpolicy.com
** The views expressed here are necessarily those of Independent Newspapers.