The Security Council: Behind the Scenes in the Rwanda Genocide
Linda R. Melvern
On 21 April 1994, the Security Council of the United Nations voted to pull out its peacekeepers from Rwanda. It was a milestone decision, today considered one of the most ignominious in the Council’s history. Hundreds of thousands of Rwandans were being slaughtered in a planned, calculated, and organized campaign of genocide intended to eliminate a human group, the Tutsi. It was slaughter of a speed and on a scale not seen since the Nazi extermination program against the Jews.
The decision to evacuate the UN soldiers came after a long, acrimonious and agonizing Council debate held among ambassadors from fifteen member states in a small room adjacent to the Council chamber. It was an informal debate and it was intended to remain secret, with the policy of each government conveniently hidden from public scrutiny. This, it should be noted, is how the Security Council standardly conducts its business. In 1994, during three months of genocide in Rwanda, the Council was in almost constant secret session, meeting sometimes twice daily and long into the night. Yet in all the various international and national inquiries held into the circumstances of the genocide, not one has focused on what was said – and not said – in these secret Council meetings. The culture of secrecy is now so embedded in Council work that it is taken for granted both within and outside Council chambers.
It is hard to imagine now, but there was once a time when Security Council debates were held in open session. Nowadays, these crucial debates take place behind closed doors, and it is behind closed doors that the deals are done determining UN policy. The ambassadors only go into public session to vote on resolutions and make set speeches; all the important work is done elsewhere. Yet in the UN’s first years the Council had operated in the full glare of publicity. It was possible to know the position of each government, and to hear the options discussed and the reasons given for decisions. In 1946, the then British ambassador, Sir Alexander Cadogan, had expressed his approval of open Council meetings. Cadogan was an advocate of public diplomacy, as exemplified in the debates in the Council, for it made it necessary for states to justify their national behavior in the eyes of the world. Every nation was amenable to some extent to world publicity. But over time the Council began to hold secret meetings, slowly in the 1960s, until by the 1980s closed-door debates had become a way of life.
The secret meetings of the Security Council held to discuss Rwanda while the genocide progressed would normally have remained secret, were it not for the fact that someone provided me with an account of them. This was an unprecedented leak of information, and this unique and valuable documentation revealed some shocking truths. Not least among them was the fact that during the first four weeks of the genocide, while most of the large-scale massacres of Tutsi took place, the systematic and continuing slaughter was not once debated at length by the Council. The mass killings were being conducted miles away from the fighting in a resumed civil war, and reports of mass murder had been sent to UN headquarters in cables sent from the field, from the headquarters of the peacekeeping mission (the UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda, UNAMIR) in the capital, Kigali. But in the Council the priority for discussion was the resumed civil war and whether or not a ceasefire could be arranged between the warring factions, the Hutu Power forces and the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF). On the killing of civilians and the threat to the thousands of refugees who had sought sanctuary in schools, churches and hospitals, the Council was virtually silent.
A plan to try to stop the mass slaughter, devised by the Force Commander of the UN peacekeepers in Rwanda, Canadian Lieutenant-General Romeo A. Dallaire, involved sending 5,500 troops as reinforcements. It was not discussed by the Council until it was almost too late. The majority of victims in Rwanda died in the first five weeks. A speedy reinforcement for the beleaguered peacekeepers would have sent the strongest possible signal to the extremist adherents of Hutu Power that the world was ready to back its promise of ‘Never Again’ – a promise enshrined in international law in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. But the main focus of the Council’s secret discussions of Rwanda was very different.
Later, these agonizing meetings were described by one of the ambassadors occupying a non-permanent seat, Karel Kovanda of the Czech Republic: ‘No one was sure what, if anything, needed to be done. Into this absolutely bizarre situation came the big powers … who said they could do nothing.’
