I have spent the last 24 hours in Kigali, Rwanda, in a state of shock at the news of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination. Our UNA-USA inspection team arrived here last night on the first leg of this African tour – the sixth in a continuing series of visits to UN peacekeeping operations initiated by Foundation Emmes in 1992. My efforts to understand the United Nations have evolved considerably over the past decade.
I developed Foundation Emmes in 1986 to examine the United Nations system from a non-ideological, common sense ‘business like” perspective. The Foundation looked at specific parts of the UN System objectively to understand why certain activities were successful, and others were not. We wanted to know if the UN really does make a positive difference in the lives of people around the world.
In developing the Foundation, we borrowed from some lessons learned during my tenure at Business Executives for National Security (BENS), a unique nonprofit group comprised of 5,000 CEOs who are Interested in understanding what the relationship is between our national security and our military strength, our economic strength, and the health of our social institutions. Foundation Emmes organized a distinct bipartisan and common sense approach toward measuring the effectiveness of the United Nations by bringing together a broad section of individuals directly and indirectly involved or interested in specific UN issues for candid and off-the-record discussions where professionals could talk to each other, instead of past each other. By bringing successful business people, military experts, ambassadors, media, members of Congress, senior UN and US officials, and key policy analysts together for these “Mixed Tables”, the Foundation achieved one of its goals by improving the quality of contacts between various UN constituencies who thought they had little in common. We often made connections between decision-makers involved in different aspects of the same issue. This, alone, often changed the quality of the debate, and boosted our ability to help frame potential solutions concerning the issues we targeted.
In one sense, Foundation Emmes was among the first of many organizations to understand the growing role of civil society in tackling fundamental issues by partnering with the private and government sector. In the ensuing years, the Foundation furthered its goals by developing unprecedented programs that brought members of Congress to New York for private meetings with the UN Secretary-General and various UN ambassadors, particularly the “Permanent Five” – US, Russia, China, UK, and France. We also brought groups of UN ambassadors to Washington for “Mixed Tables”. With members of Congress, corporate leaders, and policy experts, participants often found that they faced similar problems and could benefit from the expertise of one another.
Organizing citizens’ fact-finding tours of UN peacekeeping operations (designed almost as a traveling “Mixed Table” because of our diverse participants) was Foundation Emmes’ final initiative before being merged into the United Nations Association of the United States of America (UNA-USA) in 1992. I joined the board of UNA-USA where many of the unique concepts that had been created at the Foundation were continued.
I have led four of the six peacekeeping tours that have been organized since 1992. Our first trip, a two-week marathon across 26 time-zones, took us around the world to Cambodia, Syria, Cyprus, Israel, and EI Salvador. Subsequent teams visited UN peacekeeping missions in the Western Sahara, Somalia, Mozambique, South Africa in 1993, twice in 1994 to Croatia; Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia, and to Haiti in May 1995. I am in Kigali now leading the current inspection tour, which will take us through Rwanda and Angola over the next seven days.
Last night, after being welcomed by the UN Protocol Officer at the airport, we settled at the Hotel des Mille Collines, Kigali’s version of a Deluxe resort. After a 24-hour flight, we sat for a quick working dinner and walked back to our rooms carrying a bottle of mineral water. Although we received six shots prior to our departure, we have been told not to brush our teeth with tap water, either here or inAngola. I had just sunk into a deep slumber when the telephone rang. One of my colleagues told me to turn on CNN.
Alone in my room, I cried at the news of Rabin’s death.
I can’ remember ever crying by myself before, but so much of my life has been connected to Israel’s quest for peace, and specifically to Rabin and this Government, that my body reacts involuntarily. Immediately, I think back to the times I had met Rabin. Only two weeks before, my wife Katja and I greeted him at a dinner celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the United Nations. I was privileged to help found the Israel Policy Forum (IPF), which worked closely with Rabin’s administration. In July 1993, I had been asked to help initiate the Israel Policy Forum and I went to Jerusalem to meet with both Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres.
I count Israel’s new Prime Minister, Shimon Peres, as my friend. I have known him for years, mainly from my work with Ben Gurion University, where we both currently serve as Vice Chairs. I have come to admire Peres more and more, and I respect his extraordinary intellectual talents. I have on different occasions discussed with him the reasons’ for my involvement with the United Nations Association and with Ben Gurion University.
He said that taking on new responsibilities with the Israel Policy Forum would complement my work with the other two institutions since all three are fundamentally committed to promoting peace. I guess that where you stand, depends on where you sit.
One of the lasting memories I will carry of Yitzhak Rabin will be how he changed his clothes in the first class cabin of an airplane. He and I and one my lawyer, Don Bezahler, were flying alone in the first class section. I will never forget the image of Yitzhak Rabin in his undershirt (as he changed into the El Al first class “sleeping outfit”), as he returned from paying a condolence call on the parents of a young American woman killed by Palestinian terrorists in Gaza a week earlier. A giant caught in a moment of utter simplicity. As the world learns that Rabin’s assassin was a Jew from Bar lIan University, the unbearable news becomes somehow even more incomprehensible.
My thoughts fade back to Rwanda. I cannot forget that approximately 1,000,000 Rwandans have been butchered here — hacked to death with machetes -many right where I am. Just in the last year. Never again?
Rwanda’s genocide defies the historical record: one million people murdered in three months ‘against’ six million Jews during the six years of World War II. And what about a million Cambodians in the four years of Pol Pot’s regime?
