Refusing To Call It Genocide

Declassified U.S. documents show the Clinton administration refused to label the 1994 mass killings in Rwanda as a genocide. One State Department document read: "Be careful … Genocide finding could commit U.S.G. to actually 'do something.'" 

At a press briefing in 1994, Reuters correspondent Alan Elsner asked: "How many acts of genocide does it take to make genocide?" 

State Department spokesperson Christine Shelly responded, "Alan, that’s just not a question that I’m in a position to answer." 

Samantha Power, who is now the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, described the U.S. inaction in her 2001 article, "Bystanders to Genocide." She wrote, 

"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." 

We speak to Emily Willard of the National Security Archive, and University of Wisconsin, Madison, Professor Scott Straus, author of "The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda."

EMILY WILLARD:  There’s a Department of Defense memo sent to the National Security Council. It’s a one-page, three-paragraph memo, clearly saying that there’s an idea that the United States could jam the radios, the national radio program in Rwanda that were inciting the massacres. And this document clearly says that a decision was made that it would be ineffective and too expensive to jam the radios, and that it would be cheaper for the United States and more efficient to follow up after the violence had ended with aid support. So this clearly shows U.S. apprehension in getting militarily involved and, you know, going for the after-the-fact relief. However, key documents—

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, the key—the key point here, for people who aren’t familiar with this, is the role of the radio in the genocide, the incitement to kill Tutsis, calling them, most famously, "cockroaches."

EMILY WILLARD: Yes, yes. And while this document is certainly key—and we’ve had this one for a while—the remaining key documents that really will tell the behind-the-scenes about how some of these key decisions were made are still classified. And they’re bogged down in the declassification process. So, unfortunately, some of the very key documents that we really need as an international community to understand how these key decisions were made are still not available to the public. And we’re in the process of working with the government to get them declassified, but, unfortunately, those key behind-the-scenes conversations are not available to the public.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to some of the clips of U.S. officials. The United States government carefully avoided using the word "genocide" to describe what was happening in Rwanda. This is a clip from the PBS Frontline documentary Ghosts of Rwanda. It begins a State Department briefing, April 28th, 1994.

REPORTER 1: —comment on that, or a view as to whether or not what is happening could be genocide?

CHRISTINE SHELLY: Well, as I think you know, the use of the term "genocide" has a very precise legal meaning, although it’s not strictly a legal determination. There are—there are other factors in there, as well. When—in looking at a situation to make a determination about that, before we begin to use that term, we have to know as much as possible about the facts of the situation.

REPORTER 2: Just out of curiosity, given that so many people say that there is genocide underway, or something that strongly resembles it, why wouldn’t this convention be invoked?

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Well, I think, as you know, this becomes a legal definitional thing, unfortunately, in terms of—as horrendous as all these things are, there becomes a definitional question.

AMY GOODMAN: Madeleine Albright, then-secretary of state, speaking in ’94. Seven weeks into the genocide, then-President Bill Clinton restated U.S. policy on intervening in foreign conflicts.

PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON: The end of the superpower standoff lifted the lid from a cauldron of long-simmering hatreds. Now the entire global terrain is bloody with such conflicts, from Rwanda to Georgia. Whether we get involved in any of the world’s ethnic conflicts, in the end, must depend on the cumulative weight of the American interests at stake.

AMY GOODMAN: That was President Clinton. During a press conference in June ’94, Reuters correspondent Alan Elsner questioned State Department spokesperson Christine Shelly on how she would describe the events taking place in Rwanda.

CHRISTINE SHELLY: Hence, we have every reason to believe that acts of genocide have occurred.

ALAN ELSNER: How many acts of genocide does it take to make genocide?

CHRISTINE SHELLY: Alan, that’s just not a question that I’m in a position to answer.

ALAN ELSNER: Is it true that the—that you have specific guidance not use the word "genocide" in isolation, but always to preface it with this—this word, "acts of"?

CHRISTINE SHELLY: I have guidance, which—to which I—which I try to use as best as I can. I’m not—I have—there are formulations that we are using that we are trying to be consistent in our use of.

AMY GOODMAN: That was the State Department spokesperson, Christine Shelly, being questioned by the Reuters correspondent, Alan Elsner. Scott Straus is also with us now, in addition to Emily Willard. Scott Straus is professor of political science and international studies at UW-Madison. He has written several books on Rwanda, including The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda. Professor Straus, the significance of the U.S. response at the time, not willing to call what was happening a genocide?

