Bush’s Indefensible Comments on Peacekeeping in Darfur

At a joint press conference with Paul Kagame yesterday, President Bush was asked whether he would be willing to send U.S. troops to Darfur to help stop the systematic violence that is being committed there. Here, in relevant part, was his response:

I would say it’s like — as I explained to this fellow here — that one of the lessons of the genocide in Rwanda was to take some of the early warnings signs seriously.

Secondly, a clear lesson I learned in the museum was that outside forces that tend to divide people up inside their country are unbelievably counterproductive. In other words, people came from other countries — I guess you’d call them colonialists — and they pitted one group of people against another. And an early warning sign was — and it’s hard to have seen it, I readily admit, but I’m talking earlier than 1994, and earlier than the ’90s — was the fact that it become a habit to divide people based upon — you know, in this case, whether they were Tutsi or Hutu, which eventually led to exploitation.

Oy gevalt. Where to begin? I guess by giving President Bush his due: yes, Belgium’s actions during the 1930s, when it governed Ruanda-Urundi (present-day Rwanda and Burundi) pursuant to a League of Nations Mandate, played an integral role in creating conditions in Rwanda that eventually facilitated the 1994 genocide. As Mark Drumbl explains in Atrocity, Punishment, and International Law:

Belgian colonial administrators took a liking to the Tutsi, whom they treated preferentially. This angered the majority Hutu. In 1933, the Belgian colonial administration passed a law requiring every Rwandan to carry an ethnic identity card. The lines between Tutsi and Hutu, which traditionally had been porous and informal, suddenly became permanent and legalized. The ethnic identity card requirement persisted after Rwandan independence in 1960. Tragically, the continued presence of this requirement accelerated the genocide, insofar as persons unable to produce a Hutu card simply were slaughtered.

In every other respect, however, President Bush’s response makes absolutely no sense. There is no question that the colonial powers often created ethnic divisions where previously there were none. But that fact says nothing — literally nothing — about whether it is a good idea for “outside forces” to use their military power to prevent violence between ethnic groups that are already divided. Indeed, it is particularly ironic that the joint press conference was held in a museum dedicated to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, a genocide that may well have been avoided, or at least reduced in ferocity, had “outside forces” intervened more forcefully. Drumbl again:

The bulk of the peacekeeping effort fell upon the shoulders of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR). This was headed by a Canadian, Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, and was constituted by soldiers from several countries. UNAMIR had been present in Rwanda prior to and during the genocide. It’s size was reduced in early 1994 with the murder, by Hutu extremists, of a number of Belgian peacekeepers, which prompted the withdrawal of the remaining Belgians. UNAMIR, despite brave and dedicated efforts, was understaffed and crimped by extremely tight rules of engagement that prevented it from fighting back against the genocideal killers or intervening more directly.

Dallaire bluntly has stated that the international community lacked the will to intervene decisively in Rwanda. Although Dallaire communicated to senior UN officials the intelligence he had received from informants well ahead of time that genocide was being planned in Rwanda, institutionally speaking the United Nations remained unmoved. The execution of the actual genocide corresponded closely to what Dallaire had been told months in advance would take place. Dallaire’s requests for more forces, better equipment, and a more aggressive mandate went unheeded.

Drumbl then adds what should be obvious to anyone familiar with the situation:

Tragically, over a decade later, dithering now is occurring with regard to peacekeeping and peace-enforcement intervention to mitigate atrocity in the Darfur region of the Sudan.

Let me be clear: the entire international community was responsible for not intervening more forcefully in Rwanda, and the entire international community seems bent on repeating its mistakes in Darfur. (See Peggy’s post about helicopters here, for example.)

Nevertheless, statements like President Bush’s — statements that call into question the very idea of peacekeeping — only make the situation worse. And they are particularly indefensible coming from a President whose administration is now more than $1 billion behind in its overall UN peacekeeping dues — and whose recent pledge of $100 million for peacekeeping in Darfur is $15 million less than what it already owed the UN for Darfur before the announcement of the joint UN-AU peacekeeping mission.