MuseumDESCRIPTION:
Former Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights from 1993 - 1998, and the United States Ambassador to the Czech Republic from 1998 - 2000, John Shattuck now heads the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation in Boston. In this interview, he discusses the politics of responding to genocide and the roadblocks encountered and caused by government agencies, the syndromes of past interventions gone bad, the public opinion stalemate, and the conflict resolution paradox. Mr. Shattuck concludes with ideas for bursting through these roadblocks and responding to low level conflicts before they turn into genocide.
This interview is the second of three that Voices on Genocide Prevention is producing in conjunction with Facing History and Ourselves. John Shattuck will participate in an online discussion on March 19th and 20th which you can join by registering here.
TRANSCRIPT:
JERRY FOWLER: My guest today is John Shattuck. He was Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights from 1993 – 1998, and the United States Ambassador to the Czech Republic from 1998 – 2000. He now heads the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation in Boston. This is interview is the second of three that we are producing in conjunction with Facing History and Ourselves. John Shattuck will participate in an online discussion on March 19th and 20th. You can find details about participating in that discussion on the Voices on Genocide Prevention blog: www.vogp.org. Today, we will be considering the politics of responding to genocide. John is joining us from his office in Boston. John, welcome to the program.
JOHN SHATTUCK: Thank you; I am very glad to be here.
JERRY FOWLER: John, you wrote a book about your experience in the State Department called “Freedom on Fire: Human Rights Wars and America’s Response.” Let me start with that term, “human rights wars.” At first blush, that sounds a bit like an oxymoron.
JOHN SHATTUCK: What I meant by that was very simply the new kinds of wars that we began to see at the end of the Cold War as states failed and countries disintegrated, the former Yugoslavia, perhaps, being the leading example, and cynical leaders, such as Slobodan Milosevic and Franjo Tudjman in the former Yugoslavia began to fan the flames of religious or secretarian and ethnic conflict, and the victims of their manipulations—and they were doing this in order to be able to aggrandize their own power—the victims were almost always civilians—that is men, women and children generally unarmed—were the subject of what was called at that time “ethnic cleansing.” It is not a term that I like to use because I think in most instances it was genocide; it was efforts to strike people because of their ethnic or religious background and identity, and the atrocities were horrific. The number of people killed in Bosnia in the genocide that took place there from 1991-1995 was over 200 thousand. Of course, the most horrific of all took place in Rwanda, where 800,000 people were slaughtered in eleven weeks as a result of the kind of cynical, political manipulation from above of these ethnic conflicts. That is what I meant by human rights wars.
JERRY FOWLER: You refer to the term genocide, which obviously is the topic of our series, and you refer to genocide in Bosnia. Just earlier this month there was a decision by the International Court of Justice—fourteen years after the fact—saying that except for Srebrenica, what happened in Bosnia was not genocide, and often that term becomes a source of dispute and debate. I am wondering in what ways does the very term “genocide” influence discussions inside the government about responding to a crisis.
JOHN SHATTUCK: Genocide, as you say, is a very loaded term. I think in order to understand the kinds of debates that took place inside of government, particularly the time when I was in government, in the Clinton Administration in the 1990s, one has to look at the legal documents that governments have signed. The United States government has ratified the Genocide Convention, and the Genocide Convention which essentially grew out of the Holocaust and the effort to enlist countries around the world to prevent outbreaks of genocide again; the Genocide Convention obligated governments who signed it to take appropriate measures, to punish, and if possible, to prevent genocide. If you took that seriously, obviously, inside a government, as was the United States government, there was always a concern that if something was labeled a genocide it created a major obligation on the part of the government to do something about it; in the case, the United States government. I was both shocked and disappointed at the kind of sterile—I felt—debate that took place both in the context of Rwanda and in Bosnia over whether what was happening was genocide. I think the lawyers, many in the legal advisors’ office, the State Department and other legal council, in the White House and the Pentagon, were concerned that if something were called genocide that action would have to be taken to do something, and the United States government would have to be much more actively involved. That is the context in which this debate over the term genocide occurs inside governments.
