hotel-rwanda.com

Chapter 27: The World Turns Away II: Washington's Calculus - The Deliberate Evasion of the Word "Genocide"

Deep within the sterile, windowless bowels of the State Department, in a secure conference room known as a "tank," the air was thick with the hum of encrypted servers and the unspoken ghosts of recent failure. These rooms were designed for crises, sealed off from the outside world so that brutal strategic calculations could be made without emotion or distraction. But the horror of Rwanda was bleeding through the soundproofed walls. For three hours, the argument had been turning in a vicious, ever-tightening circle, not about how to save the tens of thousands already dead, but about the existential threat posed by a single, eight-letter word.

On one side of the polished mahogany table sat Anna, a junior but fiercely respected analyst from the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Her position was fortified by a small mountain of evidence. Stacks of diplomatic cables, their flimsy paper still warm from the telex, detailed eyewitness accounts of systematic slaughter in language stripped of all euphemism. There were glossy, high-resolution satellite images showing the tell-tale signs of mass graves—vast rectangles of disturbed earth near churches and schools. And there were the translated transcripts from Radio-Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, the hate-filled broadcasts that crackled with direct incitements to murder. Her voice was tight with a frustration that was curdling into fury. "It is targeting a specific ethnic group for extermination, with a clear command structure and the active participation of the state. It meets every legal and technical requirement of Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention. We are legally, and morally, obligated to call it what it is: genocide."

On the other side sat Frank, a Deputy Assistant Secretary who had seen too many crises and too many dead American soldiers to have any room left for moral outrage. He moved with the weary caution of a man who understood that foreign policy was a brutal game played in Washington, not on the hills of a small African nation with no oil and no strategic value. He listened with a kind of infuriating patience. "Your analysis of the facts on the ground, Anna," he said, his voice flat and devoid of emotion, "is, as always, impeccable. It is also, for the purposes of this meeting, completely and utterly irrelevant."

He stood and walked to the large whiteboard, the squeak of the marker silencing the room. "Let's talk about the world we actually live in," he began, drawing a simple timeline. He marked a point in the recent past. "October 3rd, 1993. Mogadishu." He let the word hang in the airless room, a ghost at the feast. "Eighteen dead Rangers and Delta operators. Seventy-three wounded. Televised images of the body of one of them being dragged through the streets by a mob. I was here for that. I took the calls from a hysterical congressional aide whose boss was watching it on CNN. I was in the room when the President made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that we would never again be dragged into a humanitarian mission with no exit strategy and no overriding national interest." He tapped the board again, marking the present day. "That political reality led directly to this." He wrote "PDD-25" in large block letters. "Presidential Decision Directive 25. An impossibly high bar for intervention. A checklist for inaction. It's the new gospel."

He turned back to the table. "You want to talk about the 'G-word'? It's a tripwire. The moment the President of the United States or the Secretary of State stands at a podium and utters that word, we engage the full moral and legal obligations of the Genocide Convention. It creates a tidal wave of public and political pressure to 'do something.' It commits us to a path we have already, explicitly, and as a matter of official doctrine, forbidden ourselves to walk. Our job," he concluded, his voice dropping, "is not to write a history of what happened. Our job is to protect the President and this administration from a political catastrophe they cannot afford."

The weeks that followed were a masterclass in linguistic gymnastics and moral evasion. Anna watched as her detailed, horrifying intelligence reports were sent up the chain of command, only to have their conclusions surgically removed, their language softened into the passive, soulless mush of bureaucracy. "Organized massacres" became "widespread ethnic violence." "Extermination" became "tragic loss of life." Then came the televised press briefing that would become the defining moment of America’s inaction. A reporter asked the State Department spokeswoman, Christine Shelly, a direct, unavoidable question: "Is what is happening in Rwanda a genocide?" Armed with the carefully drafted legal guidance that had come out of Frank’s meeting, the spokeswoman leaned into the microphone. "Based on the evidence we have seen," she said, her expression carefully neutral, "acts of genocide may have occurred."

It was a phrase of such studied, deliberate emptiness that it was a policy decision in itself. A public confirmation that they knew, but had chosen not to know. In the secure, soundproofed rooms of Washington, a political fire had been contained. The ghosts of Mogadishu had been appeased. The debt had been paid, in full, with Rwandan blood.

