Hillary Clinton And Rwanda

Bill Clinton claims that Hillary Clinton urged him to intervene militarily in Rwanda:

And then, using a more somber tone, he explained that she had wanted the United States to intervene in Rwanda in 1994, when hundreds of thousands of people died in a genocide that lasted just a few months.

Clinton has often said that not acting in Rwanda was one of his biggest regrets. It's a decision, he said, for which he continues to try to make amends. Had he listened to his wife, Clinton said, things might have been different.

"I believe if I had moved we might have saved at least a third of those lives," he said. "I think she clearly would have done that.""

When Hillary Clinton was asked whether this was true, she said "It is."

I have no idea whether or not this is true. But I do know a couple of related things. First, if Hillary Clinton did press for military intervention in Rwanda, her advocacy left no trace in the world. I have read quite a lot about the Rwandan genocide and the US reaction towards it, and Hillary Clinton's involvement comes as news to me. I just went through my various books on the Rwandan genocide (there are eight), and she is not mentioned in any of them. And according to the Chicago Tribune, I'm not alone:

"Whatever her private conversations with the president may have been, key foreign policy officials say that a U.S. military intervention in Rwanda was never considered in the Clinton administration's policy deliberations. Despite lengthy memoirs by both Clintons and former Secretary of State and UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright, any advice she gave on Rwanda had not been mentioned until her presidential campaign.

"In my review of the records, I didn't find anything to suggest that military intervention was put on the table in NSC [National Security Council] deliberations," said Gail Smith, a Clinton NSC official who did a review for the White House of the administration's handling of the Rwandan genocide. Smith is an Obama supporter.

Prudence Bushnell, a retired State Department official who handled the Rwanda portfolio at the time and has not allied with a presidential candidate, confirmed that a U.S. military intervention was not considered in policy deliberations, as did several senior Clinton administration officials with first-hand knowledge who declined to be identified."

In an article on the US response to the Rwandan genocide (and written in 2001, years before she met Barack Obama), Samantha Power wrote:

"What is most remarkable about the American response to the Rwandan genocide is not so much the absence of U.S. military action as that during the entire genocide the possibility of U.S. military intervention was never even debated. Indeed, the United States resisted intervention of any kind."

So: Clinton didn't mention that she advocated military intervention in Rwanda in her memoirs. Neither did Madeleine Albright. Neither, as far as I can tell, did anyone else. Military intervention was not considered as an option, "never even debated", which means that any advocacy she did engage in must have been pretty ineffective.

But it's worse than that. The Clinton administration did not simply fail to intervene militarily in Rwanda. It took a number of steps that made it easier for genocide to be committed. Not taking these steps would have been much, much easier than sending actual troops to Rwanda. They would have made a real difference. And yet the Clinton administration failed to take them.

I'll turn this over to Samantha Power:

"In March of 1998, on a visit to Rwanda, President Clinton issued what would later be known as the "Clinton apology," which was actually a carefully hedged acknowledgment. He spoke to the crowd assembled on the tarmac at Kigali Airport: "We come here today partly in recognition of the fact that we in the United States and the world community did not do as much as we could have and should have done to try to limit what occurred" in Rwanda.

This implied that the United States had done a good deal but not quite enough. In reality the United States did much more than fail to send troops. It led a successful effort to remove most of the UN peacekeepers who were already in Rwanda. It aggressively worked to block the subsequent authorization of UN reinforcements. It refused to use its technology to jam radio broadcasts that were a crucial instrument in the coordination and perpetuation of the genocide. And even as, on average, 8,000 Rwandans were being butchered each day, U.S. officials shunned the term "genocide," for fear of being obliged to act. The United States in fact did virtually nothing "to try to limit what occurred." Indeed, staying out of Rwanda was an explicit U.S. policy objective."

We in the US knew what was happening. Power describes coverage from the first few days:

"From April 8 onward media coverage featured eyewitness accounts describing the widespread targeting of Tutsi and the corpses piling up on Kigali's streets. American reporters relayed stories of missionaries and embassy officials who had been unable to save their Rwandan friends and neighbors from death. On April 9 a front-page Washington Post story quoted reports that the Rwandan employees of the major international relief agencies had been executed "in front of horrified expatriate staffers." On April 10 a New York Times front-page article quoted the Red Cross claim that "tens of thousands" were dead, 8,000 in Kigali alone, and that corpses were "in the houses, in the streets, everywhere." The Post the same day led its front-page story with a description of "a pile of corpses six feet high" outside the main hospital."

