Transcript: No More Rwandas

 

 

MARK SOMMER: As genocide was unfolding in Rwanda in 1994, prodded by messages instigating Hutu aggression against minority Tutsi on state-run hate radio, the U.N. force commander, General Roméo Dallaire, pleaded with his superiors at the U.N. to send additional troops to support his meager peacekeeping operation.

 

__: If you stated that all hell’s breaking loose in Kigali, that would be a reasonably fair statement. During the night, mostly the presidential guard, although a few members of a couple other units, have gone on a rampage, killing, destroying, massacring, mutilating.

 

MARK SOMMER: But his calls fell on deaf ears as bureaucrats in New York, Brussels, and Washington refused to risk the lives of their soldiers to stop the killing of hundreds of thousands of Rwandan civilians.

 

__: And by the time they(?) finally-- you know, I sort of started focusing on this and seeing the news reports coming out of it, it was too late to do anything about it. And I feel terrible about it, because I think we could have sent five, ten thousand troops there and saved a couple hundred thousand lives. I think we could have saved about half of them. But I will always regret that Rwanda thing(?). I will always feel terrible about it.

 

MARK SOMMER: Today on A World of Possibilities, No More Rwandas: Protecting The Innocents.Despite fervent pledges made by the international community following the Holocaust that never again would they stand idly by while innocent civilians were rounded up and massacred, we evidently didn’t learn our lesson.

 

In the 1990s, we failed to stop genocide in Rwanda and Srebrenica. And today, while the world wrings its hands but looks the other way, ethnic cleansing is taking place once more, this time in Darfur.

 

VICTORIA HOLT: It’s often more difficult to ask peacekeepers to use force, because the presumption is, they’re going into environment where there’s some rough peace to keep. How do they then act to provide physical protection to a population?

 

MARK SOMMER: Recently human rights advocates have been working with the U.N. to develop strategies that will prepare government bureaucrats, diplomats, military officers, and humanitarian workers to intervene in conflicts before they reach the stage of genocide. They call this new commitment on the part of the international community, the responsibility to protect.

 

MARK SCHNEIDER: Instead of saying, “When does the international community have the right to intervene to stop a government from doing something, it essentially said, at what point does the international community have a responsibility to protect?”

 

MARK SOMMER: It’s not that the international community doesn’t have the ability to stop crimes against humanity from taking place. It’s just that we aren’t prepared for it. In most cases, we don’t need to mount D-Day style invasions to stop or prevent mass killings. Better informed diplomats and strategically trained peacekeeping forces are key to the successful protection of civilians caught in the crossfire, especially if their efforts are augmented by the essential follow-through actions that prevent a return to violence, like establishing effective judicial institutions and mounting post-conflict reconstruction operations.

 

WILLIAM NASH: What happens is, if you don’t do something after you stop the initial killing, you could almost be sure that the killing will take place again.

 

MARK SOMMER: I’m Mark Sommer. Join us as we consider the real world implications of our collective commitment to protect those whom even their own governments fail to protect. Welcome to A World of Possibilities.

 

U.N.-speak is a language all its own, notorious for its legalese and diplomatic evasions. This is equally true when parsing the concept diplomats call responsibility to protect. But language aside, this is an innovative and potentially pattern changing shift, which, if widely adopted, could lay the foundation for more timely and decisive intervention by the international community in future Rwandas.

 

To bring us up to speed on what insiders call R2P, that is, capital ‘R', the number ‘2’, capital ‘P', guest Mark Schneider of the International Crisis Group, and Victoria Holt of the Stimson Center, explain how then U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan spearheaded this initiative at The United Nations. We’ll hear more from Mark and Torie later in the program as well.  

 

MARK SCHNEIDER: The convention against genocide came into being virtually at the same time as the creation of The United Nations. In a sense, it reflected a belief that, despite the view never again after the Holocaust, that there had in fact been significant instances of massive atrocities and ethnic cleansing recently in Rwanda and now in Darfur.

 

__: If we were to be confronted with a new Rwanda. Is the world ready to do it? Will the world move in to stop it? And my answer is, I really don’t know. I wish I can say yes. But I’m not convinced that we will see the kind of political will and action required to stop it.

 

VICTORIA HOLT: But after what happened in Rwanda, the Secretary General of the U.N., Kofi Annan, challenged the international community to do better and to come together and forge unity around what the responsibility of the world was to those who were facing genocide.

 

MARK SCHNEIDER: At what point can the international community step into a country and say, “Wait, you may not carry out those actions that result in the destruction of human life at this magnitude”?

 

VICTORIA HOLT: And the idea came out specifically from a commission in 2001. And they did a pretty amazing thing. They said, “Here — let’s think about it this way. Countries certainly are sovereign and we should respect and endow that sovereignty with responsibility. So if a country can no longer protect its own people from genocide, from ethnic cleansing or mass killing, large-scale atrocities. Then, but only then, their sovereignty falls away and the international community has a responsibility to protect those civilians.”

