The Limits Of 'cook And Look' Interventionism

THE LIMITS OF ‘COOK AND LOOK’ INTERVENTIONISM: WOULD A US-LED INTERVENTION IN RWANDA IN 1994 HAVE BEEN DIFFERENT FROM THE EARLIER ONE IN SOMALIA? (Sabiiti Mutengesa, Department of War Studies, King’s College London, December 2006)

Humanity continues to be haunted by the collective shame caused by the inertia exhibited in the face of the 1994 climax of the many decades of systematic murder of the Rwanda Tutsi. One of the manifestations of that shame is the common view that, if the United States had acted, the genocide would not have materialised. This study examines that assumption by focusing on the prevention of genocide as the mission that would have justified any intervention in Rwanda. The writer does not necessarily hold that the intervention in Somalia was successful, as is often in implied when it is argued that the a US led intervention in Rwanda would have yielded better results than what we witnessed in Somalia.

I argue that, even if the United States had overcome its strategic disinterest in Rwanda, it would have been handicapped by the lack of fit between prevailing peace support doctrine on one hand, and the complexities of the conflicts in the deeply fragmented polities of the Third World, one other. I also posit that, the false portrayal of genocide as an event, rather than a drawn-out process; and equating the processes with episodes of extermination denies the well-meaning the capacity to make timely responses as happened in Rwanda. I add that, challenges ranging from the lack of proper intelligence, poor in-theatre logistical infrastructure, military manpower limitations and the potential for secondary conflicts with key actors in Rwanda would have made a US-led intervention in that country as unsuccessful as similar interventions elsewhere in the world.

Impediments to the Effectiveness of Multinational Forces: Constituting an effective multilateral intervention force involves making ‘difficult tradeoffs between establishing a clear structure and creating a coalition of peace forces that is both politically broad and militarily sufficient’ (Bennet, 1998: 140). The experiences of the interventions of the 1990s only demonstrate the challenges of attaining this balance, more so in cases where the United States military was predominant or in leadership or both. This was especially evident with small or medium sized intervention forces that employed the traditional model based on the concept of a ‘lead nation’ (Connaughton, 1996). Experience shows that this model tended to be inappropriate to the point of 1

jeopardising the overall mission, a typical case being that of Somalia.

There is no

reason to believe that Rwanda would have been any different.

In Somalia, the overall commander was the head of the Turkish contingent; but the chain of command was mainly American, with even the UN special representative being a retired US admiral. The predominance of the US in the Force HQ, in planning the conduct of operations, resource management - some of which was retained under national command - and in the military approach to the task had the effect of undermining the cohesion of the force and led to the premature withdrawal of the major participating nations (Palin, 1995:23).

It has to be borne in mind that, any likely intervention in Rwanda would have taken place within six months of the Somalia operation and it is most uncertain that lessons would have been learnt that early and arguably, similar omissions would have arisen with much the same undesirable consequences.

Moreover it is unimaginable that a US-led, or for that matter, any other intervention, would have been immune to the problems that had already become evident within the UNAMIR, especially given that the latter would either have been the predominant component of, or even formed the core around which a subsequent intervention force will have been built. In light of the world’s apparent lack of awareness of the crisis that was unfolding in Rwanda, the scaling up of the UN presence would have necessarily been precipitous, requiring the Peace-keeping department to constitute an ad hoc multinational force, to augment the ‘Tower of Babel’ that was UNAMIR. 1

As Heidenrich notes, ‘UNAMIR brought out many of the worst problems inherent in multinational forces especially when there is little international willingness to face combat in an obscure, unimportant country (2001: 198). The 21-nation force faced difficulties in sharing critical intelligence and to achieve a smooth flow of commands because of language barriers. A Bengali officer who spoke neither Dutch nor French chaired the force level intelligence briefings. Although orders were sent by radio, on many occasions the Bangladeshi contingent commander refused to carry them out always insisting that he wanted them in writing. 1

UNAMIR was drawn from Austria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Canada, Congo, Egypt, Fiji, Ghana, Malawi, Netherlands, Nigeria, Poland, Romania, Russian Federation, Senegal, Togo, Tunisia, Uruguay and Zimbabwe with each country having an average representation of 130 personnel. 2

In all probability, even a US-led intervention in Rwanda would have been bogged down by similar problems as was in fact even evident in Somalia where each UN task had to be approved in advance and every country had a de facto veto. 2

Deficiencies in Prevalent Peace Operations Doctrine

Even the most casual look at the doctrine that is currently employed in intervention operations reveals critical inadequacies that render it incapable of satisfactorily addressing the crises of the Rwanda or Somali type that spring from protracted social conflicts associated with the twin processes of nation building and state making.