During this time we focussed entirely on evacuating our own people.

"In the three days during which some 4,000 foreigners were evacuated, about 20,000 Rwandans were killed. After the American evacuees were safely out and the U.S. embassy had been closed, Bill and Hillary Clinton visited the people who had manned the emergency-operations room at the State Department and offered congratulations on a "job well done.""

But we didn't just not pay attention to what was happening. Recall that Romeo Dallaire was commanding UN peacekeeping troops in Rwanda, troops that were just about the only protection many Tutsis had. A number of his troops were Belgian, and shortly after the killing began, ten of those Belgian peacekeepers were killed. With that background, read this and weep:

"The bodies of the slain Belgian soldiers were returned to Brussels on April 14. One of the pivotal conversations in the course of the genocide took place around that time, when Willie Claes, the Belgian Foreign Minister, called the State Department to request "cover." "We are pulling out, but we don't want to be seen to be doing it alone," Claes said, asking the Americans to support a full UN withdrawal. Dallaire had not anticipated that Belgium would extract its soldiers, removing the backbone of his mission and stranding Rwandans in their hour of greatest need. "I expected the ex-colonial white countries would stick it out even if they took casualties," he remembers. "I thought their pride would have led them to stay to try to sort the place out. The Belgian decision caught me totally off guard. I was truly stunned."

Belgium did not want to leave ignominiously, by itself. Warren Christopher agreed to back Belgian requests for a full UN exit. Policy over the next month or so can be described simply: no U.S. military intervention, robust demands for a withdrawal of all of Dallaire's forces, and no support for a new UN mission that would challenge the killers. Belgium had the cover it needed.

On April 15 Christopher sent one of the most forceful documents to be produced in the entire three months of the genocide to Madeleine Albright at the UN—a cable instructing her to demand a full UN withdrawal. The cable, which was heavily influenced by Richard Clarke at the NSC, and which bypassed Donald Steinberg and was never seen by Anthony Lake, was unequivocal about the next steps. Saying that he had "fully" taken into account the "humanitarian reasons put forth for retention of UNAMIR elements in Rwanda," Christopher wrote that there was "insufficient justification" to retain a UN presence.

The international community must give highest priority to full, orderly withdrawal of all UNAMIR personnel as soon as possible ... We will oppose any effort at this time to preserve a UNAMIR presence in Rwanda ... Our opposition to retaining a UNAMIR presence in Rwanda is firm. It is based on our conviction that the Security Council has an obligation to ensure that peacekeeping operations are viable, that they are capable of fulfilling their mandates, and that UN peacekeeping personnel are not placed or retained, knowingly, in an untenable situation.

(...) The UN Security Council now made a decision that sealed the Tutsi's fate and signaled the militia that it would have free rein. The U.S. demand for a full UN withdrawal had been opposed by some African nations, and even by Madeleine Albright; so the United States lobbied instead for a dramatic drawdown in troop strength. On April 21, amid press reports of some 100,000 dead in Rwanda, the Security Council voted to slash UNAMIR's forces to 270 men. Albright went along, publicly declaring that a "small, skeletal" operation would be left in Kigali to "show the will of the international community." (...)

Most of Dallaire's troops were evacuated by April 25. Though he was supposed to reduce the size of his force to 270, he ended up keeping 503 peacekeepers. By this time Dallaire was trying to deal with a bloody frenzy. "My force was standing knee-deep in mutilated bodies, surrounded by the guttural moans of dying people, looking into the eyes of children bleeding to death with their wounds burning in the sun and being invaded by maggots and flies," he later wrote. "I found myself walking through villages where the only sign of life was a goat, or a chicken, or a songbird, as all the people were dead, their bodies being eaten by voracious packs of wild dogs.""

Some people in the State Department proposed jamming Radio Mille Collines, which was urging people on to genocide. But that didn't happen either. Why was nothing done?