 

MARK SCHNEIDER: Instead of saying, “When does the international community have the right to intervene to stop a government from doing something,” it essentially said, “At what point does the international community have a responsibility to protect?”

 

VICTORIA HOLT: It could either be that a state is neglected or is even behind these levels of violence. But it can also be a situation where there’s a civil war. Preferably, this is all prevented in the first place. But what if the commission also emphasized-- was, “We don’t just try and prevent, we actually must react”?

 

MARK SCHNEIDER: It really has three elements to it — a responsibility to prevent, a responsibility to react, and then a responsibility, if you will, to rebuild in the event that there is military action.

 

MARK SOMMER: Only a decade after the U.N.’s tragic failure to intervene in Rwanda, the ethnic cleansing currently taking place in the Darfur region of Sudan presents the world once again with a test of our commitment to the responsibility to protect doctrine.

 

The International Crisis Group, a leader in the R2P movement, has also been at the forefront of international advocacy efforts to stop the killing in Darfur. Mark Schneider, a senior vice president at ICG joins us now from the ABC radio studios in Washington, D.C. to explain what the international community is currently doing in Darfur to try to halt the killing, and why it isn’t enough.

 

Bring us inside the argument that’s been going on about how to respond to Darfur. Because here is something that we can’t claim we don’t know about. In Rwanda, it happened so quickly, some people said, “Well, we just didn’t have any notion this was happening.” But it’s very complicated, isn’t it? There are some African Union peacekeepers there, but not nearly enough. And yet if the international community comes in the form of Western nations and Western militaries, doesn’t that provoke some kinds of sensitivities of Western former colonial nations intervening in a Muslim country?

 

MARK SCHNEIDER: To a certain degree, the beginning was an effort to use the variety of means available — diplomatic, humanitarian, non-military actions — to try and dissuade what was generally viewed as a government of Sudan undertaking actions which are resulting in ethnic cleansing and massive atrocities. More than 200,000 (and a conservative estimate) have died, and more than two million, perhaps now even closer to three million are either in a-- displaced from their homes by virtue of military action, either by the government of Sudan or by their paramilitary allies, the so-called Janjaweed, or fled across the border into other countries.

 

And initially the Secretary General called this to the attention of The United Nations and urged action. And there is an effort to focus on the diplomatic and humanitarian. And subsequently, they moved to the step of saying, “Well, let’s try and get an agreement for a cease fire.” And the African Union troops there really are there to monitor a cease fire, which was supposed to have been complied with by all sides. And the African Union troops have simply been incapable of providing the necessary kind of protection that would ensure an end to the killing.

 

MARK SOMMER: There’s also been mention of the possibility that NATO troops could go in, as many as 15,000 NATO troops. That’s a far distance from Europe. Would NATO really choose to become involved in the Sudan in this way?

 

MARK SCHNEIDER: I don't think that NATO-- At this stage anyway, they’re not inclined to put their troops into Sudan. And not too many people are asking them directly. What is being asked is, first, strengthening the current African Union mission, second, having U.N. command and control and communication support and additional mobility provided to the African Union troops. And the third phase is the one that probably has the potential of actually protecting civilians. And it was a hybrid force, A.U. and U.N., but with the U.N. command structure. And that was, as you noted, 17,000 additional troops that would go in there and protect the camps, provide for security, enforce a cease fire, and provide some safety for the displaced who go back to their homes. And that’s where the government of Sudan continues to balk.

 

MARK SOMMER: Do you think that at this point we need a more systematic approach to conflict prevention and peace-building than we’ve had to-date? And is the responsibility to protect one of those, sort of building blocks for that kind of comprehensive system?

 

MARK SCHNEIDER: We have argued that the responsibility to protect, and its internal elements, the responsibility to prevent, to react, and to rebuild, provides the basis, the justification for establishing precisely those kinds of instruments within the international arsenal to prevent conflict from occurring. And that is to have a much better analytic capacity within The United Nations system, whether it’s self-grown, if you will, or whether they draw on the resources available in the international community from NGOs like ourselves, or from other governments. But that there needs to be a bringing together the best possible information on current situations in potential conflict areas.

 

MARK SOMMER: Is the U.N. really up to this task? Or do we need to rethink the international community’s response? And where do we find the resources for the international community and the U.N. to really meet this on the level that it must be?

 

MARK SCHNEIDER: I think that one of the things that we’ve seen is that The United Nations hasn’t done a bad job when you get to the point of actually facilitating negotiations and a solution where-- in a sense where conflict is-- has run its course. When you look at the post-conflict actions taken by The United Nations, RAND Corporation did a study and found that the U.N. in fact had done a better job than others in helping define a post-conflict situation that resulted in stability, rather than a return to war.