JERRY FOWLER: We have seen more recently, though, with regard to Darfur that a United States Administration has been willing to label a situation “genocide,” which Colin Powell did as Secretary of State in September of 2004, but then it does not necessarily seem to impose any additional obligation. In fact, his position was that it did not impose any additional obligation.
JOHN SHATTUCK: I think the tragedy of both approaches—that is the approach that was taken in parts of the Clinton Administration that was dangerous to label Rwanda or Bosnia genocide because that would obligate action or the approach that was taken by the Bush Administration recently in the case of Darfur which is, “Sure we will go ahead and call it a genocide but then not do anything about it”—I think in both cases, the politics inside the United States government—at least in the first instance, particularly in Rwanda and now in Darfur—have cheapened the coin when it comes to the question of what an obligation of government ought to be. I think in the case of the Clinton Administration there was a recognition that the use of the term genocide was very serious, and if it was a genocide something would have to be done, and indeed in 1995 the United States government finally threw itself entirely behind stopping the genocide in Bosnia, and the term genocide was used. I wish that were also the case today; now that the term has been used by the Bush Administration to take more collective action to stop the genocide in Darfur.
JERRY FOWLER: Let us look a little bit more closely as to what goes on inside the United States government. This is one of the things that you discuss in your book “Freedom on Fire,” and you identify a number of what you call “Washington roadblocks,” and I would just like to go through them. The first one that you identify is what you call, “interagency gridlock.” For at least four years, you were the Senior State Department official with direct responsibility for human rights, but that did not mean that you were calling the shots on human rights policy, right?
JOHN SHATTUCK: What I meant by interagency gridlock is that in order for a policy to change, all the government agencies that were going to be charged with implementing the new policy would have to agree. For example, if there were a policy changed in Bosnia to have the United States directly commit itself through NATO to military intervention to stop the genocide in Bosnia, not only would the State Department have to recommend that as was done through my office, but the Pentagon and other sub-branches of the Pentagon and the State Department would have to agree. Otherwise, the Assistant Secretary for Human Rights could make a recommendation but nothing would happen because interagency gridlock—that is inability of agencies to agree that it ought to occur, that the change ought to occur, that the United States ought to intervene in Bosnia—would go nowhere.
JERRY FOWLER: I suppose the prevailing position in a lot of cases is just inertia, continuing to do what is already being done?
JOHN SHATTUCK: Yes, it is, and of course, there are other interests. In the case of the Pentagon, in the period that I am talking about, the Defense department, the defense doctrine was that we do not commit United States forces unless there is an overwhelming capacity to that commitment and to stop the war. The United States had been badly burned; the Clinton Administration had been badly burned in Somalia in 1993 when the Black Hawk helicopters were shot down in the midst of a United Nations peacekeeping operation and eighteen United States rangers lost their lives, and peacekeeping and United States intervention for human rights purposes became very unpopular, so you can imagine how the Pentagon felt about intervention in Rwanda or Bosnia, for that matter. They took a position that was basically saying that we did not want to get ourselves into that problem again, and of course there were politics involved on Capitol Hill as well. When the Black Hawk helicopters went down in Somalia, there was a huge outcry in the Congress. “This is not the way we ought to be committing our troops,” said many members of Congress; in particular, Bob Dole who was soon to be running for President against President Clinton. I think that was an example of the kind of politics militating against making any change in policy.
JERRY FOWLER: Since you mention Somalia, that was another of the road blocks that you identified, was what you called the “Somalia syndrome,” and the very recent experience as of 1994 of the problem of the soldiers being killed in Somalia. In some ways, that is a long time ago in terms of policy making today, but I am wondering if that “Somalia syndrome” has been or will be or is being replaced by an Iraq syndrome.
JOHN SHATTUCK: That is what I was going to say next. I think that the growing unpopularity of the Iraq war, and the great controversy over the intervention in the first instance, and the fact that the Bush Administration has justified the intervention ultimately in human rights terms, saying that the liberation of the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein; all of that has made the kind of what we call “humanitarian intervention”—which finally took place in Bosnia in 1995, in Kosovo in 1999, in East Timor in 2000—I think those kinds of humanitarian interventions are going to be far less likely to take place in the wake of a very unpopular intervention in Iraq.