"As one U.S. official put it, "Look, nobody senior was paying any attention to this mess. And in the absence of any political leadership from the top, when you have one group that feels pretty strongly about what shouldn't be done, it is extremely likely they are going to end up shaping U.S. policy." Lieutenant General Wesley Clark looked to the White House for leadership. "The Pentagon is always going to be the last to want to intervene," he says. "It is up to the civilians to tell us they want to do something and we'll figure out how to do it."

But with no powerful personalities or high-ranking officials arguing forcefully for meaningful action, mid-level Pentagon officials held sway, vetoing or stalling on hesitant proposals put forward by mid-level State Department or NSC officials."

So, to sum up: the US didn't just fail to intervene in Rwanda. Our government urged the withdrawal of the UN peacekeeping forces that were on the ground protecting Rwandans, for no better reason than to keep the Belgians from looking like cowards. It refused to jam the radio station that was passing on instructions for genocide. It blocked further efforts to reinforce the peacekeeping forces there. It also failed to do any of the much smaller things that might have shown that our government was not wholly indifferent to the people of Rwanda who were, at that time, being hacked to death with machetes.

It's worth bearing this background in mind when you hear Hillary Clinton claim that she advocated military intervention in Rwanda. If you don't, you might think: well, it's perfectly comprehensible that she might have argued for military intervention but failed to convince her husband. After all, military intervention in another country is a big deal, not to be undertaken lightly. And it's easy to imagine Hillary Clinton being in favor of it, and her husband reluctantly concluding that it just wasn't something he could do.

It's a lot harder to imagine that while Hillary Clinton was advocating military intervention, she not only failed to convince her husband to send troops, but also failed to convince him, for instance, not to advocate the withdrawal of most of the UN peacekeepers, or that he really ought to order the Pentagon to jam Radio Milles Collines. If she was doing her best behind the scenes, and failed to accomplish even this -- if, despite her best efforts, she couldn't persuade her husband not to advocate withdrawing UN peacekeepers just to provide cover for the Belgians -- then we really need to ask how effective an advocate she really is, especially since no one except her husband, in full campaign mode, seems to remember her efforts at all.

Of course, I think it's a lot more likely that she either didn't advocate action on Rwanda at all, or did so only in passing. If so, this would have to be the definitive example of her attempt to claim responsibility for everything good that happened during her husband's presidency, while disavowing all responsibility for his mistakes. This was, in my opinion, the most shameful moment of the Clinton administration. It ought, by rights, to have a place in Hillary Clinton's "thirty five years of experience working for change." Or perhaps she might claim that she wasn't that interested in foreign policy at the time, or that for whatever reason she just didn't pick up on the genocide in Rwanda until it was too late to act. That would at least be honest.

But if, in fact, Clinton missed the chance to urge her husband to help stop the Rwandan genocide, then she should not pretend that she was, in fact, right there on the side of the angels all along. That's just grotesque.

Comments

[Nell]

And what a convenient moment to make this claim, when the woman formerly in the Obama campaign organization best equipped to evaluate this claim, a women who has interviewed almost everyone and read almost everything there is to read about Rwanda policy in the 1990s has just resigned and made herself un-interviewable.

Given Power's specialty, this seems almost like a claim engineered to make her head explode -- or to taunt her out of silence.

What a lovely couple they are. 'Monstrous' isn't the right word, agreed, but there's a sadistic, Rovian edge there that 'grotesque' only hints at.

[cleek]

look at how much it took you to explain all of that ancient history. their shiny new lie takes almost no time at all to tell.

they win!

we lose.

[Mary]

If she was doing her best behind the scenes, and failed to accomplish even this -- if, despite her best efforts, she couldn't persuade her husband not to advocate withdrawing UN peacekeepers just to provide cover for the Belgians -- then we really need to ask how effective an advocate she really is, especially since no one except her husband, in full campaign mode, seems to remember her efforts at all.

That's it in a nutshell, hilzoy. But will the media pick up on it? And bending over backwards as far as I can, assuming every word the Clintons say on this matter is true, it's also a devastating illumination of their characters that they couldn't disclose this earlier than this week, when the media finally questioned her bona fides in this area. This would fit in -- if true -- with Senator Clinton's inability to frame her crucial Iraq vote as a mistake that she regrets.