 

The single most prevalent indicator of whether a country is going to move into conflict or war is whether in the past five years it has been in war or conflict. In other words, the failure of post-conflict reconstruction has been a significant cause of new conflict. The U.N. hasn’t been doing a bad job recently. And so I think one of the things is to strengthen their capacities, their political analysis capabilities, to strengthen their access to resources in terms of post-conflict reconstruction.

 

There’s no way to, in a sense, push it aside and create something totally new. But there is an opportunity to strengthen its capabilities and to make it more effective. And that should be the focus.

 

MARK SOMMER: Mark Schneider, a senior vice president at the International Crisis Group. In a moment, peace-building expect Victoria Holt.

ANNOUNCER: You’re listening to A World of Possibilities. To hear the podcast of this program and to access our show archives, please visit our website at AWorldOfPossibilities.com, or check out iTunes.

 

MARK SOMMER: Several years ago, the film Hotel Rwanda showed us harrowing fictionalized images of unprepared and unsupported U.N. peacekeepers overwhelmed by chaos and mayhem in Kigali. We’ll hear a clip from the movie in just a bit.

 

Victoria Holt, a senior advisor at the Stimson Center in Washington, D.C., is a leading expert on military preparedness for peace operations around the world. She and her colleagues at the Stimson Center have recently completed a book on the responsibility to protect called The Impossible Mandate? It’s meant to be a conversation starter. Try bringing it up at your next cocktail party.

 

The book attempts to identify what military capacity is needed, both at national and global levels, to allow the international community to act decisively on its responsibility to protect civilians from genocide and crimes against humanity. Victoria Holt joins us now from ABC radio in Washington, D.C. to tell us about some of the questions she’s sought to address in the book.

 

VICTORIA HOLT: We said, “Okay, how many international organizations have the authority to deploy military forces?” And there’s only five — The United Nations, NATO, the European Union, the African Union, and ECOWAS, which is the Economic Community of West African States in West Africa. And all five have their own authority to deploy forces and to do so in situations such as genocide.

 

So then the next question is, how do you know if they’re ready to go? And it’s not just a simple matter of, “Do they have logistic support or military personnel?” We said, “What are the tools that militaries traditionally used to prepare their own personnel to take action? And how many of those tools have been used to prepare soldiers or military leaders or civilian leadership to think about protecting civilians?” This is not a traditional task or a mission for military forces.

 

So what did we do? We looked at mandates. We looked at U.N. doctrine. We looked at training. We looked at rules of engagement. And we looked at the concepts of operations that are used across these organizations, as well as in major countries that contribute troops. And I could get into details on each of those. But what was very interesting is, that in general, broad terms, it’s not that they can’t do these missions, it’s just they haven’t sorted it out ahead of time. It’s not traditionally something (protection of civilians) that is covered in doctrine or in training.

 

MARK SOMMER: Let’s go to the training for a moment, because it’s really true-- isn’t it?-- by and large that at least national militaries really don’t train much for this kind of role. And they either fight wars or they enforce peaces, you know, in the form of military police and others. But they don’t do this in-between hybrid situation where they have not only to protect themselves, but civilians, and they have to use some force, but not total force. Is that very difficult to train for?

 

VICTORIA HOLT: Well, we don’t know how difficult to train for, because we haven’t really tried it that often. But you’re right, where you identify a gap, certainly militaries prepared to, say, uphold the Geneva Conventions where they know that their actions should not harm civilians and citizens. So it’s to do the least amount of harm possible.

 

We also know that most militaries are deployed to create security and stability, which in the long-run, should also protect civilians. What’s missing is this sort of interim area where they think about their mission in a more immediate way to provide protection directly.

 

Now, we know from the experience in Haiti in the ‘90s that rules of engagement were changed. So if a military officer or personnel witnessed, say, a woman being attacked on a street, they had the authority to intervene and protect that individual. But the harder question is, when it’s large groups of people, say in the eastern Congo in the last few years, where maybe a whole village comes under attack, or IDPs-- sorry-- displaced persons rushed towards a U.N. headquarters, what then do you do? And that’s where we like to see training come up-to-date.

 

MARK SOMMER: And what about the Security Council mandates governing peacekeeping operations? How do they address the responsibility to protect civilians?

 

VICTORIA HOLT: The Security Council, since 1999, has been asking peacekeeping forces to protect civilians under imminent threats. But what we found from our interviews in New York at the U.N. and with member states is there’s almost no explanation of what that means, first, to the head of the mission who has to lead the operation on the ground, next, to the force commanders, and then onwards, down to the troop-contributing countries.

 

So if you’ve got over 100 countries contributing peacekeepers to U.N. missions, just as an example, we need to make sure they understand what that means. When should they use force to protect civilians? And how could(?) their role be so that those people become protected? Because certainly we know that the populations often expect that peacekeeping missions are there to protect them. So this is an area where we think that mandates need to be translated into better training and pre-deployment training, that doctrine needs to be updated. We’ve already talked to some of the NATO doctrine developers, and they’ve agreed they need to address this.