The Discourse 27: The "Somalia Effect" and a Doctrine of Evasion

27.1 The Ghosts of Mogadishu
The American failure to act during the Rwandan genocide is incomprehensible without understanding the deep institutional trauma inflicted by the "Black Hawk Down" incident in Mogadishu, Somalia, on October 3, 1993. The mission in Somalia had begun as a UN-led humanitarian effort to combat a famine, but had gradually escalated into a quasi-military campaign to capture a Somali warlord. The disastrous firefight that resulted in the deaths of eighteen U.S. Army Rangers and Delta Force operators, and the subsequent televised images of an American soldier’s body being dragged through the streets by a hostile mob, were seared into the American political consciousness. This "Somalia Effect" had a profound and immediate chilling effect on U.S. foreign policy, creating an extreme aversion within the Clinton administration, the Pentagon, and the U.S. Congress to any new, risky, and open-ended humanitarian-military interventions, particularly in a region like Africa where no vital U.S. national interests were perceived to be at stake. Rwanda's tragedy was to unfold directly in the shadow of this institutional fear, which dictated that the avoidance of another "quagmire" and, most critically, the avoidance of American casualties, would be the overriding priority of foreign policy.

27.2 Presidential Decision Directive 25: A Mandate for Inaction
This pervasive fear was almost immediately codified into official government doctrine. In May 1994, even as the genocide in Rwanda was reaching its horrific peak, the Clinton administration finalized Presidential Decision Directive 25 (PDD-25). This new policy set forth an impossibly high and restrictive set of conditions for any future U.S. support for or participation in UN peacekeeping operations. The directive demanded, among other things, a clear and present threat to international peace, well-defined objectives and, most critically, a clear and pre-determined "exit strategy." As Samantha Power argues, PDD-25 was less a guide for responsible future engagement and more of a "doctrine for disengagement," a bureaucratic fortress of excuses meticulously designed to prevent the United States from ever being dragged into "another Somalia." It created an official, presidentially-approved mandate for inaction. For any official arguing against intervention in Rwanda, PDD-25 was the ultimate trump card, allowing political and military leaders to cloak a policy of risk-averse indifference in the language of sober, responsible national security procedure.

27.3 The Evasion of the "G-Word": A Policy of Linguistic Obstruction
The most damning aspect of the U.S. response was the conscious and deliberate legal effort to avoid using the word "genocide." Internal State Department legal memos, which have since been declassified and published by the National Security Archive, show an explicit debate over the term and its potential consequences. Administration officials knew that an official declaration of genocide would engage America's legal and moral obligations as a signatory to the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. While the Convention does not explicitly command military intervention, the administration feared it would be a political tripwire, unleashing immense public and congressional pressure to "do something" to stop the killing. To pre-empt this, the administration adopted a policy of systematic linguistic evasion. This policy culminated in the infamous State Department press briefing on April 28, where a spokeswoman, when asked if a genocide was taking place, stated only that "acts of genocide may have occurred." This convoluted phrase was not an error or a sign of uncertainty; it was a carefully crafted legal position, designed to acknowledge the horror of the facts on the ground just enough to maintain credibility, while simultaneously avoiding the single word that would trigger a legal and moral requirement to act. It was the epitome of a policy of moral abdication through semantic precision.

27.4 A Doctrine of Willful Ignorance
The American policy went beyond a simple refusal to deploy troops; it became a policy of actively choosing not to know, of refusing to use available, low-risk capabilities for fear they might increase pressure for further engagement. The United States was the only power with the technical capacity to jam the radio broadcasts of Radio-Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM), the station that served as the propaganda ministry and communications hub for the killers, actively broadcasting the names and locations of Tutsis to be murdered. Despite pleas from General Dallaire and human rights activists, the Pentagon refused, citing exorbitant costs and legal complications—excuses that were transparently flimsy. Furthermore, repeated requests for the use of U.S. aerial surveillance to track the movements of the génocidaires and locate massacre sites were denied. This pattern of refusing even low-cost, high-impact technical assistance demonstrates that the failure was not a result of a lack of capacity, but of a conscious, top-down policy decision to look away. Years later, during his 1998 visit to Kigali, President Clinton would speak of his profound "regret for not acting sooner." It was a personal admission of a catastrophic national failure, a recognition that Washington’s choices had been born not of ignorance, but of a calculated, and ultimately tragic, indifference.