Article published in Jeruselem Post, Internet Edition ~

BRET STEPHENS' EYES ABROAD: Indirect responsibility, anyone?

ON JUNE 8, 2001, a Belgian court sentenced four Rwandans - a former government minister, a university professor, and two Roman Catholic nuns - to prison terms of 12 to 20 years for the crime of genocide.

Specifically, the court found that in the spring of 1994, Alphonse Higanaro, the former Rwandan transport minister, had ordered the killing of a Tutsi family of eight, and that Vincent Ntezimana, the academic, had drawn up lists of Tutsi to be exterminated.

The court also found that one of the nuns, a Sister Gertrude, had in her capacity as Mother Superior of the Suvo convent refused sanctuary to several thousand Tutsi refugees, describing them as "rubbish" before alerting the Hutu Interahumwe militia (in which two of her brothers were then serving) to the Tutsi presence.

The refugees were hacked to death with machetes.

Sister Gertrude also expelled 22 refugees - relative's of the convent's Tutsi nuns - from the convent. It is reported that some of these refugees paid the Hutu $15 for the privilege of being shot to death rather than stabbed.

As for the second nun, Sister Maria Kisito, she was found guilty of assisting the Interahumwe in setting fire to a nearby health clinic in which 700 Tutsi had taken refuge. All perished. Altogether, the four defendants had a hand in an estimated 5,000 Tutsi murders.

Following the trial, George-Henri Beauthier, a lawyer for the prosecution, saluted the verdict this way: "This will encourage us to continue the fight and prosecute all those responsible for genocide."

Sure enough, the following week suit was brought in a Brussels court against Ariel Sharon by 23 survivors of the Sabra and Shatilla massacres. The charge: crimes against humanity.

It happens that I was living in Brussels at the time, so I was able to follow the two cases closely. What struck me then was this: The Rwandans were tried for acts for which they were directly responsible. Sharon was accused of acts for which he was, at most, indirectly responsible. Yet while the Brussels case against Sharon was eventually dismissed on jurisdictional grounds, the distinction between direct and indirect responsibility remains, in European eyes as well as in the eyes of much of the "international community," a blurred one. The implications of this - for Europe, the United Nations, and the United States - cannot be ignored.

LET'S RECALL briefly the findings of the Kahan Commission regarding the killing of some 800 Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Shatilla by Eli Hobeika's Christian Phalagnist militia in September 1982. The commission found that "in having the Phalangists enter the camps, no intention existed on the part of anyone who acted on the part of Israel to harm the noncombatant population."

The commission also acquited Sharon on the charge that he had been negligent in stopping the massacre; Israeli generals had, in fact, ordered the Phalangists to withdraw their forces once it became clear that something dreadful had occured.

What the commission did find was that Sharon should have anticipated the massacre, and that this failure of foresight amounted to a form of "indirect responsibility," with the recommendation that Sharon "draw the appropriate personal conclusions."

As everyone knows, Sharon did exactly that, and notwithstanding his political resurrection, he has worn something like a mark of Cain ever since.

So, indeed, has Israel.

It is not my intention here to debate the merits of the concept of indirect responsibility. To me, it seems a dangerous catch-all phrase, or (to mix my metaphors) a slippery slope. But these arguments are now moot. Both with the Kahan Commission, and in the proceedings of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, indirect responbibility has become a fact of international law, to say nothing of political reality.

The point now is that if we're going to punish people for "indirect responsibility" in war crimes, we ought to define such responsibility clearly and apply it consistently. And this brings me back to the subject of Rwanda.

ANYONE INTERESTED in what transpired in Rwanda during that awful spring could do no better than to read Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Familes. But to get a sense of how Rwanda was allowed to happen, one must read Samantha Power's meticulously researched "Bystander to Genocide" in last September's issue of The Atlantic Monthly (www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/ 09/power.htm).

The prelude to the Rwanda genocide is instructive. In 1993, after generations of hostility and periodic outbreaks of fighting between Tutsi and Hutu, an agreement called the Arusha Accords was reached under Tanzanian auspices. Its terms called for the return of Tutsi exiles, a power-sharing government, the demobilization and demilitarization of both Hutu and Tutsi, and the introduction of a UN force, the UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda, or UNAMIR, to monitor and enforce the agreement.

Within months, however, the Hutu were violating the terms of the accord: military equipment was being flown in for the Hutus; local militias were being trained; lists of Tutsis were being drawn up for what the UN officer in charge of the mission, a French Canadian general named Romeo Dallaire, suspected was for "their extermination."

The conscientious Dallaire then relayed this information to the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, headed by Kofi Annan, and proposed a raid on Hutu weapons depots. Annan's office expressly turned him down, advising him instead to alert the Hutu President, Juvenal Habyarimana.

The Clinton administration also didn't pay heed. As evidence of Hutu violations of the accord came to light, the US chose to look the other way.