 

But for the five organizations that are willing to send troops — NATO and the European Union, the U.N., African Union, ECOWAS in West Africa — all of them could use support and use support from The United States and other Western countries to help build the capacity to do these kinds of missions to protect civilians.

 

And the point there is, that often genocide does not come out of the blue. Often peacekeepers may face this while they’re already on the ground for what they think is a much simpler mission.

 

[movie clip]

 

VICTORIA HOLT: If it’s a matter of preventing genocide or mass killing, there’s sort of two major scenarios one could imagine. One is, as in Rwanda, there’s a conflict that’s not a full-scale war and may have peacekeepers on the ground.

 

What we saw there was a very lightly armed force, which is traditional peacekeeping.

 

And when the violence really kicked up, the U.N. force commander there asked for reinforcements, and asked the council to support that.

 

[film clip]

 

VICTORIA HOLT: And that’s what the council failed and the member states failed to do.

 

[film clip]

 

VICTORIA HOLT: So the first scenario you can imagine is, providing support to an existing operation on the ground. And you could debate the numbers, but the force commander himself thought another 5,000 troops would have been sufficient to prevent the level of violence they were facing. And that is certainly a number that the world can provide. And you can get that number of forces on the ground.

 

The second scenario might be much more difficult where you have a country that is purposely leading violence against its civilians, where you have no consent, where you do not have an invitation by the government to come in and provide any level of protection. That is much closer to traditional war-fighting and intervention, per se. And perhaps that’s what you would suggest would be the case of Sudan, for those calling for an intervention force there, they faced the fact that the Sudanese government would not support a more robust peacekeeping force on the ground.

 

MARK SOMMER: It would seem that peacekeepers in many very tense situations like Darfur or the Congo, other such places, that they face dilemmas that even ordinary soldiers don’t face because they have sort of additional responsibilities and additional constraints. I would imagine that many soldiers would not want to be placed in that position. It’s hard enough for them to just survive in an environment that’s highly dangerous than try to save their buddies. Do you get any feedback from peacekeepers about the kinds of dilemmas they face right on the ground, and how they deal with them?

 

VICTORIA HOLT: Oh, no — that’s exactly an excellent, excellent point. We know, for example, that American military personnel frequently have to train highly, just to understand, say, what to do at a checkpoint, right? What are the rules of engagement? When and how would they ever need to use force?

 

So if you’re at a checkpoint and there’s a woman walking by with a bundle, and you yell to have her stop and she does not, is she a woman with a baby, an innocent civilian who means no harm to anyone? Or is she a potential terrorist or someone who has, you know, armaments or a grenade on her? And that is a very difficult choice, even before you get to a peacekeeping mission.

 

Peacekeepers frequently face this, but in a situation where they’re expected to work with the civilian population. So we found that it’s often more difficult to ask peacekeepers to use force, because the presumption is, they’re going into environment where there’s some rough peace to keep. And therefore, if a militia is attacking a group of civilians, or civilians are fleeing violence, how do they then act to provide physical protection to a population? Most military personnel are not trained that way. That’s traditionally seen as a policing job, right? Military personnel in general are better trained to think about how to take a physical area, whether it’s a hill, or defend a periphery. But no — for exactly the reason you raised, this can often be very challenging.

 

In eastern Congo, we’ve seen some creative work on this. I think the lessons to be learned are still to be done. But there’s a reinforced brigade there now. And one of the things they’ve done is give pots and pans to villagers, and told them to bang loudly on them to alert the local peacekeepers if they become under threat. So in lieu of sophisticated communications devices, this is a way to call on a rapid reaction force if they find themselves in trouble. So there’s lots of interesting stories like that. We’re looking to find more of them.

 

MARK SOMMER: There have been proposals for-- really, for a very long time that The United Nations develop its own individually recruited peace forces, peacekeeping or peace forces of one sort or another. And those have never gone anywhere. It seems largely because the great powers in particular are loathe to see them be created. What are the sources of their reluctance to allow a permanent force to be created?

 

VICTORIA HOLT: Well, debates about a permanent force, as you know, stem from the initial idea in the charter that the U.N. would have such an army. But there’s never been much political support, especially in The United States for this idea. And that comes from the view that if members support a peacekeeping force, then they will provide personnel to carry it out.

 

And I must say candidly that I have sympathy with that argument. If we get a Security Council that could vote to send forces, and then had no investments in the outcome of that mission or the political ramifications of that mission, or offered their own personnel and their own funding and their own capacities to that mission, then they separate themselves from the results. And I think time and again, that’s when peacekeeping often fails, is if we don’t have strong backing from the nations of the world for this exercise. It’s not just a technical mission. It’s a magical mix of personnel and politics and good efforts.