SCOTT STRAUS: Well, the U.S. was one of the key actors at the time. And, you know, the policy was clearly not to get involved in Rwanda. But the U.S.—and as the leading actor on the international stage at that time, the U.S.'s actions were critical. But the U.S. wasn't acting alone. I mean, Britain and Belgium at that time and within the bureaucracy of the United Nations, there was a real reluctance to get involved.

AMY GOODMAN: And France, as well, of course, leading to the fight that’s happening today with the delegation, the high-level delegation, pulling out of the genocide commemorations because of Kagame saying that the French were responsible.

SCOTT STRAUS: Yeah, the French had a much more controversial history with Rwanda, both before the genocide and even during the genocide. France was the leading ally of the regime in Rwanda, the regime that ultimately orchestrated the genocide. So the controversy is really: How much did they know? When did they know? Were they—some people accuse them of being involved in the preparations for genocide. I think that goes too far. But nonetheless, they were—they were the main ally of the regime that orchestrated genocide, and so that’s one of the reasons why their role has been so controversial in this particular history.

AMY GOODMAN: In 2001, Samantha Power, now the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, wrote an article in The Atlantic magazine called "Bystanders to Genocide." In it, she wrote, quote, "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. ... The United States in fact did virtually nothing 'to try to limit what occurred.' ... In order not to appreciate that genocide or something close to it was under way, U.S. officials had to ignore public reports and internal intelligence and debate," she wrote. At the time, she was founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, now, of course, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and she is leading the U.S. delegation at the Rwandan commemorations. Emily Willard, the significance of this and the documents that you have that are the underlying documents to the kind of statements you were hearing from President Clinton to Madeleine Albright, then the secretary of state?

EMILY WILLARD: Yes, the debate around whether or not the genocide had actually occurred was very clear right after the plane was shot down and the violence started. There was a debate going on with the Department of State. And at the end of—it wasn’t until the end of April that it was declared publicly that acts of genocide had occurred, and then not until the beginning of May that the secretary of state came out and said that a genocide had occurred. And you see in the documents, the reporting within the State Department, a very clear hesitation to not overestimate the number of people who were being killed. And actually, very interestingly, as the process of getting the documents declassified, there are examples where the United States, in the documents, says, "We’re not sure if, you know, 500,000, it is an exaggeration." And in the first release of the document that—that sentence was redacted, because even after the genocide happened, there’s still a hesitation to be clear and open about what the intelligence was and how those—that analysis of the intelligence was handled.

AMY GOODMAN: And the Dallaire fax, the significance of this, Professor Straus, if you could comment on this, the head of the U.N. peacekeepers writing to the United Nations that a genocide was about to take place?

SCOTT STRAUS: So I think that, you know, people have gone back and looked, and there have been clear warnings that something really terrible was happening, including the possibility of genocide or extermination. And the significance of the January memo that Dallaire wrote was a clear warning to United Nations headquarters in New York that there were efforts to train militia, that there was stockpiling of weapons, there was a clear warning that there was going to be significant violence against Tutsi civilians, even possibility of extermination. And Dallaire was essentially requesting some type of authorization to be aggressive in uncovering those stockpiles of weapons and so forth. And the U.N. headquarters was essentially risk-averse, said, "Don’t do it. You know, don’t get involved." And so, this was a real early warning, a chance that something could have happened before the genocide started in April, and the decision was not to do something. So I think the significance is a refusal to act on early warning and really ignoring the possibility that something really awful could happen in Rwanda.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Emily Willard, how unusual it is that you cannot get these documents declassified from 20 years ago?

EMILY WILLARD: That’s definitely a concern, because, especially with presidential records, 12 years after the president leaves office, there should be an increased access to the information. And those 20 years expired last January. So we’re still—it is very concerning that we’re still having a hard time getting especially the behind-the-scenes—

AMY GOODMAN: You’re talking about President Clinton.

EMILY WILLARD: —deliberative information. Yes, president—the presidential records from the National Security Council, where a lot of these decisions were likely made. So, it is concerning because, you know, 20 years after the fact, especially that the documents and the information is about a genocide—

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there. Emily Willard, thanks so much for being with us, and Professor Scott Straus of University of Wisconsin.

Is Africa Still Being Looted?

Let Us Count The Ways

By PATRICK BOND
August 17, 2010
Courtesy Of "CounterPunch"

The continent’s own elites, together with the West and now China are still making Africans progressively poorer, thanks to the extraction of raw materials. Reinvestment is negligible and the prices, royalties and taxes paid are inadequate to compensate for the draining of Africa’s natural wealth. Anti-extraction campaigns by (un)civil society are the only hope for a reversal of these neocolonial relations.