JERRY FOWLER: The unpopularity kind of leads to another roadblock that you identified, which you termed the “public opinion syndrome.” In general, from someone with your perspective, who was an Assistant Secretary of State, what role does public opinion play in shaping the context in which decisions are made to respond or not to respond to massive human rights abuses?
JOHN SHATTUCK: It plays a far larger role than I would have liked for it to have played, and that is to say that if there is no large public outcry or public constituency for the use of force—and here we are talking about a very specific kind of effort to stop genocide after everything else has failed; after any kind of diplomatic negotiations or the use of sanctions has failed, then all that remains is a military effort to intervene, and if public opinion is not very supportive of that kind of military intervention, then it is not likely to take place. I will give you an example where it was supportive and where an intervention occurred. It was very shortly after the failure to intervene in Rwanda. There was a growing humanitarian and human rights crisis in Haiti in 1993 and 1994, and in the fall of 1994, despite not having intervened in Rwanda, the United States led a military intervention in Haiti to essentially protect the Haitians from their military regime which were engaged, not in genocide, but certainly in crimes against humanity, massive attacks on civilians, and a reign of terror in order to stay in power, and I think the fact that the Congressional Black Caucus and the number of governors in the southern states of the United States, where there were refugees coming from Haiti, supported a strong military response to what was going on led to the intervention that was going on there. In Bosnia in 1995, I think finally after three years of seeing a failed peacekeeping effort by the United Nations, led by European countries, public opinion in the United States increasingly turned toward “this is something that the United States really ought to be involved in,” and certainly the role of the press in publicizing the unfolding genocide in Bosnia, the massive killings that were occurring and the Srebrenica episode, which was probably the single trigger that got the military intervention; all of that I think, reflected a public opinion that was changing in favor of intervening. The “public opinion syndrome” that I mention is basically that the public often waits to be led on something as complex as a foreign policy, military intervention issue. It is looking to the President to take the bully pulpit, but the President often will not do that unless he feels that the public is on his side, so there is a kind of Catch 22. The public wants to be led and the President does not take action until he feels the public is ready to be led. That is how the “public opinion syndrome” played out, I think particularly in Rwanda.
JERRY FOWLER: Just touching on Haiti for a little bit; I think one of the points that you made in your book was that there was this intervention as it were, there was this action in Haiti, but then it got cut short. Is a short attention span another problem?
JOHN SHATTUCK: It certainly is a problem. I think the Haiti intervention did not have broad public support, and was in fact very much opposed by particularly Republicans in the Congress in 1994 who did not want to provide funding for the kind of post-conflict reconstruction that is necessary in a situation like this, so partly it was a short attention span, but it was also the controversy around the intervention itself, and here again, all of this you have to tie to domestic politics in 1994 and 1995 when the funding was being cut off from Haiti after the initial intervention. The Congress was up for reelection and there was a strong effort being made to embarrass President Clinton in the midterm elections, and indeed he was significantly embarrassed because he lost virtually all of the democratic control of both houses in Congress, so Haiti became, in a sense, a political football domestically.
JERRY FOWLER: One final roadblock that I want to touch on that you identify is what you call the “conflict resolution paradox,” which I understand as meaning that it easier to solve a situation before it becomes a crisis, but the government, our government, generally does not pay attention until it is already a crisis, and then solutions are much more difficult.