Dallaire's awful personal story post-Rwanda is described in his book, but here's the Wikipedia summary for anyone unfamiliar with it:

Dallaire was medically released from the Canadian Forces and retired on April 22, 2000, after being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

At the time of his retirement he held the rank of lieutenant-general. Blaming himself for the failures of the mission, he began a spiral into a depression, culminating on June 20, 2000, when he was rushed to hospital after being found under a park bench in Ottawa. He was intoxicated and suffering from the reaction of alcohol and his prescription anti-depressants, the mixture of which almost put him into a coma. The story gained national headlines and sparked a fierce debate over the rules of engagement forced upon UN peacekeepers.

After the "park-bench" incident, Dallaire began writing about his experiences, started lecturing on his experiences, and was well on the road to recovery. He has since stated that during this bleak period, he considered suicide and attempted it on several occasions. Despite his personal turmoil, the months he spent in Rwanda were eventually chronicled in his 2003 book Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda, written in collaboration with his aide, Major Brent Beardsley. This book won the Shaughnessy Cohen Award for Political Writing in 2003 and the 2004 Governor General's Award for non-fiction.

On preview: what Nell said, which is a shame (or shamelessness taking advantage of an opponent's error) but also something Powers bears a hell of a lot of responsibility for. And cleek, the paragraph I quoted might one of the handles the media needs, if they're willing to pick up on it.

Shorter hilzoy, pre-packaged for the media:

1) This is a new claim,
2) Which does not appear in any pre-existing media,
3) Which raises doubts about its veracity,
4) And, even if it is true, still falls short of giving us any reason to trust in Senator Clinton's expertise, judgment and effectiveness. If she couldn't away her husband, who can she sway?

[hilzoy]

Actually -- and I should have been clearer on this in my post -- it's not a new claim. Bill Clinton said it in December. It is new to me -- I saw it in the Chicago Tribune article and thought: huh???!!! But they said it a while ago.

[tom p]

"it's not a new claim. Bill Clinton said it in December."

The Rwandan Genocide occured over a decade ago (my memory is hazy on the exact year) and the first time it gets mentioned is 3 months ago? Sounds pretty new to me. Especially considering that it did not get mentioned in either of their books? (did it? The Rwandan Genocide was a rather important event in history)

As Mary said, HRC would be wise not to push this as an example of her "experience"... another failure.

[Mark]

I suggested that Bill C intervene in Rwanda in a conversation with my sister-in-law. Does that mean I can cross the Commander-in-chief threshold?

[Turbulence]

Some people in the State Department proposed jamming Radio Mille Collines, which was urging people on to genocide. But that didn't happen either. Why was nothing done?

Hilzoy,

Now, that's not a very fair characterization, is it? You forgot to mention the extreme cost of deploying the National Guard plane equipped with jamming gear; that asset was going to cost tens of thousands of dollars. And think about what would happen if that asset was damaged? I mean genocide is important and all, but we're talking about tens of thousands of dollars here or maybe even a whole airplane.

"The Pentagon is always going to be the last to want to intervene," he says. "It is up to the civilians to tell us they want to do something and we'll figure out how to do it."

But with no powerful personalities or high-ranking officials arguing forcefully for meaningful action, mid-level Pentagon officials held sway, vetoing or stalling on hesitant proposals put forward by mid-level State Department or NSC officials."

As I recall, the proposals weren't all that tentative since State officials were screaming for any action whatsoever.

Look, we all need to focus on what's really important: the military has lots of nifty hardware and it is very, very, very important that all that precious hardware never be endangered. Certainly not for a purpose as cheap and tawdry as stopping genocide.

[Mary]

Well, if he said it in December, then the "this week" portion of my post is off base, but this is still a new claim because it only showed up during this campaign and not in any pre-existing sources.

But hilzoy's best case scenario for the Senator -- that she tried and failed to influence her husband to do anything positive, let alone persuading him not to do the horrible, counter-productive things he committed to -- is still the key point.

[joejoejoe]

Here's Bill Clinton on Rwanda in The New Yorker, 9/18/06:

"Later, when I asked Clinton about Rwanda, he said that the calamity in Somalia and the crisis in the Balkans had been distractions but that his inaction in Rwanda was the worst foreign-policy mistake of his Administration.