In its original form, the doctrine emerged out of an operational environment that was characterised by a largely bipolar configuration of disputants on a linear battlefield where peacekeeping tasks were idiot-proof, at least in as far as one was sure of eliciting compliance from the warring parties. In such conflicts the peacekeeper had only to survive through the initial phase of extricating the adversaries from each other and positioning himself in a demilitarised zone where he would carry out an occasional patrol and maintain a roadblock to check civilian movements.

Owing to its static and

predictable nature, the British Army has dubbed buffer zone duty as ‘cook and look’ (Donald, 2002:109).

In these circumstances, peacekeeping was a ‘military solution to a military problem’, in an era when combatants were employed in the pursuit of policy, when if policy changed, third party soldiers who were legitimate, impartial, neutral, transparent, credible and could be relied on to act restraint, 3 and could hold the ring until the political processes kicked in again.

In such conflicts, deployment of intervention forces by “interposition” was possible because there were identifiable, often two belligerents in between which one could position oneself. As the conflict in Somalia demonstrated, third world conflicts may be fought out by dozens of disputants formed village by village, most times with no clear or reliable chain of command, with an apolitical and unclear grievance structure. Some 2

Italian, French and Pakistani forces at times declined to take part in offensive operations at times rendering the whole notion of a ‘coalition’ hollow (Bennet, op. cit)

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US Army (2003), p. 4.13 3

may be driven by individual survival, revenge and vendettas (Donald, 2002:111). Such amorphous and interminably fissiparous conflicts that erupt from a horizontally differentiated social structure leave little room for the application of traditional peacekeeping doctrine.

Analysts such as Luttwak have introduced a new critique of the shortcomings of interventionism by convincingly arguing that, thorough prosecution of wars may provide a more lasting peace than many attempts to end conflicts peacefully and that hopes of military success must fade for accommodation to become more attractive than further combat. He claims that well-meaning relief aid and ceasefires often prolong conflict by allowing combatants to reconstitute their capabilities, which in the case of Rwanda, the genocidaires would have been able to do. He controversially, if justifiably adds that ‘If the United Nations helped the strong defeat the weak faster and more decisively, it would actually enhance the peacemaking potential of war’ (Luttwak, 1999). He gets support from those who assert that, in many African crises, ICRC often turns out to mean ‘Inadvertent Collateral Resourcing of Conflict’.

The doctrine writers of the 90s have attempted to address the ‘new’ environment but all they have done is to re-emphasize the old principles borne out of the experiences of conflicts in industrial settings, with minimal accommodation for the intricate realities of the crises that will continue to erupt in agrarian and pre-industrial societies.

The

emergency in Rwanda was a phenomenon of the latter type, distinct from the wars of what is clearly another era.

Its very complexity was bound to yield an even more

unsuccessful result for a US-led intervention than was witnessed in Somalia. I would therefore argue that applying peace support doctrine as we know it now, to what have been variously characterized as ‘complex emergencies’ or ‘new wars’ is akin to thrusting a round peg into a square hole: an exercise in futility. The ‘Fashoda Syndrome’: 4 US-led Intervention and French Sensitivities

On the diplomatic front, two key factors would have seriously militated against the success of a US-led intervention in Rwanda, namely, the longstanding animosity 4

Fashoda is a town in Southern Sudan along the Nile where in 1898 French forces marching eastwards confronted the south-bound British Army, in the collision between the Cape-Cairo and Dakar –Djibout dreams in what almost caused a European war. For Britain the control of the Nile was critical for her interests in Egypt especially in the cotton crop. The standoff lasted for some weeks with the French eventually retiring. 4

between France and the ‘Anglosaxons’ and the morbidly possessive relationship France has with her African Francophone domains.

