Richard Clarke, Rwanda, Reparations

The emergence of Richard Clarke as a folk hero to some
Americans for his dramatic whistle blowing against the
Bush administrations’ mishandling of the Al Queda
intelligence gathering, needs to be compared to his
shameful role in preventing the United States from
responding to the Rwanda genocide campaign; a role that
has now contributed to the world wide call that an
international fund be established to pay reparations to
the survivors of the Rwanda holocaust of 1994.

Rwanda, a country roughly the size of Maryland, along
with Haiti is one of the two mostly densely populated
nations on the planet. The two most populous ethnic
groups Hutu and Tutsi have long standing grievances
with one another, largely stemming from the historic
vassalage imposed on the Hutu’s by the Tutsi’s and ill-
conceived ideas of self-rule imposed by Belgium in the
1950’s. Although Hutu’s and Tutsi’s long ago have been
so intermarried it is difficult to visually determine
who is who, since the early 1960’s there has been
numerous outbreaks of fighting between political and
cultural organizations.

In early 1994 a peace process had been brokered between
the Rwandan government and their opponents the
Patriotic Front. According to documents released just
this past week by the National Security Archives, in
commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan
genocide, U.S. intelligence and diplomatic officials
knew by the second day of violence that Rwandan
president Juvenal Habyarimani had been assassinated by
his own security detail in a calculated move to signal
the beginning of a planned extermination of Tutsi’s,
known supporters of the Patriotic Front and politically
moderate Hutu’s, to the degree they were so identified.

This newly released information seems to contradict
former President Clinton’s 1996 assertions that he was
not fully aware of what was taking place in Rwanda.

From the first week of April until early July of 1994,
more than 900,000 Rwandan Tutsi’s and politically
moderate Hutu’s, 10,000 per day, were hacked to death
by machete or killed by rifle fire at the hands of Hutu
extremists while the post-cold war world, led by the
U.S., mostly did nothing. Richard Clarke, who then
oversaw peacekeeping policies for Washington’s National
Security Council, formulated and promoted the do less
than nothing plan.

While there is more than enough blame to go around to
numerous organizations and bodies (Congress, both major
political parties, the Congressional Black Caucus) for
not responding to the unfolding genocide in Rwanda, it
was Richard Clarke, more than any single individual who
promoted the concept that Rwanda held no national
interest for the U.S. Therefore we would not only not
respond but do all in our power to withdraw what little
UN support all ready existed for the Rwandan victims.

For the clearest understanding regarding Clarke’s role
toward Rwanda we re-visit Samantha Power’s Atlantic,
Sept. 2001 article "Bystanders to Genocide."

From Power we learn that on April 15, Secretary of
State Warren Christopher, while responding to the
political reality that the U.S. had no stomach for
further engagement in Africa following the humiliating
withdrawal from Somalia, delivered to US United Nations
representative Madeline Albright one of the most
forceful documents developed during the entire three
month period of genocide. The document, according to
Power, was largely the work of Richard Clarke.

Christopher, by way of Clarke, wrote that he had
"fully" taken into account the humanitarian dimensions,
"The international community must give highest priority
to full, orderly withdrawal of [UN] personnel as soon
as possible..We will oppose any effort at this time to
preserve a presence of [UN] in Rwanda..Our opposition
to retaining a [UN] presence in Rwanda is firm. It is
based on our conviction that the Security Council has
an obligation to ensure the peacekeeping operations are
viable, that they are capable of fulfilling their
mandates and that the UN peacekeeping personnel are not
placed or retained, knowingly, in an untenable
situation."

According to Power, Clarke later recalled that once the
Belgians withdrew from Rwanda, "We were left with a
rump mission, incapable of doing anything to help
people. They were doing nothing to stop the killings."

The Belgian military forces withdrew from Rwanda in the
first week of genocide after 12 of them were kidnapped
and executed. As Power points out however, even the few
hundred UN military personnel that remained, under the
dedicated leadership of Canadian general Romeo
Dallaire, were able to save several thousands from
extermination. One Senegalese officer alone saved more
than a hundred Rwandans.

The only other military force that became a
counterbalance during the genocide was the Rwandan
Patriotic Front headed by Paul Kagame. It had been
headquartered in neighboring Uganda and today, Kagame
is the president of Rwanda. From the moment the killing
campaign was known to have begun, the patriotic Front
entered Rwanda from Uganda and in slightly more than
three months established a new government in Kigali.

After the Security Council belatedly agreed to send
some assistance to the UN military mission in Rwanda,
Clarke informed the press that Washington was
attempting to provide some safety net for Rwandan
survivors. In fact, the opposite was true.

Finally, Clarke had more to say when the UN and western
countries began to formulate plans to aid the genocide
survivors and when it became clear the Patriotic Front
was physically driving the Interahamwe from the Rwandan
region. He argued that U.S. and UN military troops not
be inserted inside Rwanda to protect victims and
survivors, but rather they should build camps along the
Rwandan border and encourage Rwandans to walk to the
camps. It did not seem to Clarke to matter that in
order for the genocide survivors to reach the camps
they would have to walk through countless miles of
their enemies. It is not known how many more Rwandans
died attempting to reach these camps.

The final count for the Rwandan genocide is officially
937, 568.

As part of the efforts to memorialize the Rwandan
victims of genocide an international conference met in
Kigali, Rwanda last week to draw attention to the issue
of genocide and to discuss what to do about the Rwandan
tragedy.

The conference, whose themes was "Preventing and
banishing genocide forever through universal active
solidarity", recommended that the UN and countries that
could have intervened to stop the genocide but failed
to do so should pay reparations "for the material,
psychological and moral losses incurred."

Dallaire, who has since been forced to retire from the
Canadian army attended the conference and told those in
attendance, "You were abandoned. You are an orphaned
country."

The reparations movement world wide should take up the
cause of Rwandan reparations and bring to justice and
expose to public scrutiny those who physically and
morally committed and abetted genocide in Rwanda.

J.Damu is the acting Western Regional Representative
for N’COBRA, (National Coalition of Blacks for
Reparations in America.) He can be reached at
jdamu@sbcglobal.net.