Nearly two weeks into the 1994 mass killings in Rwanda that would ultimately be called genocide, Eric P. Schwartz, a human rights specialist on the National Security Council, wrote a memorandum to his White House colleagues voicing alarm over reports of tens of thousands of slaughtered ethnic Tutsis.
Human rights groups were pleading for the Clinton administration to help keep 2,500 U.N. peacekeepers on the scene in the Central African country. Human Rights Watch, the New York-based advocacy group, was warning that Rwandans will quickly become victims of genocide.
Is this true? Schwartz asked Susan Rice, at the time a 29-year-old director of international organizations and peacekeeping on the National Security Council (NSC), and Donald Steinberg, then the NSCs new director for African affairs, according to a recently declassified White House memo dated April 19, 1994. If so, shouldnt it be a major factor informing high-level decision-making on this issue? Has it been?
In the end, the fate of Rwandas victims hardly figured at all in U.S. calculations about the international communitys response to what turned out to be the worst mass killing since the Holocaust, according to hundreds of pages of internal White House memos.
On the contrary, Richard Clarke, a special assistant to President Bill Clinton on global affairs in the NSC and Rices boss, had already been looking for a way out of Rwanda for months. Rwandas descent into mass killing, paradoxically, provided a fresh opportunity.
We make a lot of noise about terminating U.N. forces that arent working, Clarke wrote on April 9, just three days after the genocide started. Well, few could be as clearly not working. We should work with the French to gain a consensus to terminate the U.N. mission.
The Clinton administrations failure to muster a credible international response to Rwandas mass murder has been amply documented over the past two decades. President Clinton and his key aides including National Security Advisor Anthony Lake, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright, and Rice, who has since risen to become President Barack Obamas top national security advisor have all publicly expressed regret that they didnt do more to stem the killing.
But the recently declassified documents which include more than 200 pages of internal memos and handwritten notes from Rice and other key White House players provide a far more granular account of how the White House sought to limit U.N. action. They fill a major gap in the historical record, providing the most detailed chronicle to date of policy instructions and actions taken by White House staffers, particularly Clarke and Rice, who appear to have exercised greater influence over U.S. policy on Rwanda than the White Houses Africa hands.
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But these documents also alter the public record. It was the White House, not a beleaguered Belgian government that had just suffered the brutal murder of 10 of its soldiers, that was the first to advocate a pullout of U.N. blue helmets from Rwanda during the genocide, where they served as a last line of defense for tens of thousands of terrified Tutsi civilians.
