the accords and the “technical” program of peacekeeping as outlined and captained by the United Nations.54
This intervention on behalf of international peace and security and in the interest of rehabilitating the Rwandan state took on the cultural expectations of international diplomacy: giving status to arguments from both sides, seeking a middle ground, and urging compromise with a view to establishing an institutionalized agreement between contending parties.
However, this was not just an international diplomatic intervention to restore international peace and security. It was also a humanitarian intervention to save lives and comfort the hungry, sick, and homeless while protecting individual human rights on both sides of the conflict. The international intervention in Rwanda was driven by concern for the displaced and refugees, as well as by preoccupation with statecraft in Central Africa. The central question was whether the intervention could achieve its objectives in each domain. Obviously, it grievously failed in both regards.
Does “Humanitarian Intervention” Work?
In an insightful analysis, Anthony Lang has looked at international interventions taken for purported humanitarian purposes and found them wanting. Such interventions are, he finds, essentially self-serving, undertaken to heighten the image of those intervening rather than to succor the helpless. Echoing Hedley Bull’s reflections on the ambiguous status of human rights within the state system, Lang concludes that humanitarian interventions concentrate more “on saving the state than on saving people.”55 Lang is not the only one to point out the failures of international humanitarian intervention; a plethora of recent studies take up the theme, many pointing to Rwanda as the demonstrative case.56 However, Lang was one of the first in the genre, and he makes more explicit than most the connection between the failure of humanitarian action and the structural nature of state action.
Lang’s thesis is that the space of international action is “the province of the states themselves,” and that the language of international politics, including discourses on international humanitarian interventions, “is constituted and controlled by state interpretations.”57 Moreover, in humanitarian crises caused by collapsing state structures, intervening states are concerned with reestablishing the disintegrating state so as to repair the breach in the state system.58 Once reestablished, a revived state also contests within the interstate arena.
Meanwhile, the interests of individual citizens, victims of the humanitarian crisis, are secondary to the playing out of initiatives designed to establish state identity and state persona (including that of human rights advocate) in the interstate arena. According to Lang, “State agents focus more on other state agents in an intervention rather than on people who need assistance.”59 The dynamics of state agency in an international crisis thus intrinsically conflict with the humanitarian aims of intervention. Nicholas Onuf echoes the theme: “The institutional machinery which governments have authorized for the protection of human rights greatly favors states over nationals; in effect, states’ rights trump individual rights.”60
A Look Forward
A glance forward at the record in this study will show that a state-centric agenda driven by a diplomatic ethos of negotiation, fair play, and power sharing prevailed over the claims of humanitarian intervention that would put the real needs of people first. Diplomats did seek policy responses that met human need. But they persisted in deferring to sovereign choice, in treating both sides as equal parties, in holding faith in power sharing, and in promoting democratic choice as the antidote to conflict. These approaches, reflecting the essential values of the twentieth century, obviously did not work.
Yet, internecine conflict was not new to world leaders, nor was the quest for peace.61 Moreover, international peacekeeping had built up considerable experience and expertise since the Second World War. Thus, the unrolling of the Rwandan peacekeeping peace process as recorded in the several chapters of this book parallels similar endeavors in international conflict resolution.
First, parties in any conflict need to accept the reality of each other’s presence on the ground and work through to a sustainable “ceasefire.” Once the shooting has stopped, negotiations on the future order ensue: debates about fundamental “law,” or negotiations on “power sharing.” But negotiations about principles, structure, or power often come, as they did in Rwanda, to an “impasse.” Getting past an impasse to a final settlement, an “endgame,” is both an art and impelling goal of international mediation. A transition to a peaceful, secure future should then valorize provisions of a final agreement. Instead, in Rwanda’s case, “things fell apart.” In the Rwandan story narrated here, a brief analysis of conflict resolution issues at stake fronts each chapter. At the end of each chapter, I list the lessons we learned from that segment of conflict mediation, with specific insights into the tragic Rwandan experience.
Rwanda was a terrain where states and international organizations projected their own interests and identities; where peacemakers misjudged the depth of animosity between parties; and where the will to power of the contenders eventually overwhelmed the limited international project to hold the peace process on course. Customary modes of peacemaking and peacekeeping failed, and misjudgments of the peacemaking context contributed to the scenario that engendered genocide. Attitudes and habits of diplomatic actors, deployed in different arenas and within varying modes, did not mitigate the crisis. The Arusha political negotiations became a prelude to genocide and a tragic lesson in a failed international humanitarian intervention.
ONE
Ceasefire
On October 1, 1990, a military force moved from southern Uganda into northeast Rwanda at Kagitumba and headed down the eastern edge toward the tourist camp and police headquarters at Gabiro, the central entrance to Kagera National Park. The military force called itself the Rwandese Patriotic Army (RPA), the military arm of the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF). Major General Fred Rwigyema, formerly deputy commander of Uganda’s National Resistance Army (NRA) and deputy minister of defense in Uganda’s government, headed the invasion. A large part of the force was made up of Rwandan Tutsi from the Lweru triangle who had joined Yoweri Museveni’s campaign to overthrow Milton Obote. Additional refugees had joined the NRA in 1986 to help put down a rebellion in northern Uganda. Now, the troopers moved out of barracks toward the Rwandan border under various guises. Major General Rwigyema told people that he was preparing for Uganda National Day on October 9. Recruits from within the Tutsi diaspora, as well as Hutu military leaders and politicians who had fled the regime of President Habyarimana, were part of the RPA corps.1
The exiles had carried from Rwanda stories of corruption, injustice, and economic bankruptcy in the Habyarimana regime. Expecting that a disenchanted population would join in revolt against the government, the RPF found that, instead, the people fled before them. Within three days of the invasion, General Rwigyema was killed at the front.2 On October 23, Rwanda government forces ambushed the RPA, killing top officers along with scores of RPA fighters. After suffering additional losses, the RPA broke up into small mobile groups, seeking cover in the Virunga volcano forests and crossing over into Uganda by night. The initial RPA thrust had been broken; the Rwandan government declared victory.3 But Major Paul Kagame, head of Uganda’s military intelligence, rushed back from training in the United States and revitalized the RPA forces, preparing for a drawn-out civil war.
The October 1 incursions quickly stirred an international response. Both President Habyarimana and President Museveni had gone to New York to attend the World Summit on Children and were about to journey on to meetings in Washington. Their precipitate return to their respective capitals highlighted both the surprise and the seriousness of the incursion.4 Key donors, France and Belgium, dispatched forces to protect Kigali and the expatriates in it. The United States began to withdraw nonessential personnel from its embassy.5