"An examination of cable traffic from the US embassy in Kigali to Washington [before the killing began]," writes Power, "reveals that setbacks were perceived as 'dangers to the peace process' more than 'dangers to Rwandans.' American criticisms were deliberately and steadfastly leveled at 'both sides,' though Hutu government and militia forces were usually responsible."

Then, on April 6, President Habyarimana's jet was shot down. It was the pretext the Hutu militia needed to begin the killing. The Prime Minister and her husband, both moderates, were killed within minutes in their homes. Hutu militia also rounded up 10 Belgian peacekeepers - the Belgians were the backbone of UNAMIR's operation - and killed them. Rwandan radio began broadcasting the names and addresses of all Tutsi to be killed immediately.

Writes Power: "Killers often carried a machete in one hand and a transistor radio in the other. Tens of thousands of Tutsi fled their homes in panic and were snared and butchered at checkpoints. Little care was given to their disposal. Some were shoveled into landfills. Human flesh rotted in the sunshine. In churches, bodies mingled with scattered hosts."

To these several events, the reaction of the West proved remarkably uniform. The Europeans moved quickly to evacuate their citizens in Rwanda; they landed 1,000 troops in the Kigali airport expressly for that purpose, and then departed.

The Belgians, Rwanda's erstwhile colonial masters, also wanted out. But as Willie Claes, the foreign minister at the time, explained: "We are pulling out, but we don't want to be seen doing it alone." He wanted "cover," which meant the removal of all UN peacekeepers.

On April 21, the United Nations Security Council, with the full backing of the US, complied, with one caveat. A "small, skeletal" force was to remain in place, in order, as then UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright said, "to show the will of the international community."

By then, an estimated 100,000 Tutsi had been slaughtered.

The UN wanted to maintain its posture of evenhandedness - and to protect non-Rwandans. In the face of Dallaire's pleas for beefed up assistance and more proactive measures, Annan's office responded as follows: "You should make every effort not to compromise your impartiality or to act beyond your mandate, but [you] may exercise your discretion to do [so] should this be essential for the evacuation of foreign nationals."

As for the Clinton administration, its objectives were twofold. First, it wanted to extract US citizens, which it accomplished by April 10. Second, the administration, wary of "another Somalia," wanted to avoid avoid any form of military involvement.

This latter point posed a peculiar difficulty. The US is a signatory to the 1948 Genocide Convention. Article One of the Convention stipulates: "The contracting parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and punish."

Thus, in order to avoid any military involvement in Rwanda, the US government had to avoid using "the g-word." Power quotes from a memo of an interagency group: "Be Careful. Legal at State was worried about this yesterday - Genocide finding could commit [the US government] to actually 'do something.'"

As a result, the administration was forced to resort to the most remarkable verbal gymanastics. State Department spokesmen talked of "acts of genocide," but not genocide. Then-secretary of state Warren Christopher carefully instructed his UN delegation that it was "not authorized to agree to the characterization of any specific incident of genocide or to agree to any formulation that indicates that all killings in Rwanda are genocide."

Yet even as this defense became untenable, the administration went out of its way to find excuses for inaction. A proposal that Rwandan radio be jammed was denied on grounds that it would be a violation of free speech. A proposal to send in a second UNAMIR mission fell afoul of US tactical objections: the UN wanted an "inside-out" approach; the US insisted on "outside-in." An undertaking by Vice President Al Gore to supply the mission with armored personnel carriers was delayed on account of cost considerations, and the question of whether the APCs should be wheeled or tracked.

In the end, it all amounted to nothing. Only the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front brought the killing to a halt, in June, by force of arms.

UPON READING Gourevitch's initial account of the genocide in The New Yorker, Bill Clinton circulated copies of the article to his staff with notes like: "Is what he's saying true?" and "How did this happen?"

In fact, Clinton could not have failed to take notice of the genocide. The story was all over the press. In the few days during which US Embassy personnel remained in Kigali as the killing unfolded, detailed diplomatic dispatches were sent to the White House. Secretary Christopher was kept well-abreast of developments via the work of interagency groups and his own Africa specialists. So was ambassador Albright at the UN. Peacekeeping chief Kofi Annan was kept informed via Dallaire. The Belgians had extensive contacts in their old colony.

All of them knew perfectly well what was happening. They chose - for reasons of political expediency, international indifference or personal embarrassment - to look away.

As for Clinton's jotted questions, they were carefully planted deceits, though whether to himself or to posterity I can hardly say.

None of this is to say that there were not intellectually defensible reasons for the West to stay out of Rwanda. But these reasons are neither legally nor morally defensible once the Western world committed itself to preventing genocide. Annan had foreknowledge that a genocide was going to take place, but did nothing. Clinton and his officers had knowledge that a genocide was taking place, but did nothing. The Belgians, who possessed the means on the ground to do something, not only abandoned their posts instantly upon the death of 10 troops, but prevailed on the UN to go along.

All of them bear a clear, if indirect responsibility for the genocide in Rwanda. Yet none of them, to my knowledge, has drawn the "appropriate personal conclusions."

Only Israelis, it seems, are fools enough to do that.