John Shattuck Interview (2004): Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Before we talk about the various case studies with the policy and problems that you struggled with, let's talk a little about the Somali event, which has been portrayed in a movie called Black Hawk Down, and which became an important concern and made an important imprint on a policy in the Clinton administration as that policy related to intervention and human rights. Remind us about what happened Somalia and its impact.
Somalia was the first human rights war. My book is about human rights wars of the post - Cold War period. Somalia was a humanitarian crisis. President Bush (the first) led an American intervention with the UN into Somalia to try to solve the problem of terrible starvation and famine. As the Somalia intervention developed, it became clear that Somalia was being run by warlords, and warlords were effectively keeping people from getting access to food. So the UN mission became a mission to search for warlords, particularly one warlord, Mohammed Farah Aidid. That led into a much more complicated kind of intervention, which was searching for a warlord, rather than sustaining humanitarian needs.
To move right to the bottom line, what happened in October of 1993 was catastrophic from a political standpoint, in terms of the future of peacekeeping in humanitarian intervention, at least in the short-run, and that was the Black Hawk Down incident. Eighteen U.S. rangers lost their lives. About eighty were wounded. The most dramatic and terrible moment of that failure was the dragging, shown on CNN, of the body of a U.S. soldier through the streets of Mogadishu by the guerrillas who were working with the warlords. It was on CNN in a way which captured everybody's attention back in the United States. It led to a political disaster. Washington became deeply antipathetic to peacekeeping. President Clinton came under great pressure from the Congress to restrict U.S. participation in future peacekeeping activities, and he issued a Presidential Decision Directive, PDD 25, some five months later, which basically said that the U.S. will not participate in UN peacekeeping operations or even authorize them through the Security Council unless they meet certain very specific criteria, which were very difficult to meet.
So in every subsequent crisis, and this is especially true of the great tragedy of Rwanda, there was an overhang from what happened in Somalia: "We can't intervene ... the loss of American life ... the situation unraveling." Which led to probably the greatest policy failure of the Clinton administration, which in a sense permitted the Rwandan genocide to unfold.
Rwanda, as I write in my book, was the "perfect storm" from a human rights standpoint, perfect in the worst sense of that word. The genocide that broke out in Rwanda came six months after the Somalia catastrophe. It was a genocide that was very similar to what was going on in Yugoslavia at the time, which is that cynical leaders were using ethnic differences between Hutus and Tutsis, in that context, to advance their own cause by turning the ethnic groups against each other, and fanning the flames of conflict by broadcasting through radio terrible messages of killing Tutsis -- Tutsis having been the minority in the country.
As the violence broke out in early April of 1994, the United States -- and Europe, for that matter, because it was equally affected by the Somalia catastrophe in many ways -- and the UN were all very skittish about any continued peacekeeping operation. There had been a peacekeeping operation in Rwanda; it was withdrawn some two weeks after the violence broke out. As I write in my book, the withdrawal was catastrophic, because it sent a signal to the genocide planners that the international community wasn't going to do anything about what they were planning.
I and a number of others inside the Clinton administration, and there were some European human rights activists who tried to do the same, tried to reverse the process and get a peacekeeping force back into Rwanda after the first one was withdrawn. I went to the region; I was sent on a presidential mission to meet with the presidents of Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, and others in the region, to get them to agree to assemble another peacekeeping force to go in. As I telephoned back that I was making progress, I kept finding that the Pentagon was unwilling to commit any resources to support this additional peacekeeping operation. So, genocide proceeded at an astounding rate. Within eleven weeks, 800,000 people had been killed in the fastest genocide in recorded history.
I'll never forget flying over the river between Rwanda and Tanzania. From about 1000 feet, one could see what looked like logs in the river. I had a very small plane; I had it fly lower, and you could see that it was basically the whole river choked with bodies.
It was catastrophic, and it was a direct result of the political catastrophe of the failure of peacekeeping in Somalia, which as a failure was one of the singular events of the early post - Cold War history. It's a failure that rests both on the first Bush administration and on the Clinton administration, but also on the shoulders of European supporters for the UN at the time as well.
We set the stage for how the Clinton administration would respond to a number of the subsequent case studies. In looking at them in the book, you defined five syndromes, five problem sets that you encountered at bringing this human rights agenda to the broader foreign policy agenda of the United States. Let's talk a little about them one by one, and relate these roadblocks to specific examples. The first obstacle is interagency gridlock. I was taken with your very clear description of what that meant, because we often talk about bureaucracies and why they don't help us understand what's going on.