Though it’s easy to prove, using even the World Bank’s main study of natural resource economics, apparently the looting allegation is controversial. When I made it during a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) interview last week, the World Bank’s chief economist for Africa, Shanta Devarajan, immediately contradicted me, claiming (twice) that I am not in command of ‘the facts’.

Here’s how it went:

Patrick Bond: Africa is suffering neocolonialism, and that means the basic trend of exporting raw materials, and cash crops, minerals, petroleum, has gotten worse. And that’s really left Africa poorer per person in much of the continent, than even at independence. The idea that there’s steady growth in Africa is very misleading, and it really represents the abuse of economic concepts by politicians, by economists, who factor out society and the environment. And it’s mainly a myth, because, really, the extraction of non-renewable resources – those resources will never be available for future generations. And there’s very little reinvestment, and very little broadening of the economy into an industrial project or even a services economy.

CBC: Mr Devarajan, how would you respond to that view?

Shanta Devarajan: First, I just want to correct one of the facts, which is that the continent is not poorer per person. GDP per capita is not lower today than it was ten to fifteen years ago. In fact, it is considerably higher.

Here, Devarajan abuses the discussion about African poverty by using the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) measure, even though just seconds earlier I had warned against doing so. African economies suffer extreme distortions caused by the export of irreplaceable minerals, petroleum and hard-wood timber. Were he honest, Devarajan would confess that GDP calculates such exports as a solely positive process (a credit), without a corresponding debit on the books of a country’s natural capital.

Seeking a less biased wealth accounting – i.e., by factoring in society and the environment so as to calculate a country’s ‘genuine savings’ from year to year - we find that Africa gets progressively poorer. This was demonstrated in even the World Bank’s own book, Where is the Wealth of Nations?, published four years ago (and still available on the Bank website).

According to the book’s authors, “Genuine saving provides a much broader indicator of sustainability by valuing changes in natural resources, environmental quality, and human capital, in addition to the traditional measure of changes in produced assets. Negative genuine saving rates imply that total wealth is in decline.”

The researchers are conservative in their assumptions, but once they factor in society and the environment, Africa’s most populous country, Nigeria, fell from a GDP in 2000 of $297 per person to negative $210 in genuine savings, mainly because the value of oil extracted was subtracted from  its net wealth.

Even the most industrialized African country, South Africa, suffers from resource curse: instead of a per person GDP of $2837 in 2000, the more reasonable way to measure wealth results in genuine savings declining to negative $2 per person that year. From 2001, the problem became even more acute thanks to the delisting of the largest corporations from the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, which added not just the outflow of mineral wealth, but also of profits and dividends that in earlier years would have been retained in South Africa.

(SA president Jacob Zuma approved these policies and he is still relaxing exchange controls, thus permitting further wealth outflow. It was the height of United Nations incompetence or irony that Zuma was last week named as co-chair of Ban Ki-moon’s new panel on global sustainability, “tasked with finding ways to lift people out of poverty while tackling climate change and ensuring that economic development is environmentally friendly.” And after the United Nations climate summit in Cancun fails in December 2010, a year later Zuma will host the Johannesburg follow-up to the Kyoto Protocol, whose targets of 5 per cent emissions reduction expire in 2012. What might we expect? Beholden as he is to mining/smelting capital, with his son and nephew seeking mineral-tycoon status, Zuma signed the Copenhagen Accord last December. But this mainly confirmed that his climate-vulnerable kin in rural Zululand will suffer so that Melbourne and London shareholders of BHP Billiton and Anglo American can continue receiving the world’s cheapest electricity, from South Africa’s rapidly-expanding coal-fired power generators. Just so you are warned.)

As commodity prices soared from 2002-08, the outflow of wealth was amplified. But dating to the independence of so many countries over the past five decades, the story is the same: Africa is being looted in a manner that even World Bank environmental staff are openly acknowledging, even if Devarajan has ignored their research. Hence it is misleading to the point of mischievousness for Devarajan to contradict my assertion that Africans are getting poorer.

The interview then turned to public policies associated with the looting of Africa.

CBC: The World Bank gets a lot of heat for your [ie Davarajan’s World Bank] structural readjustment program from some quarters. And that is when you offer to countries interest-free loans but they’re contingent on some pretty severe austerity measures that some people say can be counterproductive because they hurt the economies in question more than they help them. And you’ve been criticized, notably, by economists like Patrick Bond and I’d like you to listen one more time to something he’s told us.

