The backwash of war crimes endures

The arrest of Radovan Karadzic yesterday seems both a belated nod toward justice (wonder if aggressive warriors Bush and Cheney are noticing?) and yet another indication of how tortuous progress toward an international rule of law necessarily is. Karadzic was the leader of the Bosnian Serbs 1992-1995 during their all-too-effective attempt to "ethnically cleanse" Bosnia of Muslims and Croats. He has been a fugitive from a war crimes indictment by the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia ever since.

I have to confess that I pretty much didn't do the work during the 1990s to try to understand the vicious wars that followed on the break up of Yugoslavia. I had good excuses. I was busy working against a series of populist racist initiatives in California and against Bill Clinton's choice to tear up the federal safety net for poor mothers in the name of "welfare reform." Moreover I was guilty of an intellectual fault I'm sometimes too eager to point out in others: I had worked hard to understand a series of U.S. imperial adventures in Southeast Asia, Africa and Central America. The ongoing Balkan horror story was about white Europeans and didn't seem to be directly something the U.S. had brought about -- my paradigms for looking at events didn't fit. I'd have to learn a lot of new, hard stuff to make any sense of these events. I looked away instead.

An Obama administration is likely to be full of people whose paradigms were formed looking at the failings and (few) successes of international response to the Balkan disaster. Adviser Samantha Power is the most prominent example. If we want to know what they are likely to champion, those of use who attend to U.S. international behavior would be wise to study the history of 1990s.

To that end, I've been reading Elizabeth Neuffer's The Key to My Neighbor's House: Seeking Justice in Bosnia and Rwanda. I would highly recommend this approachable, human, journalistic account of the 1990's two most horrific genocides. (Did I really just write that sentence?) Neuffer had the guts to go where the killing was fresh and an ability to get people to tell her the abominable things they had survived. She also sympathetically reported on the stumbling efforts of create courts to bring perpetrators to justice -- and the search for reconciliation that would somehow reconstitute societies blown apart by violence. No big conclusions here -- but lots to mull over. She wrote, explaining why she had presevered in writing about these horrors:

That tyrants are punished, that societies heal, that individuals find justice are the responsibilities of us all -- in order that they not become our fate.

Elizabeth Neuffer became one of the early civilian casualties of the current U.S. war on Iraq when, while reporting for the Boston Globe near Samarra in May 2003, the car in which she was riding struck a guardrail and turned over.

When the world's indifference was culpable

Part two. Part one outlined Dallaire's narrative. Here I share particularly lucid and horrible details.

When I posted on Lt. General Romeo Dallaire's account of commanding the U.N. mission in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, I thought I was done with the subject. But looking the book over, I cannot resist sharing some of the more vivid descriptive bits (while sticking with my recommendation above that folks read the Mother Jones interview unless you really need the full minutia of horror.

Nonetheless -- here's Dallaire reporting the order he received from U.N. Security Council ten days after appealing for a change in his orders and more forces to intervene as the slaughter proceeded all around his troops:

The resolution's phrases were pure UN-ese: '...having considered ...express regret ...shocked ...appalled ...deeply concerned ...stressing ...expressing deep concern ...condemns ...strongly condemns ...demands ...decides ...reiterates ...reaffirms ...calls upon ...invites ...decides to remain actively seized of the moment.'

So there he was, adrift with a tiny force that had been ordered not to act, but somehow keep itself alive, amid unimaginable carnage. What did he see and how did he cope?

We saw many faces of death during the genocide, from the innocence of babies to the bewilderment of the elderly, from the defiance of fighters to the resigned stares of nuns. ... Early on I seemed to develop a screen between me and the sights and sounds to allow me to stay focused on the work to be done. ...But if you looked you could see the evidence, even in the whitened skeletons. The legs bent and apart. A broken bottle, a rough branch, even a knife between them. ...There was always a lot of blood. Some male corpses had their genitals cut off, but many women and young girls had their breasts chopped off and their genitals crudely cut apart. They died in a position of total vulnerability....

When he finally left for home, he tried to make sense of what his force had done. They had made repeated forays into haunted streets, gathering up a few survivors, always in danger themselves.

It took every ounce of our effort, resources and courage to produce tiny results, yet all around us hundreds of thousands of human beings were being ripped apart and millions were running for their lives. Sometimes we did more harm than good. After each and every mission, failed or "successful," I had to wonder whether it was ethical for me to keep my men at such a level of operational intensity and risk. After I got home from Rwanda, and the years slowly revealed to me the extent of the cynical maneuvering by France, Belgium, the United States and [the Rwandan factions] I couldn't help but feel that we were a sort of diversion, even sacrificial lambs, that permitted statesmen to say that the world was doing something to stop the killing. In fact, we were nothing more than camouflage.