We need to know that human rights is not some sort of theoretical construct that is held over government, and that government is somehow going to engage with it when it chooses to do so. Human rights issues work through the bureaucracy like all other issues. The first syndrome that I described is the "interagency syndrome." This is true for all modern administrations, and that is that to change policy in the foreign policy area (and this is true for domestic policy generally as well), you have to get all the interested agencies in the bureaucracy to agree that a change in policy is called for, a change, for example, such as sending peacekeepers back to Rwanda. If one agency disagrees -- even though everyone else may agree that it's a good idea, one agency can disagree -- that, essentially, blocks [the process] and becomes interagency gridlock.
If that agency is the Pentagon, which would obviously be behind any peacekeeping operation, then it won't go forward unless you get a presidential decision to move the whole process forward. But that leads to what I call the "presidential decision syndrome," particularly in the post - Cold War period, where Americans are not going to tell their presidents, particularly, that they want him to do anything special on foreign policy, because we've sort of withdrawn as a country more or less after the Cold War. The president is not going to act without some degree of pressure on a controversial issue such as deploying peacekeepers to Rwanda, which might have a cost similar to the one that was paid in Somalia. That leads to, essentially, a presidential gridlock in terms of decision-making.
That further follows to the third syndrome, which is what I call the "public opinion syndrome." Especially in foreign policy, the public is unlikely to lead. The public is not going to push the president to do anything, although foreign policy is increasingly becoming a product of interest groups, to be sure, in this period where we're searching for a new construct of foreign policy, different from what existed in the Cold War period. But if you don't get public pressure, you're not going to have the presidential decision, and the public is not likely to put the pressure on unless the president takes the bully pulpit and goes on television and says we need to send peacekeepers to Rwanda.
So you have kind of a Catch-22. The three syndromes end up reinforcing each other, unless in those rare instances, and there were a number that I recount in my book, where the president breaks out of the syndromes.
And Haiti is an example where he does that.
Yes.
During the campaign, Clinton was critical of the flow of refugees. Then when he came in he changed his mind. Then domestic politics intervened. Tell us a little.
It's a very good example of how foreign policy now is being influenced by domestic politics, much more than was the case in the Cold War era, when, as I said, there was widespread agreement by partisans about the goals of the U.S. foreign policy in the Cold War.
Haiti is a country not far from the shores of the United States. In 1993 and '94, a human rights catastrophe was unraveling in Haiti. The democratically elected president had been overthrown in a coup by a military regime that then conducted massive political killings in Haiti. Anyone aligned with the president, President Aristide, was likely to be picked up and killed or rounded up. Many people started to flee from Haiti in small boats, and many of them tried to make it and did succeed in making it to Florida and other places on U.S. shores. That, naturally, became a political question, the whole question of how you deal with the refugees. At the same time, the Congressional Black Caucus became very interested in the plight of the Haitians. There are a lot of Haitian-Americans in the United States.
President Clinton began to feel that this crisis not far from our shores required the kind of attention which a very distant catastrophe like the one in Rwanda didn't receive. So he did go on national television, he did take the bully pulpit, and he did work to assemble a multinational force and got UN approval of that force to go into Haiti and help restore the democratically elected president and remove the military regime that was causing such havoc.
So that was accomplished, and that was some six months after the Rwanda catastrophe. As I write in my book, Rwanda had a terrible but also galvanizing effect on the politics of humanitarian intervention. Since it was, quite early on, a catastrophic failure of foreign policy, the president was willing to take risks that something similar would not happen in Haiti, and, therefore, assembled a multinational intervention force for that country.
Reading your book, I get the sense that the perfect day for human rights, as opposed to the perfect storm, is that day when both multilateral forces -- not military forces, but sentiment and interest -- come together with a domestic coalition to say, "We've got to do something about this situation." Is that a fair statement? What makes that possible? Leadership and time, working together?
Let's look at the big picture here for a minute. What I call in the book the forces of disintegration were very active in the post - Cold War period after [several] wonderful things happened -- the fall of Apartheid, the fall of the Berlin Wall, etc. But there were high costs for these forces of disintegration, which produced conflicts in many parts of the world as states failed and cynical leaders tried to use ethnic and religious and political differences to advance their own cause.
First of all, by 1995, some three million people had been killed inside their own countries in the post - Cold War period alone. Three million people in places like Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Haiti, Chechnya, and many, many other places around the world. Second of all, there were 25 million refugees, the same number of refugees that we saw at the end of the Second World War, and that was very expensive. The U.S. had to spend, by 1995, some $20 billion in humanitarian assistance and peacekeeping assistance simply to clean up after these catastrophes that occurred. It became clear that it was really in the national interest to try to do something to contain the forces of disintegration.