“Whatever happened, I have to take responsibility for it,” he said. “We never even had a staff meeting on it. But I don’t blame anybody that works for me. That was my fault. I should have been alert and alive to it. And that’s why I went there and apologized in ’98. I’ve always been surprised at how much they wanted me to come back, accepting my help on their holocaust memorial. Every time I ask, they say, ‘You know, we did this to ourselves, you didn’t make us do it—I wish you’d come.’ And then they always say, ‘Besides, you were the only one who ever apologized. Nobody else even said they were sorry.’ So all I can do is—I just have to face it. It was just one of those things that happen. It is inexplicable to me looking back, but when we lived it forward, in the aftermath of Somalia, trying to get the support from a fairly isolationist Congress at the time—including some elements in both parties—to get into Bosnia, where I felt we had an overwhelming national interest and a moral imperative, we just blew it. I blew it. I just, I feel terrible about it, and all I can ever do is tell them the truth, and not try to sugarcoat it, and try to make it up to them.”

I'm not sure how strong Hillary Clinton's advocacy for military action could have been if in Sept. '06 Bill Clinton is saying he was not "alert and alive" to the situation in Rwanda. How strong could Sen. Clinton's advice have been if it didn't so much as move Bill Clinton to "alert"?

[Sarah J]

You can't blame Hillary Clinton for anything her husband did as president, because she's not him! But she's got 35 years of experience working on foreign relations, and how dare you question her credentials?

Someone kill me now.

[Jammer]

In fairness, I have heard this for many years.

[Nell]

Jammer -- In fairness, then, accompany that claim with some evidence.

[Gareth Wilson]

Suppose we take Clinton's word for it, she did recommend that the US should intervene militarily in Rwanda. Was that good advice? It sounds idiotic to me - Somalia squared.

[washerdreyer]

Hilzoy, is there a book on the Rwandan genocide which you'd recommend above the others? If it helps in making a selection, assume that the person you're making a recommendation to was 13 when the underlying events occurred and so might need something that does a good job of explaining even the basics.

[swarty]

Next week's headline:

"Hillary repeatedly warned me not to get blowjobs from Monica Lewinsky. If only I had listened to her..."

They're even willing to game the greatest genocide of my lifetime (I'm 44). Fuck them to eternity.

[Ara]

Is anybody really surprised?

Did anybody really expect anything different from her?

I really think this is the tone the Obama campaign has to begin to take with her: condescension.

[Ari]

The Hillary foreign policy gambit, as TPM has pointed out, is a very silly move. There's just no way that it doesn't backfire.

[hilzoy]

washerdreyer: Samantha Power's book is very good. There's also (switching to another medium) a very good Frontline on it; if it's available to be watched on the web, it would be a great place to start.

[joejoejoe]

washerdryer - There is a blog called '100 Days of Rwanda' which recounted the events of each day in a blog post. It gives you a real sense of what decisions confronted various players in real time. It's just about the best history in a blog form that I've seen online. Blogger NYCO wrote it on the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide.

http://www.silent-edge.org/mt/rwanda/

[Fraud Guy]

So this helps explain Power's statement that she is a "monster"; trying to make political hay off of her and her husband's failure to stop the genocide.

Wonder if she can be reinstated.

[Turbulence]

For those looking for more reading, Jared Diamond's recent book, Collapse includes a chapter on the Rwandan genocide that takes a somewhat different perspective than I've seen in other works. Diamond focuses on the changing resource constraints as a driver for the genocide; he locates the events of 94 in an economic context that gives some insight into sectarian motivations. Its been a while since I read other Rwandan books, but at the time, his perspective struck me as novel and useful.

I recently stumbled on a completely unrelated paper that has a rather provocative thesis: Explaining the Ultimate Escalation in Rwanda: How and Why Tutsi Rebels Provoked a Retaliatory Genocide. Unfortunately, I don't know enough to determine how accurate its contentions are.

[Donald Johnson]

Turbulence--Howard French, the NYT reporter, also deviates quite a bit from the standard line on Hutu/Tutsi relations , though he deals more with the aftermath than what led up to it. I read his book a few years ago--he portrays the war in the Congo following the Rwandan genocide as yet another genocide, this time with the Tutsi army as one of the villains. And he doesn't think highly of Gourevitch, the author of one of the most widely cited books on the Rwandan genocide. Here's a link--

Link

That doesn't speak to the issue raised in your link, of course. I would have guessed that events in neighboring Burundi might have had a lot to do with what happened in Rwanda in 1994. There was a Tutsi genocide against Hutus in 1972, and a Hutu genocide of Tutsis in the early 90's, at least according to wikipedia. I'd heard of the 72 genocide before.