Patrick Bond: The World Bank and also the International Monetary Fund, they sort of fooled us, in 2008-2009, because they seemed to shift their ideology away from a very hard-core agenda of promoting markets above everything else. And for a time it seems they were promoting government deficits and a Keynesian strategy: government should step in when the private sector fails. But now it seems like it’s back to business as usual, namely export orientation and austerity. And the World Bank, led by President Robert Zoellick who had come from the Bush Administration - he worked for Enron and for Goldman Sachs – this sort of leadership, and the Northern orientation and the banker mentality, means that the only way forward is to get away from these institutions, maybe to default on their debt, to kick them out of the country. And Latin America provides a good model for doing both of those things.

CBC: And in fact some Latin American countries, Argentina, successfully told the institutions like yourself and the IMF to take a hike, and in fact it ended up doing them a lot of good. So how do you respond to someone like Patrick Bond?

Shanta Devarajan: Oh I think again that we have to look at the facts. There’s no question that the structural adjustment policies of the 1980s and early 1990s received a lot of criticism. But then ask the question, ‘what changed?’ As I was saying, the growth has accelerated since the 1990s. We can’t hide from that fact. And you look at what changed. And it’s that these countries adopted exactly the Washington Consensus policies in the mid-1990s, the African countries. The difference is that they did it out of their own accord, out of domestic political consensus, rather than imposed from Washington or Paris or London. And I think that’s the point that people are not recognizing, that the actual policies that are generating the growth, are actually very similar to what was criticized in the structural adjustment era.

Again, African GDP growth may have accelerated as commodity prices rose, but Africa became poorer once we calculate the net wealth effect and genuine savings. Devarajan can’t hide from that fact.

To disguise this by saying that structural adjustment did not work before the mid-1990s because it was ‘imposed’ by Devarajan’s colleagues, but did work after the mid-1990s because it was adopted through a ‘domestic political consensus’, is the most bizarre claim I’ve ever heard about African macroeconomics. There has never been a political consensus to structurally adjust Africa, aside from the permanent problem of unpatriotic elites who are more closely allied with Washington, Paris, London, Brussels and Beijing string-pullers than with their subjects (a problem which in his 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon so eloquently brought to our attention).

The Bank’s 2006 book mentions one obvious policy conclusion, learning from a country with petroleum resources that did not fall victim to resource curse: “Norway has used the flow accounts for energy and greenhouse gas emissions to assess a policy that many countries are considering: changing the structure of taxes to increase taxes on emissions and resource use.”

But liberalization imposed by the World Bank’s lending staff does precisely the opposite. This is the sort of schizophrenia we have come to expect from Bank researchers who arrive at common-sense ‘talk-left’ conclusions, such as that extracting resources from Africa leaves the continent poorer. But it is not surprising that Devarajan and World Bank operational staff ‘walk right’ when it counts, in interviews with gullible journalists like CBC’s Mike Finnerty (who failed to follow up on either of Devarajan’s whoppers) and when imposing neoliberal policies on wretched African elites.

In this context, the only encouraging signs are the myriad of challenges to extractive industries by activists who often put their bodies on the line in sites of sustained state and corporate violence like the Eastern DRC where human-rights watchdogs struggle to document a history of resource-extraction-related mass murder adding up to maybe 5 million overallx—in such enterprises as Zimbabwe’s Marange diamond mines, South Africa’s Limpopo and Northwest Province platinum fields and the Eastern Cape’s titanium-rich Xolobeni beaches, the Niger Delta’s oil-soaked creeks and Chad’s oil fields, Firestone’s Liberian plantations, Lesotho’s dams supplying Johannesburg’s water consumers, and other dam displacement zones including Gibe in Ethiopia, Mphanda Nkuwa in Mozambique and Bujagali in Uganda, to name just a few.

Because World Bank officials can be counted on to ignore their own research and hence continue promoting non-renewable resource exports; because this arrangement suits multinational corporations and donor agencies; and because African elites will continue taking this advice (often with sweetener bribes as was the case of the African National Congress’ role in the Medupi power plant controversy, funded by the Bank’s largest-ever project loan, for $3.75 billion, in April 2010), Africa will grow progressively poorer.

The African networks of civil society which promote ‘publish what you pay’ and other gambits for transparency, participation and human rights should finally come to the realization that this system of looting is not going to be reformed under the prevailing balance of power, and that much more forceful resistance to extraction is required – and is underway.

Patrick Bond directs the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal – http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs - and from September will be on sabbatical at the University of California/Berkeley Department of Geography. He can be reached at  pbond@mail.ngo.za