At the same time, I do think that there were domestic forces and domestic lobbies that began to have something of an impact. I'd like to credit the human rights lobby, to the extent that they played a role. But certainly, so did the ethnic Americans -- the Haitian-Americans, in the case of Haiti, and those who felt they were being victimized in Yugoslavia. Finally, I do think that the president began to see that these kinds of catastrophes could not proliferate on his watch without major political consequences. And so President Clinton, quite belatedly, after the Haiti intervention that I described, also led an intervention into the former Yugoslavia, a much more complicated crisis, and an intervention that came quite late, after some 200,000 people had already lost their lives in that conflict, but an intervention which was decisive and ended the war, and began the process of nation-building which is going on today. And then, of course, the intervention in Kosovo, which followed upon that and, essentially, was another means by which these forces of disintegration were sought to be contained and lives saved.
Now, you mentioned one other syndrome. We talked about the Somali syndrome earlier. But the final one was the "conflict resolution paradox," and I want to bring that up. Explain that to us, and then we'll talk about how you dealt with all of this.
The conflict resolution paradox is really very simple. International conflicts, as they develop, and in some ways it's very similar to interpersonal conflict, probably can best be dealt with at the earliest stage, at the time when they're not heating up to the extent that large numbers of people are being killed or [in personal conflict] divorce is being contemplated. But that's the time, at least in the foreign policy context, when you're least likely to be paying attention.
There's a constant bureaucratic competition for airtime in the foreign policy arena. At the same time that the Rwanda genocide was under way, the Middle East was in crisis, Bosnia was in crisis, relations with China -- and these are all human rights issues -- had been sent into a tailspin because of differences over human rights. So you have a combination of events that are pushing forward only the most visible and catastrophic. By the time the policy process focuses on something like Bosnia, as it finally did in 1995, it's very late in the game. Many lives have been lost, and it's almost too late to do the preventive work that will save lives. By then CNN is showing all the bodies and the president is probably giving much more attention, but it's then the most difficult time to intervene.
So the paradox is a stitch in time saves nine, intervention early will save lives, but it's the time when intervention is least likely to occur.
Now, okay, we've got a set of problems here. You've come in with this human rights agenda. You're not alone, but the buck stops with you. What were some of the strategies developed to deal with it? You mentioned one earlier, that you would get on a plane and go to the hot spot and get on CNN yourself, I guess. Talk a little about your strategies for dealing with these syndromes, in light of what you wanted to achieve.
There were many strategies. Above all, the strategy was to seek alliances within the bureaucracy to find people who would work with you. I was fortunate over time to find many such people. They weren't necessarily human rights people, but they were concerned about the political costs of further disintegration of Yugoslavia, or the humanitarian costs in certain ways.
One of the ways that we focused human rights advocacy was by spotlighting abuses, gathering information. Information in Washington is a commodity. It's very important. Accurate information and an ability to produce it and to show what's happening could make a big difference. I and Dick Holbrook and a number of others who were working in the administration on Bosnia to change the policy had to produce evidence that what was happening was not the result of ancient hatreds, as some people [claimed] who were trying to wash their hands of the situation, but was the result of direct orders and activities by Slobodan Milosevic and Tudjman, and other leaders of those who were trying to engage in "ethnic cleansing."
So I put together fifteen reports inside the Human Rights Bureau of the State Department, gathering evidence from many sources -- from nongovernmental sources, from the UN, and from our own people in the field, using intelligence information and proving rather definitively that this was not an ancient-hatreds war, this was a war that was being manipulated by leaders, and those leaders should be charged with genocide and war crimes. By 1995 we were able to swing the process around.
One thing I did very specifically in the summer of 1995 was to travel to the refugee camps in central Bosnia where the victims of the genocide in Srebrenica were emerging. And the victims were [reporting] that there were 7,000 men missing, and [asking] where are those men? I finally found some of those men, they were the few who had made it into the refugee camps, and I interviewed them. These men told me horrendous tales of surviving their own executions, and they gave me graphic descriptions of how the Bosnian Serbs had conducted those executions, or the places they had been held, the towns in which they had been held, etc.
I filed a report which went to the intelligence agencies, and several heroic younger CIA officers stayed up all night for several nights rifling through the materials, through the aerial surveillance photographs that the intelligence community had maintained to find the evidence of the information that had been given to me by these survivors. They found it. They found the smoking guns. They found the surveillance photographs. Those photos were then taken to the UN Security Council and shown by Madeline Albright in mid-August of 1995. The U.S. policy was changed. NATO intervened, and the Bosnian Serbs were forced, along with the Croats, to the negotiating table, and the Dayton peace process followed. Now that was an important spotlighting enterprise which resulted in a change in policy.
So it's about, in part, building alliances across the bureaucracy of like-minded people, or people who are open to new kinds of information?
Yes, exactly.
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