Rwanda, located at the confluence of the two overarching Western European politicocultural influences or as was formerly known, spheres of influence of Francophone and Anglophone Africa would definitely have been a test case for the unity of the Western powers.

In Paris, journalists, diplomats and politicians viewed the invasion by the

English speaking RPF from Uganda as an Anglo-Saxon conspiracy to humiliate France and undermine her influence in what in French political circles is referred to as ‘le pre carre’ – our own backyard 5 and to create ‘an arc of influence from Ethiopia and Eritrea via Uganda, Rwanda and Zaire to Congo and Gabon’ (Huliaras, 1998).

In a reverse of France’s past attempts at the Gabon to Djibouti march, France perceived the Rwanda Patriotic Front as the Trojan horse that was destined to undermine client regimes in Congo-Brazaville, Cameroon and Gabon. As the RPF consolidated its hold, a French senior officer was overheard lamenting that, ‘….the worst is yet to come. These bastards will go all the way to Kinshasa now. And how in God's name am I going to explain to our friends that we have let down one of our own?’ By reference to ‘bastards’, the French were really not insulting the RPF but needling the rebels’ perceived patrons, the United States.

Such undercurrents had the potential of spawning diplomatic

standoffs that would have dissipated the energies of the interveners.

Shortfalls in United States’ Intelligence Holdings on Rwanda

According to most assessments of intelligence holdings on Rwanda, the US security establishment had such a dearth of vital information that in the event of intervention, the military would have had to deploy blindly into the troubled country, a factor that would have vitiated against success. Power indicates that the problem was of such great magnitude that on learning of the plane crash that claimed the life of President Habyarimana, staff officers to the director of strategic plans and policy at the Pentagon were overheard inquiring whether the people in Rwanda were Hutu and Tutsi or Tutu and Hutsi, confirming that, ‘…. Rwanda had never been of more than marginal concern to Washington’s most influential planners’ (2003: 330).

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Prunier (1995), p. 103; Marchal (1998). 5

Kuperman notes that the United States had only a single human intelligence asset in Central Africa, the overstretched Defence Advisor in Yaounde, Cameroon, who covered all the eight Francophone countries in the region, a key weakness in intelligence gathering (2001:24). This, Kuperman notes, was added to the following three trends: •

At a most critical point the violence was depicted as a two-sided affair, and a logical progression of the civil war and a break down of the Arusha Accords, with the assumption that since the Tutsi were winning, and the worst prospect could only have been a retaliatory massacre of the Hutu. Many of the reports that emerged from media houses and advocacy organisations reflected this confusion, not least General Dallaire who, a week into the violence perceived the mayhem as reciprocal massacres.

•

There was no unity in intelligence gathering/sharing within the components of the US national security establishment, the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Council, State Department and as already alluded to above, even the Department of Defence. Only the Defence Intelligence Agency had sources of information armed to closely monitor events but because of interagency competition, this information would never flow up the chain of authority

•

Misreporting and under reporting:

a. Most reporting and subsequently, intervention planning was Kigali-focused, yet the city had only about 4% of the country’s population, and most massacres were rural.

b. The total strength of Hutu militias was reported as 1700 by key informers and this turned out to be the number operating only in the Kigali metropolitan cellules 6 , whereas the strength of militias country-wide was anywhere between 30,000-50,000, excluding augmentees from Burundi (Mamdani, 2001:206; Prunier, 1995:243). Therefore any deployment planning based on reported figures would have been inherently inaccurate by about 2,000% and would have set the stage for a sloppy intervention.

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Dallaire (1994). 6

c. General Dallaire’s request for 5,000 additional troops was partly derived from this report; and partly from a computation based on the generic attacker to defender ratio of 3:1 used in tactical planning. Given that any likely combat operations were bound to be irregular, using a tie-down ratio for conventional operations was fundamentally defective. The figure of 5,000 is bandied around by Human Rights organisations, respected bodies like the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict and even Congress and would most likely have been used in planning a US-led intervention.

d. General Dallaire’s estimate appears to have been partly inspired by nostalgia and memories of past assignments. Feil quotes him lamenting that, ‘I came to the United Nations from commanding a mechanised brigade group of 5,000 soldiers. If I had had that brigade group in Rwanda, there would be hundreds of thousands of lives spared today’ (1997:1).