 

So the good news here is that the U.N. has been through an incredible growth spurt, first from ’99 and then 2003. Today we’re looking at expanded missions, above and beyond the(?) current(?) 18(?) with numbers of peacekeepers easily topping over 100,000 in the coming year. New missions may even be on the horizon today for Nepal, for Somalia or Chad and CAR, in addition to the seven or eight already in Africa, and then the additional ones around the world.

 

And we’ve found that member states are willing to provide personnel. The difficult thing is making sure that they’re well funded, that we have excellent leadership, that there’s sufficient capacity, and that the member states’ personnel are well briefed on what their mission is on the ground, and that those personnel are matched to the tasks they’re asked to conduct.

 

So I think that this exercise has moved forward dramatically since the days of Rwanda. The capacity’s improved. Their success on the ground has improved. But we keep seeing the council throw more and more missions at the U.N. headquarters and asking them to organize them. So it’s more questions if member states will carry through and support these operations thoroughly.

 

MARK SOMMER: Stepping back from the particulars, looking forward towards, you know, the next ten, twenty years, what do you see up ahead in terms of, will there be an increased demand and need for these kinds of interventions based on responsibility to protect?

 

VICTORIA HOLT: Well, I think we’ve already seen an amazing shift where the U.N. and other countries, as well as, say, for example, the African Union or even the European Union, ECOWAS and NATO have been asked to go in and do much more complex missions than we would have imagined, even a decade ago, where they are asked to be very engaged in building governments and creating rule of law and support humanitarian and human rights efforts.

 

Next ten to twenty years? That’s an excellent question, Mark. I sort of guess the idea of, what is the state of our world’s countries and how much external support will they need? I think the ...(inaudible) protect will be urgent in the sense that, is not an overwhelming task to think ahead about what kind of actions can be taken, hopefully not by the military, but if necessary by the military, to stop the levels of violence that we used to see. I mean, you could certainly look at the Holocaust. You can then look more modernly at Rwanda and say, “You know, we know a bit more about what it would have taken to halt those actors. It won’t always be perfect, but let’s prepare them.”

 

And I unfortunately do believe that this incidence of violence won’t go away, and that it would be an excellent investment just to prepare our forces and our civilian leaders for dealing with this better.

 

MARK SOMMER: Victoria Holt, senior advisor at the Stimson Center. I’m Mark Sommer, and this is A World of Possibilities, distributed by the WFMT Radio Network.

 

ANNOUNCER: This is A World of Possibilities. If you wish to contact us (and we hope you do) please direct emails to comments@aworldofpossibilities.com. This program is distributed by the WFMT Radio Network.

 

MARK SOMMER: I’m Mark Sommer, and this is A World of Possibilities. This program, No More Rwandas: Protecting The Innocents, is underwritten by the Compton Foundation. Coming up in this half hour, how can we make sure that ethnic cleansing of the kind that happened in the Balkans in the early ‘90s never happens again? But first, would the threat of being hauled before an international war crimes tribunal be enough to give pause to would-be perpetrators of genocide and other crimes against humanity? John Stompor, senior associate at Human Rights First, thinks so.

 

An international lawyer, he’s worked with a special court for Sierra Leone, the tribunal that’s trying former Liberian president Charles Taylor for crimes against humanity he committed during civil wars that ravaged the Mano River region of West Africa for over a decade. John Stompor joins us now from his office at Human Rights First in New York.

 

JOHN STOMPOR: I think Taylor is a very good example of how the system of international prosecutions is evolving, and how the effects of deterrents via international prosecution is evolving. There was a combination of efforts by different states in the international community, among them United States, by Liberia and the new Liberian president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, and by civil society. All of these forces came together to push for Taylor’s surrender to the special court for Sierra Leone. And as a result, he’s now facing trial.

 

I think a successful trial of Taylor will prevent leaders in the future from thinking that they can get away with coldly planning and plotting crimes against humanity.

 

MARK SOMMER: Let’s look at a few of those, because particularly Darfur has attracted a lot of attention. What do you see coming in the judicial form in relation to Sudan?

 

JOHN STOMPOR: The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court mentioned that he is intending to seek initial arrest warrants for accused persons in Sudan in relation to the grave crimes committed in Darfur. And so the International Criminal Court is going to be getting very much increased attention with regard to Sudan.

 

MARK SOMMER: Let’s look then in the Balkans, Ratko Mladic and other figures are in hiding right now. And they are eluding any kind of arrest for-- to bring them to the Hague. Given the limited enforcement powers of the ICC, could they forever elude arrest? And does the fact that they now have to be in hiding represent a certain kind of punishment in any case?