I have no idea what experiencing such a level of disillusionment would be like; most of us don't. And meanwhile, the dead are still dead and the intoxication of killing spread to the rest of Central Africa, still largely ignored by countries with enough wealth and power to stop it.

In a forward to the U.S. edition to this book, Samantha Powers discusses why the person who probably did more than anyone else from the outside world to save those he could, seems to be the one who carries the most awful burden of guilt. She realized:

the man who would try to do the most would inevitably be the man least capable of making excuses for himself, his men, his country or his planet. The only way risky action is ever taken on behalf of mere principle is when feeling -- a hugely discredited quality in military and political life -- overpowers self-interest. ... Dallaire is a man who felt and who continues to feel.

He is also a man of character, someone who came to this horrible experience with a habit of acting with courage and integrity. Practice helps.

Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda

If you've ever wondered what it would be like to work inside a weak, rigid, and highly political bureaucracy, this book will convey more than you ever wanted to know. Canadian Lt. General Romeo Dallaire was given the mission of commanding the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda in 1993. Good, loyal, efficient soldier that he was, he tried to make the ill-assorted, under-equipped collection of troops assigned to him by member states into a buffer between Rwandan factions. Operating under orders not to intervene, it was his curse to witness the Rwandan genocide. During four months in 1994, some 800,000 Rwandans -- members of the Tutsi group and Hutus who would not join the killing -- were cut to pieces by other Rwandans who identified as Hutus. Fifteen soldiers under Dallaire's command were massacred as a warning to the U.N. force not to become involved.

The true hell of this story is that Dallaire had warning of the impending slaughter and could not act to prevent it.

[An informer] was horrified that he was being drawn into a plan to create a series of highly efficient death squads that, when turned loose on the population, could kill a thousand Tutsis in [the capital] Kigali within twenty minutes of receiving the order. ...the army had recently transferred four large shipments of AK-47s, ammunition and grenades to the [genocidal] militia. ...I made the decision to go after the weapons caches. ... [U.N. headquarters in New York] ordered me to suspend the operation immediately. ...The [Rwandan] extremists had taken their cue from the grim farces of Bosnia and Somalia. They knew that Western nations do not have the stomach or the will to sustain casualties in peace support operations. When confronted with casualties ... they will run, regardless of the consequences to the abandoned population.

And so, Dallaire took no preventive action and watched the carnage helplessly, unable to save more than a handful of potential victims.

Months later, France did send an expedition to protect some of its past clients and the Rwandan faction that still rules the country today seized the capital. But even then, Dallaire was able to predict that the losing Rwandans pushed into the Congo would keep the region in chaos as long as they were not disarmed. Their raids and the responses of neighboring states set off the conflict in the eastern Congo that has killed some 3.8 million people in the years since. The world's major powers still prefer to look away from this human catastrophe.

Not surprisingly, after wading through bodies and having to conduct sham negotiations with murderers, Dallaire went home to Canada and broke down. The general attempted suicide, was discharged from the Canadian army with PTSD, and gradually recovered some grip with the help of medication and therapy. This book is his exhaustive chronicle of Rwanda's unimaginable horror.

Unfortunately, in his concern not to leave anything out, Dallaire buries the reader in military acronyms and rather colorless detail. He doesn't describe; rather he records in what reads as if it were a monotone, as if still reporting to his bureaucratic superiors. I would recommend this Mother Jones interview with the General if you are interested in Dallaire's unique insights into what happens when atrocities take place outside the rich world's sphere of interest. In that interview he is both thoughtful and blunt.

MJ.com: What about a situation such as Bosnia and Kosovo, where the United States and others intervene. Why was that viewed differently than Rwanda or Darfur?

RD: It is the residual of the colonial era which has influenced us all. Yugoslavia is white. Yugoslavia is in Europe. Yugoslavia is close to home. We know them, and their security there is a concern. So it is dominated by self-interest and the fact that they’re “like us.” It was also seen as a far more sophisticated exercise because we’re talking about educated people who come from great nations of the past. They’re not simply black Africans who we trivialize by saying that they’re going at each other because they’ve always done it under tribalism. So it is an overt expression of “some people count, and some people don’t count.” We’ll go where they count, even if there isn’t an overt gain, but we won’t go where people don’t count.

His present work involves trying to understand how international pressure can be mobilized effectively to overcome great power unwillingness to intervene to protect people in countries where they have no vital interests.

Part two discussing this book is here.