Somalia was something close to anarchy. Rwanda was planned mass murder. Somalia counseled caution; Rwanda demanded action.
— MADELEINE ALBRIGHT
UNFINISHED BUSINESS IN SOMALIA
One of the large worries of the Clinton’s foreign policy advisers was that Bush’s public promise that the U.S. military deployment in Somalia was to be swiftly completed—a promise that Clinton as president-elect had endorsed—would not be fulfilled before Bush left office and would haunt the incoming administration. The premise of the Bush intervention was that once the U.S. forces had established a modicum of order by separating or partially disarming the warring warlord factions and had provided security for the delivery of humanitarian relief, the United Nations would take over the long-run peacekeeping and relief tasks. But Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali had disputed the Bush administration’s timetable for the completion of the initial pacification efforts by the U.S. forces, claiming that the United Nations did not presently possess either an adequate mandate or the peacekeeping resources that would be required to substitute for the U.S. presence.
However, the UN Secretary General was faced by the determination of Clinton’s administration to implement Bush’s promise. The result was the Security Council’s unanimous passage on March 26, 1993, of the U.S.-drafted resolution for turning over the basic functions (and more) of the U.S.-led Operation Restore Hope to the United Nations on May 1. The authorized UN operation in Somalia would be one of the largest and most ambitious peacekeeping or humanitarian operations in the organization’s history. Costing an estimated $1.5 billion during its first year and involving a planned 28,000 blue-helmeted UN troops and another 2,000 civilians, the world organization’s operation in Somalia would be mandated to virtually run the country. The UN military force would include an American contingent that—in a departure from the Bush administration policy of maintaining U.S. command and control of any U.S. forces—would be subject to the authority of the UN operation’s commander, a general from Turkey. Operating under authority of Security Council resolutions ordering the capture of warlord Mohammed Aidid and the confiscation of his arms caches, the UN force was the target of increasing numbers of violent attacks in the summer and fall of 1993.
Clinton’s moment of truth about the Somalia mission came at the beginning of October 1993 when, under orders to capture Aidid, a beefed-up U.S. Ranger contingent, with support from Blackhawk helicopters, got into an intense firefight in Mogadishu. They captured two dozen of Aidid’s group, but not Aidid. One of the Blackhawks was shot down and the U.S. forces trying to rescue the downed crew were held off by Somali fighters, who surrounded the downed helicopter and a small contingent of U.S. troops. Rescue helicopters and truck convoys were fired on and could not get through. A second Blackhawk was shot down. It took fifteen hours before U.S. forces assisted by Pakistani and Malaysian soldiers were able rescue the besieged still-surviving U.S. troops near the first downed helicopter, scores of whom had been wounded. At the site of the second downed helicopter, all the U.S. troops—killed, wounded, or captured—had been removed by their Somali assailants. One of the captured crew was shown on television being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu; another was held hostage for days. All in all, eighteen American troops were killed and over seventy wounded in the encounter.1
Clearly, the original mission of the UN and U.S. forces—to ensure the delivery of food and medical supplies—to besieged communities could not be adequately performed without defeating the warlords who were the cause of the country’s humanitarian disaster. But the resulting mission creep, as it was called, turned the intervening forces from “peacekeepers” into active belligerents. To fulfill their expanded mission of subduing the warlords and taking over the country to establish peace and security, the deployments would have to be substantially augmented. Unable to point to U.S. geopolitical or economic interests in Somalia at the time that would warrant such a commitment of blood and treasure, the president decided to terminate Operation Restore Hope and withdraw the U.S. forces.
“Americans were outraged and astounded,” Clinton recalls in his memoir. “How had our humanitarian mission turned into an obsession with getting Aidid?” Why were American forces doing the UN’s job? “Senator John McCain said, ‘Clinton’s got to bring them home.’”2
After Black Hawk Down, Clinton wrote, “whenever I approved the deployment of forces, I knew much more about what the risks were … The lessons of Somalia were not lost on the military planners who plotted our course in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and other troubled spots of the post–Cold War world, where America was often asked to step in to stop hideous violence, and too often expected to do it without the loss of lives to ourselves, our adversaries, or innocent bystanders.” 3
Nor were the “lessons” of Somalia lost on the president and his aides who decided not to step in to try to stop the hideous violence in Rwanda.