 

JOHN STOMPOR: Their being in hiding and essentially being on the run from arrest by the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia represents a form of punishment. They are now deemed wanted by all of the countries of the world, and so are forced to live in circumstances that I don't think anyone would want to live under. At the same time, I do think that they’re engaging in a high risk strategy of trying to outrun justice, as it were.

 

I don't think that that ultimately will not prove successful. I think that even though the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia will finish its mandate in the next few years, there’s going to be some mechanism established in order to prosecute Mladic or prosecute Karadzic, should they surface and be able to be surrendered for trial.

 

MARK SOMMER: Does prosecuting someone within that system, is it a larger challenge than domestic prosecutions, say, within an established body of law in a place like The United States?

 

JOHN STOMPOR: As compared to a prosecution for murder, a single murder taking place over a very specified period of time, an international criminal prosecution is a whole other level of evidence and of consideration. In many ways, prosecution on an international criminal level is much more similar to prosecution of very complicated white collar criminal cases in The United States.

 

MARK SOMMER: Is the challenge also complicated by the fact that there just isn’t that much of a body of settled law around international criminal law, the way there is for hundreds of years now in domestic criminal cases?

 

JOHN STOMPOR: I think that makes a difference, although the body of case law has been building up over the last 15 years as the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has gone about adjudicating its cases. There have been over 50 cases there. And similarly, as the international criminal tribunal for Rwanda has gone about its cases, a body of law has built up about prosecution of genocide and prosecution of crimes against humanity. And the same thing can be said for the special court for Sierra Leone.

 

MARK SOMMER: Have these special courts ended up being effective in themselves? They seem to be popping up all over the place after many different kinds of situations. Do they vary a great deal in their effectiveness?

 

JOHN STOMPOR: I think that they have varied in their effectiveness, although I do think that all of them have met a certain minimum. And as a result of the recent work of the Rwandan tribunal and the Yugoslav tribunal, the work has been easier for more recently established courts, such as the special court for Sierra Leone. They’ve been able to learn the lessons of the Yugoslav tribunal and the Rwandan tribunal.

 

MARK SOMMER: The U.S. opposed the establishment of the International Criminal Court, and is not party to it. Has that damaged the court’s ability to function? Or is the court sort of moving around that successfully and without great impediments?

 

JOHN STOMPOR: I think that U.S. opposition, indeed, U.S. hostility to the International Criminal Court was detrimental to the early development of the International Criminal Court. However, I think that the relationship between The United States, on the one hand, and the International Criminal Court on the other has changed significantly in the last two years.

 

With the referral of the Darfur case to the International Criminal Court by the U.N. Security Council, the attitude of The United States significantly changed toward the ICC because the U.S. had to acquiesce, had to basically agree to such referral. As a result of that, I think The United States has started to recognize some of the benefits of the International Criminal Court.

 

MARK SOMMER: John Stompor, senior associate at Human Rights First.

 

After a short break, a view from the top — General William Nash is next.

 

ANNOUNCER: This is A World of Possibilities. We love hearing from our listeners. Contact us at comments@aworldofpossibilities.com.

 

MARK SOMMER: Like a vanquished forest fire whose embers continue to smolder underground, one of the best predictors of future conflict is a history of conflict in the recent past. So in a region like the Balkans where an early ‘90s conflict included genocide and other crimes against humanity, you want to make very sure that the peace you made endures.

 

Following the signing of the Dayton Peace Accord that ended the war in Bosnia in 1995, General William Nash commanded a multinational division of 25,000 soldiers from 12 nations as part of a NATO peacekeeping force. Since retiring from the military, General Nash has become director of the Center For Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations where he focused on conflict prevention and post-conflict reconstruction.

 

General Nash joins us from the studios of ABC radio in Washington, D.C. He begins by explaining that when the international community intervenes in a conflict to protect civilians, we have to be conscious of our responsibility to stick around long enough to rebuild the country once peace has been established.

 

WILLIAM NASH: Just as an example, George Marshall, when he was Chief of Staff of the Army in World War II, began the planning for post-war Japan and post-war Germany in the spring of 1942. And you could argue that he had no right to think we would-- 

 

MARK SOMMER: --we would win-- 

 

WILLIAM NASH: --we would win, or we’d, you know, be in a position to occupy Japan and Germany at that time. But he understood that the consequences of peace could lose the victories of war if we weren’t prepared for it. And consequently, a man of great vision and wisdom, a characteristic that we don’t have in huge quantities today, put The United States in a posture to achieve the peace victories equal to, if not greater than the wartime victories.

 

MARK SOMMER: That’s an intriguing phrase you used — the consequences of peace. You usually think of the consequences of war, and you think of carnage. But what are the consequences of peace?

 

WILLIAM NASH: Well, one of the issues in this whole rubric of responsibilities to protect is that when you intervene, when you intervene for humanitarian purposes or you intervene because you want to change a regime, as United States did in Iraq, you need to understand that that intervention will bring about consequences that are very hard to predict prior to the intervention, except that you know there will be a degree of chaos and there will be a degree of great disruption. And political forces will be unleashed that you may or may not have imagined.