The debate in the Security Council is often shaped by recommendations from the Secretary-General, acting on advice from officials in the Secretariat, who in turn receive all cables from force commanders. When Rwanda’s crisis spilled over into genocide in April 1994, no such recommendations were forthcoming. Some of the non-permanent members speculated that either the Secretariat had no options at all, in which case it was not up to the task of managing the conflict, or the body was overwhelmed to the point of paralysis. There was an assumption, actively encouraged by Belgium and supported by Britain and the US, that only a massive and dramatic intervention would succeed in Rwanda – and this was out of the question. Belgium, of course, had already unilaterally decided to withdraw its own troops from the peacekeeping mission. Along with two of the Council’s most powerful members, the US and Britain, it had now decided that intervention in Rwanda was too dangerous. The Belgian ambassador at the UN conducted a concerted campaign to warn everyone – Secretariat officials and ambassadors – of the supposed danger. Little attention was paid to the humanitarian assistance that continued throughout the genocide, provided by a handful of volunteer peacekeepers who stayed on in Rwanda, and by the International Committee of the Red Cross and Médecins sans Frontières. Indeed, while the ICRC managed to send convoys of food and medical supplies to Rwanda throughout the three months of genocide, the UN failed even to resupply its own volunteer force. The 470 soldiers in the international force did all they could to help Rwandan victims. It was not for want of courage that they failed to rescue more people, but for want of petrol. At the UN headquarters in New York, a preoccupation with the renewed civil war meant that little attention was given to the contribution that peacekeepers in Rwanda could continue to make, even without reinforcements, in trying to alleviate the suffering.
The crucial decisions
The importance of secrecy to the Council was dramatically illustrated on 29 April. The presidency of the Security Council changes monthly through alphabetic rotation, and in May it was New Zealand’s turn. On that April day, the New Zealand ambassador, lawyer Colin Keating, tried to persuade Council members to recognize officially the fact of the Rwandan ‘genocide.’ But the British, Americans, and Chinese were strenuously against use of the word. Keating had prepared a Presidential Statement for Council approval recognizing the genocide. He believed that if recognition could be achieved, the Council would be faced with an obligation, under the 1948 Convention, to stop the killing. The debate over recognition went in circles, and long into the night. It was a Friday, and tempers were frayed.
For Keating this was brinkmanship. His term as president was ending, and so he decided to use the desperate measure of threatening public exposure. This would take the form of a draft resolution, tabled in Keating’s national capacity, and requiring a vote. The vote would expose the position of every country to the glare of world opinion; and by now the wider world, at least the Western press, was beginning to take notice of the catastrophe unfolding in Rwanda. They followed on the heels of aid agencies like Oxfam and Human Rights Watch, which were calling the genocide a genocide, and lobbying for political actors to do the same. In the end, and only after threats of public exposure, a compromise was reached. The time-honored British ability for framing resolutions with mind-numbing ambiguity was called upon, and a watered-down presidential statement was issued. The statement quoted directly from the Genocide Convention, but did not itself use the word ‘genocide.’ It recognized the systematic nature of the massacres, and described attacks on defenceless civilians throughout the country, particularly in areas under control of the armed forces of the so-called ‘interim government’ of Rwanda. But the nature of the targets was not clearly specified.
No choices were presented and no risks taken as a result of these deliberations. In the first four weeks of genocide, when mass killings were occurring on a scale unprecedented in recorded history, the Western media failed to recognize that genocide was taking place. Journalists preferred to describe the killing in these first weeks as ‘tribal’ and anarchic, and this meant that public pressure could not be generated on domestic governments, contributing to the pervasive inaction at the level of the Security Council.
History will record the abject failure of the Council to act decisively in protecting civilian lives in Rwanda. The Council is the UN’s most important body, empowered to determine threats to international peace and take corresponding enforcement action. Yet rarely are its actions and internal operations subject to challenge. The Council’s method of working in secret and informal session is accompanied by a range of other institutional deficiencies: a lack of clear guidelines about peacekeeping management, no clear division of labor between ambassadors and the Secretariat, and a reliance on Secretariat officials for information on what is happening on the ground. As a result, the Council has served the world ill over in the last decade. Rwanda may be only one example of that broader failing, but in its genocidal consequences it towers over all others.