Newly released documents from the Clinton presidential library reveal
how the administration worked to explain the often-criticized U.S.
response to genocide in Rwanda.
Documents preparing President Bill Clinton for an interview with a Washington Post
reporter, Tom Lippman, suggest a range of responses to possible
criticisms of the administration’s response to one of the most serious
post-war humanitarian crises.
Over around 100 days in the summer of 1994, members of Rwanda’s Hutu
majority slaughtered between 500,000 and a million people, predominantly
Tutsis. The international community was condemned for its slow
reaction, which was in part attributed to the killing of several U.S.
troops during an earlier United Nations mission in Somalia.
 |
| Former US President Bill Clinton meets Rwanda's President Paul Kagame during a visit to Kigali in 2006 |
The memo for the president, written in September 1994 by a close
aide, Tara Sonenshine, attempts to rebut potential criticisms in turn.
If Lippman suggested the U.S. experience in Somalia had prevented
Clinton from doing “the right thing,” Sonenshine suggested the president
should respond: “If we were truly spooked by Somalia, we would have
turned away entirely, instead of committing 4,000 American troops and
spending $500 million to give the people of Rwanda humanitarian help.”
Another answer suggests an earlier deployment of peacekeepers to the
region should be used to say the administration had “responded to danger
signs – not ignored them”, and makes a defense of a U.S. decision in
April, weeks before the genocide began, to push for the U.N. to withdraw
its peacekeepers.
Sonenshine was, however, unable to offer a rebuttal to every line of questioning she could foresee.
“On the decision NOT to provide U.S. peacekeepers and the notion that
PRD 25 [Likely a typographical error in a reference to PDD-25, a
Clinton directive governing U.S. involvement in U.N. peacekeeping
missions] was designed to limit peacekeeping,” she wrote “with Rwanda
fast-becoming the litmus test of that unwillingness — I leave that to
you!”
A later note from Sonenshine to one of Clinton’s speechwriters, Bob
Boorstein, returns to the subject of Rwanda, gently admonishing some in
the administration for spurning the idea of a “moral” foreign policy.
“I know you bristled at the term “moral” especially vis-a-vis foreign
policy,” Sonenshine wrote, “but the reality is that this president has a
moral compass … we fail to trumpet the fact that he has the moral
courage to take on difficult issues such as staying in Somalia even
after the killing of U.S. servicemen, bringing the force of the entire
U.S. military to bear on the crisis in Rwanda [and] sticking up for
democracy in Haiti.”
Source: theguardian.com
SCROLL DOWN TO LEAVE A COMMENT
No comments:
Post a Comment