[Kevin Donoghue]

washerdreyer asked: Hilzoy, is there a book on the Rwandan genocide which you'd recommend above the others? If it helps in making a selection, assume that the person you're making a recommendation to was 13 when the underlying events occurred and so might need something that does a good job of explaining even the basics.

I strongly recommend Gérard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis. It’s very good on the colonial background, the Hutu Republic (1959-1990) and France’s involvement (Prunier was asked to advise the French government at one point).

[Nell]

joejoejoe, thanks so much for the pointer to the 100 Days of Rwanda site. Do you know where NYCO blogs or comments nowadays?

[OCSteve]

As disgusted as I am by our inaction then, at least we weren’t alone. Just as with Darfur today, the whole world just kind of stands around and watches it happen. And the UN doesn’t want to call it “genocide” because that would require them to do something about it…

It's worth bearing this background in mind when you hear Hillary Clinton claim that she advocated military intervention in Rwanda.

Also worth bearing in mind whenever the names Warren Christopher, Richard Clarke, Madeleine Albright, or Wesley Clark come up…

“show the will of the international community” – read it and weep.

[felix culpa]

Oh my forking dear.
Slimyslimysmlumy... I guess it does illuminate those thirty-five years and what being at the levers of responsible leadership have entailed.
Pretense and outrageous insults to integrity under cover of claims to deep human feeling.
Now that Prof. Power still stands near the spotlight it seems deeply fitting that she speak up for truthfulness. Herewith hoping.
In another thread LeftTurn wrote (10:48 PM, Crossing the Threshold) of growing anger in his cirlce over the state of things. This should rightly augment that anger.

[Aaron B. Brown]

It's very simple, black folks died, and Hillary lied.

She has no credentials to become president. She's manufactured a political career off her husband's name, and is quite obviously not qualified to be president of anything except maybe president of the condo association at the retirement home where she and Bill were going to wind up when this is over.

The Clintons are all done, goodbye and good riddance to Republicans in Democratic clothing. Perhaps John McCain will offer her the vice presidency, now that she sold the Democratic Party down the river. Hillary is a monster, here's the evidence.

Hillary">http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/3/8/10246/00557/770/472129">Hillary Queen of the Monsters

:-)

[Donald Johnson]

I wouldn't expect too much truthfulness from Samantha Power, except when she blurts it out without thinking. I say this because it doesn't make any logical sense that someone writing a massive book on American foreign policy and genocide would leave out East Timor, where every President from Ford through Clinton (until 1999) sided with Indonesia, providing both weapons and diplomatic support for their position. It's gotten a fair amount of attention for this reason, sometimes even in the MSM, though generally they limit their discussion of the matter to the initial Ford/Kissinger decision to support the Indonesian invasion.

So it's bizarre that her book doesn't devote a chapter to it, unless she was ignorant about it when she wrote the book. I think her friendship with Richard Holbrooke provides a clue--Holbrooke is one of the leading villains in the Timorese story.

Link

Holbrooke and Power"

Holbrooke has always been interested in keeping the full story of the US role in Timor out of the press

Link

I don't think a person who wants to have political influence as a foreign policy guru can afford to offend powerful people in both parties. Samantha Power chooses to travel in those incestuous circles, where Wolfowitz and Holbrooke praise each other while working for opposing parties, and so I think it constrains what she can say.

[janinsanfran]

Nell -- I believe NYCO now blogs here.

Another set of moments when US intervention would have saved Rwandan lives was when the French waltzed in, giving cover to "their" Rwandans. Clinton(s) acquiesced over the protests of Dallaire.

[publius]

well done - this also makes me want to go out and get the power book.

[woof]

If Samantha Power had been responding to this claim, why couldn't she say it in the United States and make a statement in a complete sentence?

Something like 'that Hillary is making a new claims in a presidential race that she tried to stop the Rwandan genocide when all the evidence is that she ignored it just like her husband, makes her a monster.

