"The fact that nearly 1,500 highly capable troops from France, Italy and Belgium landed in Kigali within days, with several hundred U.S. Marines standing by in Burundi, to evacuate the expatriates and a few hundred selected Rwandans, and then left in the face of the unfolding tragedy and with full knowledge of the danger confronting the emasculated U.N. force, is inexcusable by any human criteria. [The U.N. Mission] was abandoned by all, including most of our civilian staff (by order), and we were left to fend for ourselves for weeks. That we were left in this state with neither mandate nor supplies--defensive stores, ammunition, medical supplies, or water, and with only survival rations that were either rotten or inedible--is a description of inexcusable apathy by the sovereign states that make up the U.N. that is completely beyond comprehension and moral acceptability."
The Quality of Mercy
WHY PEACEKEEPING FAILS By Dennis C. Jett; St. Martin's Press: 240 pp., $49
HARD CHOICES Moral Dilemmas in Humanitarian Intervention By Jonathan Moore; Rowman & Littlefield: 320 pp., $24.95
DELIVER US FROM EVIL; Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict By William Shawcross; Simon & Schuster: 416 pp., $27.50
Kofi Annan was under-secretary general for peacekeeping at the time. Unlike Albright and Clinton, Annan has stopped short of apologizing for his oversight. What does it tell us about the U.N. that not a single official thought fit to resign over the first indisputable genocide since the U.N. Charter was signed?
The U.N. Secretariat has blundered many times, but it is an organization more sinned against than sinning. Dallaire is right to point the finger at "the sovereign states that make up the U.N." One in particular stands out. Rwanda tested Presidential Decision Directive 25 to destruction. The White House's judgment was fatally clouded during those weeks in April 1994, when Hutu power launched its final solution. Perhaps the unburied and unmourned dead of Rwanda also torment Clinton and his secretary of state six years on.
Mogadishu and Kigali are the twin totems of warlordism and peacekeeping at the beginning of the 21st century. They are also the twin taboos--spoken of rarely, still more rarely analyzed and understood. William Shawcross' attempt to write a contemporary account of the U.N.'s peacekeeping role, without trying to understand these episodes and their interpretation, misinterpretation and non-interpretation, is Hamlet without the ghost. On solid ground with Cambodia--the subject of his finest earlier books--Shawcross has missed the wider plot with "Deliver Us From Evil."