 

And so it’s very important to over-resource, if you will, and be prepared to deal with a wide range of things that are very different than you might have predicted. And if you assume it’s going to be good, you inevitably will be wrong.

 

MARK SOMMER: Let’s look at your experience in the Balkans when you commanded, I believe it’s called taskforce Eagle, a multinational division of 25,000 soldiers that were charged with enforcing the military provisions of the Dayton Peace Accords. What were the challenges you faced there? And how did you deal with them?

 

WILLIAM NASH: Well, the first challenge we faced was getting there and taking a large organization in the dead of winter. And the winter is a hard time to go to the Balkans, especially if you’re taking a tank division and you’re trying to bring all these folks together. But the major challenges we had was the fact that there were three former warring factions we were dealing with. And each of those had to be dealt with in an evenhanded manner. And we wanted to make it very clear that we were not there on anybody’s side. We were there on the side of the implementation, the enforcement if you will, of the Dayton Peace Accord.

 

But the political, economic, and the social aspects of the Dayton Peace Accords were much more difficult to implement. And there was not an organization that was capable of leading that effort. I like to tell the story that by April of ’96, we’d been there between 90 and 120 days. My biggest problem was the fact that there were 200,000 demobilized soldiers in my area with nothing to do. And I had to get very involved in the creation of a jobs program, because out of work ex‑soldiers who might be taking a drink or two as the day goes along, is a security problem, and it’s trouble. And it’s not conducive to peace-building or state‑building.

 

And as a consequence, you’ve got to integrate the jobs. It’s just like what happened in Iraq. And we should have known better, was when you fire the army and all the Baathists, you put lots of people out of work. And we should not have been surprised that trouble came from that.

 

MARK SOMMER: How did you go about mounting a jobs program in a country that you just entered? I mean, that’s pretty challenging.

 

WILLIAM NASH: Well, it is. But the first thing you have to do is find somebody with some money. And so we started working with some very great folks at the American Embassy who were able to reprogram some funds. They understood the situation and the logic. And then we used Army Civil Affairs folks. And then the commanders that were responsible for the various sectors that we had subdivided the division area into, went to work meeting with political leaders and military leaders and business leaders looking for various job opportunities. And some of the jobs we created were relatively minor. But the first thing you want to do is clean up, clean up the ravages of war, the dirt and trash that accumulates across the countryside. You want to fix the roads. You want to fix the sewage system. You want to fix the schools, and if possible, fix the factories that then can start a jobs creation program within the private sector.

 

So you just start doing it. Like the joke(?) folks, we had some very clean lampposts around our area. And the road suddenly started getting clean. And if it snowed, we had people out with shovels, if not dozers, cleaning off the roads.

 

MARK SOMMER: Those who recall the terrible ethnic cleansing that went on in that region before the intervention may still wonder whether ethnic divisions could resurface in explosive ways. Do you see those having been dealt with at any deeper level at this point?

 

WILLIAM NASH: The tensions remain very severe, I think, in Kosovo, though there has been some progress in that area. Amongst the issues, one of the largest ones is guaranteeing the safety of the minorities of Kosovo from majority rule that would not have the respect for the minority rights.

 

MARK SOMMER: You spoke earlier of the responsibility to protect, which has become a U.N.-enshrined principle in international affairs in just the last few years. As part of that, there’s a responsibility to rebuild. What are the elements of that responsibility to rebuild? As I understand it, they include establishing security systems of justice and reconstruction.

 

WILLIAM NASH: Well, I think that’s right. And it’s an issue that, when you go into a country and you in fact usurp the sovereignty of the leader, you have a requirement, moral requirement to make the conditions far better than they were prior to your intervention. Now, you can imagine this is a controversial approach because of the nature of what took place to bring about the intervention. But you can also make a very strong argument that to do less than that would be irresponsible given the overt actions taken to usurp the sovereignty of the country. And I personally view that as an appropriate response by the international community, though it brings with it a burden that is not insignificant. It is a requirement and national treasure that must be expended by the parties that intervene. And as we’ve seen, you know, in our example of Iraq, is the cost of the post-war efforts has far exceeded anything we spent on the war itself.

 

MARK SOMMER: I would think it would give policymakers pause, the realization that fighting the war, both costs less and takes far less time and commitment than the rebuilding afterwards. Is the arc of rebuilding something that’s-- one has to expect to go on for literally a decade or more?

 

WILLIAM NASH: Well, there’s little evidence it will take place any faster. The examples that international community has faced in recent years have all taken considerable time. And it’s hard to find too many examples of where that intervention is over since the end of the Cold War.

