December 11, 2001

As a middle power, Canada has had an abiding interest in contributing to the emergence of a rules-based international political system. Humanitarian diplomacy and peacekeeping find broad support in Canadian society. Policies based on compassion are seen to distinguish Canadian foreign policy from the self-serving unilateralism of the United States.

This is the spirit that Carol Off (an experienced reporter for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) brings to her fascinating account of the work done for the United Nations by three Canadians, Romeo Dallaire, Lewis MacKenzie, and Louise Arbour.

Brigadier General Romeo Dallaire, who had no previous experience in peacekeeping, was the leader of the United Nations Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR) in 1993-1994. This Mission, consisting of 2,500 soldiers, was sent to help the Tutsi and Hutu nationalists in Rwanda to bring an end to their conflict in accordance with the Arusha Agreement that they had signed in 1993. But Dallaire found that extremist Hutus associated with the President of Rwanda planned to torpedo the implementation of the Arusha Agreement, and to kill the entire population of Tutsis.

Dallaire prepared a strategy to foil their scheme, but his superiors at the UN forbade him from implementing it. They feared that if Dallaire employed force, and incurred casualties, contributing nations could withdraw their men. As a result, the opportunity to nip this evil in the bud was missed and 800,000 Tutsi citizens of Rwanda were killed. Dallaire kept making practical proposals for putting a swift end to the genocide, while using all the resources at his command to save as many lives as he could. Even when his contingent of peacekeepers was reduced to 450 men, Dallaire did not quit. For this, he is characterised by Off as the lion in The story of UN peacekeeping during the 1990s.

The genocide in Rwanda ended in July 1994 with defeat of the Rwandan regime by the Tutsi army of the Rwanda Patriotic Front.

The fox in the story, is Brigadier General Lewis Mackenzie, who unlike Dallaire, was a highly experienced peacekeeper. He was based in Sarajevo as Chief of Staff to the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR). As someone familiar with the limitations of traditional peacekeeping, MacKenzie wished that the parties to the conflict would quickly come to an agreement that he could help them to enforce. The issues of justice, and of saving lives did not have priority. The lives that he was most interested in saving were those of his own men. In his desperation for an agreement, he kept pressing the Bosnian leaders to give up their dream of a multi-ethnic democratic state, and to concede the demand of Yugoslav backed Serbian aggressors that the legitimate Government of Bosnia only represented the Muslim population of the country.

The widespread perception that MacKenzie was taking sides led to the premature end of his assignment. But by then, the international community had already begun to treat the conflict in Bosnia as an ethnic civil war, and had slammed an arms embargo on the Bosnians, leaving them defenceless against aggression. More than 200,000 Bosnians died in the conflict. The Dayton Accords that ended the conflict in 1995 recognized the claim of extremist Serbians that they were a separate nation, by creating an entity called Republika Srpska within Bosnia.

The eagle in the saga of the United Nations’ largely unsuccessful efforts to deal with gross violations of human rights, according to Carol Off, is Judge Louise Arbour, who became the Prosecutor of the international war crimes tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda in 1996. Like Dallaire, Arbour had no previous experience in dealing with international human rights issues, and like him, she was idealistic, and felt that she could actually contribute towards breaking the culture of impunity that protected violators of human rights. She soon discovered that seasoned diplomats actually saw the setting up of the two tribunals as a step that was meant to deal with the clamour in global civil society for bringing the war criminals of Yugoslavia and Rwanda to justice. They had no intention of actually enabling the tribunals to succeed.

The Serbians who had been indicted for war crimes continued to live comfortably in the NATO controlled parts of Bosnia. Louise Arbour began a campaign to shame NATO governments into arresting them, and had limited success in this endeavour. She managed to convince Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi to permit her to arrest most of the prominent Rwandans resident in Nairobi, who had been indicted for the genocide of the Tutsis.

When the crisis erupted in Kosovo, Arbour highlighted the human rights dimension by making an attempt to visit sites of reported massacres. She also affirmed that NATO actions would also fall under the jurisdiction of her Tribunal, and agreed to investigate the bombing of a television station in Belgrade that was not a military target. Finally, Arbour took the bold decision to indict Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosovic on charges of gross violations of human rights.

It is not a coincidence that General Dallaire and Judge Arbour, who had no previous experience of working for the United Nations, were idealistic, and they tried to do their best despite the resistance that they encountered. On the other hand, General MacKenzie the experienced peacekeeper was so familiar with the culture of inertia, and of the limitations imposed by it, that he did not even make an effort to achieve the objectives of his mission.

On the basis of her study of the its failures, Carol Off has charged that the UN is an organization without a moral compass. There appears to be some evidence that the UN is prepared to change. A panel of experts headed by Lakhdar Brahimi has proposed a radical rethinking of the concept of peacekeeping, and a complete restructuring of the UN’s way of handling situations that warrant humanitarian intervention. It has suggested the creation of standing rapid reaction forces that could be quickly rushed to situations where gross violations of human rights could be expected to occur.

The International Criminal Court is expected to start functioning after seventeen more states ratify the relevant documents. When these initiatives come to fruition, the United Nations will have greater ability to take timely action to prevent gross violations of human rights, and to bring organizers of genocide and ethnic cleansing and the torturers, and rapists associated with them to justice.

Carol Off’s exclusive focus on the UN’s failings, however, misses the point made among others by eminent Canadian diplomat John W. Holmes, that the “United Nations can do only what its members find a consensus to do”. The most powerful countries of the world have sought to use the UN as an instrument to achieve their national security interests. Resources are available when the UN is used to legitimize the use of force, to clean up the mess thus created, and to provide minimal humanitarian relief when conflict is over.

We see a similar reliance on the UN in the ongoing intervention against Afghanistan. On the other hand, the behaviour is very different when the need arises to risk lives, and to devote resources in situations that are not perceived as being national security priorities. For example, in situations like the one in East Timor in 1975, Bosnia in 1991, and Rwanda in 1993, either nothing is done, or ill-defined missions are dispatched merely for the sake of making it appear that something is being done.

Carl Off has made a valuable contribution by describing how the culture of political inertia, and the lack of resources hinder the efforts of dedicated individuals in the United Nations institutions charged with the prevention of genocide and ethnic cleansing. But for this state of affairs to change it will also be essential for individual members of the international community to give up their obsession with narrow national security concerns, and to make the necessary resources available to the UN.

The lion, the fox, and the eagle: a story of generals and justice in Rwanda and Yugoslavia
By Carol Off
Random House
ISBN 0679310495
406pp. $29.71

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