These, among other weaknesses in intelligence gathering meant that, first of all, a USled intervention would not have been in time to prevent, slow or stop the genocide because it would have long ended, secondly, the gaps in intelligence would have resulted in faulty deployment planning.

Both factors in combination with others

discussed in the essay would have made for a significantly unsuccessful intervention.

Logistical Obstacles to Successful Intervention:

Any US-led intervention in Rwanda would have heavily depended on the United States’ logistic capability and strategic airlift assets. However, the United States would have had to contend with the challenge of accessing landlocked Rwanda 10,000 km away, tucked deep in a region that has a dearth of theatre airlift facilities/infrastructure and no decent reserves of aviation fuel.

The aviation fuel demand for Operation Turquoise almost

ground to a halt all commercial aviation in Central Africa just like Operation Restore Hope threatened to paralyse the whole of Sub-Saharan Africa until Shell was drafted directly to support the operation. A full-blown intervention would have been on a grander scale and would have faced severe handicaps.

Kuperman estimates that airlifting the desired number of US personnel (about 13,000) with their kit (about 26, 000 tonnes) would have taken no less than 40 days. When one adds about a week, the interval between receipt of deployment orders and initiation of 7

airlifting, operations would have started in earnest in June 1994 (2001: 56). By this time most of the genocide’s victims had already been massacred. This coupled with the fact that the United States had other ongoing commitments in the Gulf, Haiti and Bosnia would not have portended well for an intervention in Rwanda and would have had the potential of yielding a poorer result than what we saw with the more accessible Somalia.

When is Genocide Ripe for Intervention?

The major challenge to the well meaning who hope to intervene to stem future genocides is the question whether genocide is an event or a process, and whether indeed as witnessed in Rwanda, the gory acts of the crushing of the skulls of victims, the slashing of their carotids and the smashing of their limbs, i.e., extermination, is all that genocide amounts to.

I would argue that, portraying genocide as an event, as is currently the practice, is misleading and only predisposes prospective interveners to the embarrassment of, at best wising after the event and rationalising inertia; at worst, indulging in shameful denial.

Worse still this narrow portrayal of genocide obstructs analysts and policy

makers from understanding its historical specificity as a type of mass murder thus blinding them from visualising ‘the large scale socio-historical processes that create the necessary conditions for genocide to happen’ (Dufour, 2001).

This essay identifies with Stanton who looks at genocide as a continuum that unfolds through ‘eight stages that are predictable but not exorable’ with the earlier critical stages giving a window of opportunity for meaningful intervention. He identifies the eight stages as classification, symbolization, dehumanization, organization, polarization, identification extermination and denial, factors that play out over a long period of time giving room for preventive action (1998, 2002).

When genocide is viewed along this schema, it

becomes evident that most counter-genocide interventions, and specifically, the knee jerk reactions to the Rwanda debacle are always in the belated stages of the continuum of genocide and are therefore almost always predestined to achieve very little by virtue of being time barred.

I view any likely US-led intervention in this light and contend that, it would not have been successful in altering the course of the genocide.

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CONCLUSION The debate on what a ‘prompt’ and robustly constituted - and suitably US-led intervention in Rwanda would have achieved in light of the events after 06 April 1994 will remain with us for many years to come; if not for dealing with collective guilt, at least for learning a few lessons. What the foregoing essay has tried to demonstrate is that, once we overcome the limitations imposed by indifference to the plight of others and preoccupation with self, the next more daunting task will be refining the perceptions, concepts, and principles that guide such actions as humanitarian intervention.

The position of this study is, that the letter and spirit of the fashionable intervention doctrines is akin to a therapeutic approach that seeks to save the life of an ailing man by carrying out radical surgery at the very moment when the only meaningful action is post mortem.

Additionally, limitless endowment with ‘hardware’: military forces, transportation capabilities, elaborate bureaucracies, life support and relief supplies cannot effectively compensate for shortfalls in ‘software’; that is, pertinent doctrines, insights into the sensitivities of allies, knowledge of zones of prospective intervention, compassion, political will and diplomatic acumen. The failed intervention in Somalia was in many ways symptomatic of a ‘software’ deficit. An intervention in Rwanda as argued above would have suffered a similar fate.

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