 

But what happens is, if you don’t do something after you stop the initial killing, you could almost be sure that the killing will take place again, or it will be the reverse of the previous killing. As I said about Kosovo, had there not been a NATO force there, it’s my judgment there would have been a significant ethnic cleansing of Kosovo of the Serb population. Whereas because NATO was there, only about half of it(?) was run off. So even then, it was difficult not to stop some of the atrocities that took place.

 

MARK SOMMER: So in the post-Cold War era, we seem to have gone from, you know, one standoff between great powers that largely remained on the level of rhetoric and posturing, to 40 or 50 ongoing civil and international conflicts, each one of which is not of the scale of what the Cold War would have been had it ever gotten hot, but is actually killing many more people and decimating societies.

 

WILLIAM NASH: Yeah, I think it’s important to note that wars are down. The fact of the matter is, the research shows that there has been less conflict and there are less people being killed than before. But we know about a lot more of them today than we did before on a real-time basis. And they certainly draw much more attention than they ever did before because of the Cold War circumstance.

 

MARK SOMMER: I’m glad for the correction, because I was not under the impression. Nonetheless, because we know more about them and because the international community has decided that it can’t just avert its gaze, it seems to say that we’re going to have to gather the resources — financial, material, logistic — and summon the commitment to the long-term. Where do you think those kinds of resources and commitment will come from?

 

WILLIAM NASH: Well, it’s going to come from us. There’s no-- You know, when I say ‘us’ I mean the international community as a whole. And The United States traditionally pays upwards of 25% of any of these type operations that the U.N. conducts or the U.N.’s involved in. And of course the bill for places like Iraq where there was not a large scale coalition, we paid much, much more.

 

But that’s part of the price of our security, because we have seen also (and, you know, Afghanistan is the example that’s most frequently used) that as the national security strategy, The United States clearly states, The United States is much more threatened today by weak states than they are by powerful states. And that’s because the phenomena of ungoverned territory where non-state actors can bring about events that have catastrophic impact on The United States and other locales. So it has now become much more than a humanitarian endeavor. It’s become an issue of trying to create in fragile or failing states circumstances where the space is governed and that there’s a government that represent the people and that provides goods and services to its citizens and operates under a rule of law.

 

MARK SOMMER: General William Nash of the Council on Foreign Relations. Like so many lofty sentiments invoked by statesmen in the aftermath of war, the phrase, ‘responsibility to protect’ sounds simple in principle. But it’s damnably difficult to implement in practice.

 

We know what we don’t want to do anymore, stand by in apparent helplessness while innocents once more become the chief casualties of yet another war. But as an international community, we’re not moving with any great haste to create the means and provide the resources to do anything different. Instead, we’re preparing to fight the last war while failing to prepare to make the next peace. Something’s wrong with this picture.

 

Part of the problem may be that, hard as it is to wage war, it’s still harder to wage peace. And while we’ve been making war for millennia, we’re only now getting serious about making peace. Nor do we currently put our money where our mouths are. Do the math — The United States alone is spending at least $200 billion dollars a year in direct costs to field about 140,000 soldiers in Iraq. The U.N. meanwhile spends about $6 billion a year to field 87,000 peacekeepers in more than a dozen conflicts around the world.

 

On the basis of these raw figures, peacekeeping is one of the world’s best bargains. But that’s just the beginning. Like firefighters, peacekeepers not only put wars out, but prevent them from reigniting or starting in the first place. How many innocents didn’t die in the Balkans because the international community finally intervened? How many wars wouldn’t happen at all if a modest contingent of well-trained and adequately resourced peacekeepers were on the scene at the first signs of unrest?

 

If we have a collective responsibility to protect, we also have a responsibility to create the means and provide the resources to achieve that protection. In the larger scheme of things, this is a small investment for a very large return, not just for the innocents who will not be slaughtered, but for the many nations that, in the absence of such protection, pay a high price in blood and treasure to deal with the mayhem that arises if no such peacekeeping and peace-building system is in place to prevent it.

 

Despite the distractions of power politics and national ambitions, we’re collectively cobbling together the rudiments of such a system. And none too soon, for before long, the next Rwanda will be on our doorsteps, calling on our consciences to respond.

 

I’m Mark Sommer. And this has been A World of Possibilities. Thanks for listening.

 

ANNOUNCER: You’ve been listening to A World of Possibilities. For more information on today’s topic, please click on the listener action link at AWorldOfPossibilities.com This program was produced and edited by Chuck Rogers, Britney Danish, and Tammy Rae Scott, with administrative support from Ali Cook and Susan Semenov. Production engineer is Chuck Johnson. Support for this program is provided by the Compton Foundation. Music is courtesy of Fat Possum Records, Putumayo World Music, ATO Records, East-West Records, Warner Brothers, and Sony Music Entertainment. Sound clips courtesy of the CBC, PBS, and United Artists. This program is distributed by the WFMT Radio Network. Thank you for listening.