[F]

I was the Public Affairs Officer in our embassy in Nairobi during this time, and subsequently read everything I could about events in Rwanda as I was preparing to fill a USAID contract four years later working in Rwanda. The contract was eventually cancelled for internal reasons. The best book for understanding the whole picture is the Prunier book and I spoke to him at length on the phone while preparing for the USAID contract.

Remember that one-third of Rwanda's people were either killed or displaced -- a figure that approximates what happened in Pol Pot's Cambodia. It was truly a horrendous time, and as someone noted, followed and preceeded similar events in neighoring Burundi and Zaire (now Congo).

The thing that makes me angriest about our lack of response is that the smallest intervention on our part would have changed the outcome dramatically. General Dellaire had called for armored cars for his UN troops, and the cars had even been painted UN white and were waiting transport, as I recall. The only nation with the airlift capacity to move 50 armored cars is -- guess who? -- the US. We demurred. Where was Hillary then?

It is true Belgium wanted us not to intervene, and asked us not to send the airlift for the armored cars. So since when is our relationship with Belgium so important that it trumps a million lives? We could have accomplished this with very little diplomatic exposure and have looked good all around, perhaps even to the Belgians. Where was Hillary when it was time to tell the Belgians "fuggedaboutit?"

I was also at the Nairobi airport when our first C-130 brought American missionaries and diplomats out of Rwanda. We had to wade through scores of French troops who were waiting to be airlifted to Rwanda, but never got the order. Where was Hillary then?

The very worst part of the event for us in Nairobi was listening to the American missionary radio net as folks in Rwanda were losing hundreds and thousands of friends. It was a horrible time. Where was Hillary then?

F

[History]

Belgium was the problem in Rwanda 1994. They had the troops and the equipment on the ground to stop the genocide.

That's what the Belgians were there for, to keep the peace. They were leading the U.N. peacekeeping force. They didn't need any Americans.

The United States had just been chased out of Somalia six months earlier. Of course, Clinton wasn't going to order another African rescue mission, and Hillary probably agreed.

But where was the Belgian leadership? All they had to do was ask Europe for another 5,000 troops, and the killing of 800,000 people would have been nipped in the bud.

Instead, as soon as Belgium lost 10 men, they ran, taking the whole U.N. peacekeeping force with them. Who was in charge of U.N. peacekeeping at the time? Kofi Anan. For his failure of leadership, he then was rewarded with his appointment as secretary-general of the U.N.

[Mike Schilling]

Something has gone wrong in this paragraph:

But it's worse than that. The Clinton administration did not simply fail to intervene militarily in Rwanda. It took a number of steps that made it easier for genocide to be committed. Not taking these steps would have been much, much easier than sending actual troops to Rwanda. They would have made a real difference. And yet the Clinton administration failed to take them.

It begins with steps taken that enabled the genocide, and ends being unhappy that those steps were not taken.

[Tomeck]

So if Hillary want to make this claim about advocating for intervention in Rwanda, then can't at least one reporter ask: "When? To Whom? How?" Did she bring it up over dinner with Bill? With Chelsea? Was she lobbying with State or the Pentagon?

Look, I'm a schlub in Minneapolis who felt ashamed we didn't send troops in to stop the killing. I said it to my friends. That doesn't qualify me or Hillary to be president.

[ilovemylife]

Link to the study of Hillary Clinton's personality:
http://www.csbsju.edu/uspp/Clinton-HR/Character.html

In 1993 and 1994 (the Rwandan genocide started April 6, 1994), the Clintons were DISTRACTED with the Paula Jones lawsuit against the President (one of his extra-marital affairs) and the Whitewater investigation. And Vince Foster, said more to be a friend of Hillary than Bill was found dead in a park. Though it is claimed it was suicide, murder has never been ruled out. Vince Foster knew many things about the Clintons, including the land deal regarding Whitewater, that the Clintons didn't want public:
http://prorev.com/connex2.htm

Here is "small" section from this site about Vince Foster:
Just hours after the search warrant authorizing the raid is signed by a federal magistrate in Little Rock, Vince Foster apparently drives to Ft. Marcy Park without any car keys in a vehicle that changes color over the next few hours, walks across 700 feet of park without accruing any dirt or grass stains, and then shoots himself with a vanishing bullet that leaves only a small amount of blood. Or at least that is what would have to had occurred if official accounts are to be reconciled with the available evidence. There are numerous other anomalies in this quickly-declared suicide. Despite two badly misleading independent counsel reports, Foster's death will remain an unsolved mystery.