JOHN SHATTUCK: One of the things it is often hard to understand if you have not been on the inside of government is what an incredible number of issues are constantly vying for attention at the highest levels. At the time that the Rwanda genocide took place there were many other issues that were diverting the attention of the White House, the Pentagon, and even the State Department during the short time that the Rwanda genocide was taking place, and there was basically a competition to get access to the highest levels. It was very hard to do that because there was a preoccupation with China, issues in Haiti that were much closer to home, the war in Bosnia, to say nothing of all the domestic issues underway. What I mean by the “conflict resolution paradox” is the time when intervention can be most effective is when the crisis is least visible, at a time before massive numbers of killings have occurred, when warnings might have been issued. This was the case in Rwanda where there were clear indications that those who were planning the genocide were doing such and they could have been disarmed. There was in fact and effort to disarm them by the United Nations commander and he was told by the United Nations Secretary General’s office that he was not to take any military action because he was not getting support from the United States. At a time when intervention might very well head off a genocide, it is that nobody is paying close attention. At a time when the killing is underway in massive numbers, it is often too late. The paradox is that it takes the genocide itself to get the attention of the highest levels, and by then, the damage is often done. A very, sort of classic way of putting this is in the case of Somalia which was not a genocide to be sure, but the United States had intervened there to deal with issues of famine in 1991, and it was the CNN broadcast and publicity given to what was happening to the people who were victims of famine in Somalia that really led to the United States intervention because so many people saw it on their televisions, and then a year and a half later when the Black Hawk helicopters were shot down and the United States soldiers were killed in Somalia and one of their bodies was dragged through the streets of Somalia, that too was on CNN, and what we said loosely at the time—and I am afraid that it somewhat was true—is that CNN got us into Somalia and CNN got us out of Somalia.
JERRY FOWLER: Looking forward, and as we are coming near the end of our time, what are the ways that we can burst through these roadblocks that you have discussed and act sooner, more effectively, without allowing crises to get to the point where the only options available are very, very tough options?
JOHN SHATTUCK: I think there are several things that need to happen, and sadly in the context of the “Iraq syndrome” that we discussed earlier, I fear that they are not happening. First, the United States needs to be much more supportive of the international early warning systems, many of them within the United Nations—the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees—we need to provide the kind of support that allows us to be able to get information early from these kinds of agencies that there is a danger of genocide breaking out. In essence, we need to build the capacity to take action that can head a genocide off before military intervention is necessary. Second, I think we need to build a much more effective international peacekeeping capacity. There has been a debate for a number of years about the kind of capacity that the United Nations and regional organizations ought to have. I think NATO probably has the best capacity of any organization to move, and it did move, and effectively moved finally in Bosnia, and so we need to see these international peacekeeping or military coalitions as charged with the responsibility for intervening in the case of genocide and governments that are participating in these types of organizations, particularly in our case, the United States obviously, need to see that as part of the mission. I think we did get to that point both in Bosnia, and again in Kosovo. Third, and here is a very personal observation, I think people in positions where they can take action inside government need to press by being witnesses. There is nothing more powerful than the power of witnessing, as the Raphael Lemkin interview that you did last week demonstrated. In my own case, I found the power of witnessing in Bosnia and constantly producing information that finally could not be ignored about the kinds of atrocities that were occurring, particularly when I went to Srebrenica and was the first person to interview some of the Survivors of the Srebrenica genocide, and then get that publicized and get it to the highest levels of government; that can have a very significant impact. I tried the same thing in Rwanda, and unfortunately Rwanda was just too soon after Somalia for the United States to really take the kind of notice that it should have taken, and I think in retrospect, and as President Clinton himself said when he went to Rwanda in 1998, clearly this was a massive failure not only of United States responsibility under the Genocide Convention, but also a breach of our own support for the mechanisms of international security because what happened in Rwanda after the genocide—not only were the 800,000 people killed in Rwanda, but the entire region of Central Africa has been destabilized basically on until today in the Congo. There are some major lessons to be learned from genocides that have not been stopped. What I fear now as a result of the exhaustion that people feel after the failure of the Iraq intervention and the fact that that is being tied to humanitarian intervention is that it may weaken the will of Americans to throw their support behind the kind of intervention that we have been talking about here, but I hope that that is not true and certainly this ought to be a topic to be taken up in the upcoming presidential campaigns.
JERRY FOWLER: John Shattuck is a former Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and now head of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation in Boston. He will be discussing these issues online on March 19th and 20th. You can find details about participating in that discussion on the Voices on Genocide Prevention blog: www.vogp.org. John, thanks so much for taking the time to be with us.
JOHN SHATTUCK: Thank you Jerry very much. It has been a pleasure.