NO BUSINESS IN RWANDA
With the bloody skirmish between U.S. “peacekeepers” and Somali militias still fresh in their minds, when the UN Security Council authorized a peacekeeping mission for Rwanda in the fall of 1993, they made sure to write into its mandate that it was not to take sides in the conflict between the Hutus and Tutsis and definitely not to engage in any of the fighting, other than what was necessary for self-defense. This was consistent with the new and stricter guidance being worked up in the Clinton administration for U.S. participation in multilateral peacekeeping missions, eventually published as Presidential Decision Directive (PDD-25). And the U.S. ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright had no hesitancy in supporting the restrictive mandate for the UN force.
So when reports of extremist Hutu militias secretly arming themselves in violation of the existing Rwanda cease-fire accord were received early in 1994 by the Canadian commander of the UN peacekeepers, General Roméo Dallaire, there was very little he could do about it other than to inform the Rwandan president and ask him to investigate. Washington at the time was focused on other crises, including Saddam’s violations of the Gulf War cease-fire accord. It took the shooting down of Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane on April 6, and the murder the next day of the prime minister and ten Belgian peacekeepers who were guarding her to get Ambassador Albright and her bosses to begin to pay attention to the horrendous disaster unfolding in Kigale.
Still, Albright confesses in her memoir, “It would be weeks before most of us understood the nature and scale of the violence.” 4 Meanwhile there were plausible grounds for believing that President Habyarimana’s plane had been shot down by Hutu extremists, trying to make it look like the assassination of the moderate Hutu president was committed by Tutsis, thereby giving the Hutu radicals the excuse to kill the prime minister who was a Tutsi, which would provoke reprisals by the Tutsis—which in turn would generate intense anger in the Hutu community that the radicals could mobilize for a widespread rampage against the Tutsis.
To make sure that U.S. personnel and nationals did not themselves become targets or get caught in the cross fire, the United States quickly decided to evacuate its people. The director of the task force in Washington managing the evacuation, Acting Assistant Secretary of State Prudence Bushnell, recalls, “I was sorry about the Rwandans, of course, but my job was to get our folks out. … Then again, people didn’t know it was a genocide. What I was told was, ‘Look, Pru, these people do this from time to time.’ We thought we’d be right back.” 5
To deal with the escalating carnage, in which UN personnel were also likely to be victims—indeed, the ten Belgian peacekeepers guarding the prime minister had been hacked to death—General Dallaire requested permission from the UN Secretariat to use arms. But, “Fearing another Somalia,” recounts Albright, “UN Headquarters didn’t want to be viewed as taking sides, so it turned the request down.” 6 Even if Dallaire did get an okay, he would have had very little to work with. Belgium, the best-equipped contingent, was pulling out its troops. Others, like the Tutsis and Ghanians, were woefully underequipped.
As the UN and Washington dithered, the interethnic violence mushroomed to genocidal proportions—as many as 500,000 people already killed, estimated the International Committee of the Red Cross. The debates in the international community and the Clinton administration polarized between those advocating a complete UN pullout and those urging full peace enforcement (as distinct from peacekeeping), which would have required some 40,000 heavily armed troops and would have to depend centrally on U.S. participation, if not direction. In retrospect, Madeleine Albright regrets not having advocated such a role for the United States—even in the wake of Somalia. “Many people would have thought I was crazy and we would never have won support from Congress, but I would have been right, and possibly my voice would have been heard.” 7
All that came of the months of agonizing over what to do was a weak UN resolution to create secure humanitarian areas “where feasible.” Some countries decided to act largely on their own to save lives—France with 1,500 troops, joined by Senegal with 500, set up a security zone in southwest Rwanda, and belatedly the United States sent a small contingent to care for refugees fleeing the killing fields. By the time the conflict wound down in late July, some 800,000 people had lost their lives in mutual genocide.
Looking back, Clinton is consumed by regret. “We were so preoccupied with Bosnia, with the memory of Somalia just six months old, and opposition in Congress to military deployments in faraway places not vital to our national interests that neither I nor anyone on my foreign policy team adequately focused on sending troops to stop the slaughter. With a few thousand troops and help from our allies, even making allowances for the time it would have taken to deploy them, we could have saved lives. The failure to try to stop Rwanda’s tragedies became one of the greatest regrets of my presidency.” 8