Less than three hours after Foster's body is found, his office is secretly searched by Clinton operatives, including Mrs. Clinton's chief of staff. Another search occurs two days later. Meanwhile, US Park Police and FBI agents are not allowed to search the office on grounds of "executive privilege."

Foster's suicide note is withheld from investigators for some 30 hours. The note is in 27 pieces with one other piece missing. Foster's personal diary will be withheld from the special prosecutor for a year despite being covered by a subpoena.

Samantha Power's Chapter 10 in "A Problem from Hell" which is entirely about the Rwandan genocide, she states that Clinton knew there would be no political price if he did nothing in Rwanda...indeed he perceived a political price if he did do something. And furthermore Power states that Clinton influenced other countries on the UN Security Council, that wanted to act, not to act. Because if they acted and we didn't we wouldn't look good.

[Darwin]

Albright gives her account of the abandonment of Rwanda, here :

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ghosts/interviews/albright.html
"
q: Can you tell the story that you talk about in your book of the instructions that came to you at the U.N. about the U.S. position on calling for a full withdrawal of U.N. forces?

a: The secretary-general basically came to the Security Council with three options: either to reinforce this UNAMIR group, which really was inadequate; to withdraw it completely; or to have a kind of medium option of some reinforcement of it. My instructions were to support full withdrawal. I listened to the discussion very carefully in the Security Council. I could see that our position was wrong, and especially in listening to the African delegate, Ambassador Gambari from Nigeria, [who] was very moving on this.

a: [So] I had these instructions which made no sense at all. These were in informal meetings of the Security Council, where the real discussion goes on. I asked my deputy to take my seat while I left, and went out into the hall into these phone booths and called Washington. I decided not to call the State Department from whence my instructions really came, but the National Security Council, because they were dealing with it on a very imminent basis. Tony Lake, the national security adviser, was somebody that certainly knew a lot about Africa. He was the great expert.

a: I felt that I would get a better hearing if I called the National Security Council, which I did, and they said, "Well, no, we're worrying about this, and these are your instructions." I actually screamed into the phone. I said, "They're unacceptable. I want them changed." So they told me to chill out and calm down. But ultimately, they did send me instructions that allowed us to do a reinforcement of UNAMIR; not a massive changing of the mandate and enlarging it or withdrawing it, but the middle option allowed me to support that.

q: I have been told you talked to Richard Clarke, that the conversation was with him.

a: That is correct.
"

Kinda puts a new perspective on Clarke's "apology" for 9/11, doesn't it..

=darwin

[Patrick]

I had the same reaction to go back and look through my books on the Rwanda genocide. I too found no mention of Hilary Clinton. I'd recommend Philip Gourevitch's "We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families" and Dallaire's "Shake Hands With The Devil."

[kevino]

And since the Clintons refuse to release any of the important White House documents of the period, we have no way to measure this claim - or any similar claims. We just have to trust that the Clintons aren't lying to us - again.

They must think we're stupid. The bad news is that most Clinton supporters are stupid.

[WDinCA]

I think this says it best:

Are You Experienced?

[bulldogpundit]

Hilzoy - What are the 8 books you've read. I've read Power, Gourevitch and Dallaire's and have been fascinated by all of them. Which other ones should I check out?

[Tom Maguire]

Geez, you mean the Clintons are lying about their role in Rwanda?

Why not start with Bill's 1998 "apology", where he claimed he was not aware of the situation:

That lie came four years after the genocide. During a 1998 presidential tour of Africa, Clinton stopped at the airport in Kigali, Rwanda, and issued an apology. Sort of. Speaking of those nightmarish months in the spring of 1994, he said, "All over the world there were people like me sitting in offices who did not fully appreciate the depth and speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror." He acknowledged that the United States and the international community had not moved quickly enough in response to the horrors under way. To emphasize his sorrow, he said, "Never again."

Maybe Hillary's advocacy for military involvement would have been effective if only she had remembered to mention to Bill that bad things were happening quickly.

Or maybe they are both lying. Another tough call!