Coincidentally (a concept whose very premise I have begun to question), survivors of the Holocaust and researchers from Yad Vashem and the Holocaust Memorial in Washington are in Rwanda this week to participate in an International Conference on the Genocide. A strong gut-feeling tells me that I should get to Israel immediately to attend Rabin’s funeral, but I don’t. We are scheduled to fly to the Rwanda-Zaire border tomorrow to visit the refugee camps across Lake Kivu. I decide to stay.
Mass murders started in Kigali on April 6, 1994 after a plane carrying Rwanda’s president, a Hutu, and his counterpart from Burundi, crashed at the Kigali airport, allegedly brought down by Tutsi-fire. The killings started spontaneously, or so it seemed. In fact, a campaign had long been brewing inside Rwanda’s Hutu-dominated government to kill Rwanda’s Tutsis and moderate Hutus–those in favor of a peaceful power-sharing arrangement between Rwanda’s two ethnic groups. Using mostly machetes and other improvised weapons, perpetrators of the genocide killed moderate Hutus first, before turning against the Tutsis.
There were 500,000 victims by the end of May and the death toll rose to one million at the end of the summer. A conservative estimate puts at 100,000, the number of perpetrators (we will hear that the number of suspected perpetrators and collaborators is closer to 500,000) it probably took to kill this amount of people in the span of a few months.
So much senseless violence.
I am reminded of our visit to Cambodia when I met Prince Sihanouk on our first peacekeeping inspection tour in 1992. We had traveled to the country’s northern province to receive an official welcome from the Prince.
We sat for a formal lunch.
As the head of the delegation, I sat next to the Prince’s daughter-in-law. Following lunch, we sat through a two hour presentation of traditional Cambodian dance – by the National play troupe debuting the Prince’s granddaughter. Juxtaposing the ancient beauty of this traditional art form with the horrors of the recent genocide created an ironic contrast similar to those I have witnessed in later trips to the former Yugoslavia, and now in Rwanda. My thoughts are brought back to this moment because the Princess too was a survivor from genocide and she was the only one of her entire family remaining alive.
Thoughts of genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda- and in the former Yugoslavia, where our team has been last year, lead me back to Rabin and the Holocaust. Rabin has paid the ultimate price for his courage. In Cambodia, the carnage was attributed to the “oriental way”. In Africa to the “African approach”. In Yugoslavia to the “Slavic mentality” –so many qualifiers when the face of human evil seems to transcend race and geography. And now in Israel, what is it?
At my son, Forest’s birth, I had expressed my wish for him to grow to be a great “warrior for peace”. Now these words serve as Rabin’s epitaph. That his death had to come at the hands of a Jewish student from Bar lIan University is inconceivable. What unfathomable form of idolatry has allowed a Jewish leader to be killed by another Jew in the name of the land, as if the land itself had become some deity to be worshipped even above life itself?
My father has always said orthodoxy is an affliction- in any religion- and he has once again been proved right. Even if his comments were restricted to fanaticism or fundamentalism, it would matter little under these circumstances. I fade off in a swirl of thoughts that connect each of my children to Rabin and Peres and to the horrible truths about Cambodia, Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
Angola –November 10, 1995 9:00pm
I draft these words from the plane as we depart from Luanda, Angola, where we have spent the last few days. I am on my way home to New York through Brussels, where I will lay over to meet with my business partners for an afternoon. We were in Rwanda for three days, and then In Angola to inspect another UN peacekeeping operation. In Angola, we witness the Angolan peoples’ struggle to rebuild their nation. Until this week, Rwanda and Angola were just names in the news. All of my preconceived notions have been completely erased by first hand exposure. This is generally the pattern of first hand experiences, but it always seems a surprise, nonetheless.
In Rwanda, we met with the majority of the government’s ministers, mostly Hutus, although the most influential post of Defense Minister and Vice President is in the hands of a Tutsi, Mr. Paul Kagame, as are a number of other key posts. We are led to believe the Defense Minister is actually running the country, although he, of course, denies it. In the summer of 1994, Kagame led his army back into Rwanda and put an end to the genocide. He and most of his generation were not born in Rwanda; they returned to Rwanda in 1994 after 30 years of exile in neighboring countries.
On our Rwanda leg, a UN helicopter, on loan from Canada, flew our group to the Zairian border, which served as escape route for close to 2 million refugees fleeing the mayhem in 1994. Before the war, Rwanda was the second most densely populated country in the world after Bangladesh. But the country lost 40 percent of its population to genocide and exile. There are still an estimated 1.6 million refugees on the other side of Lake Kivu and UN agencies hope to facilitate their return in the coming months, although how they will fulfill that task is unclear based on the limited resources we saw deployed at the border with Zaire. The score of humanitarian organizations located in the vicinity were working in close cooperation with the UN at the time of our visit, but the government of Rwanda has recently expelled the majority of their representatives.
The flight over Rwanda’s western half affords us the view of a magnificent country–an uninterrupted stream of lush hills which has given Rwanda its name of ‘pays des mille collines’ – Land of 1,000 Hills.
The countryside is remarkably well cultivated, showing an orderly pattern of coffee, tea, and other plantations. Rwanda has the capacity to feed itself, and, prior to the war, even the Queen of England sent for some of the world’s most renowned and expensive tea grown on Rwanda’s hill-tops. Unlike other third world countries, which have been overwhelmed by urban blight, Rwanda had remained an agricultural economy, and the population remained disbursed throughout the countryside. Somehow, the fact that the carnage took place throughout the country rather than just in populous urban centers seems to change the equation.
Although we were in Rwanda for only three days, part of our mission requires forming an opinion on the achievements of the UN since the arrival of the peacekeepers in 1993. Clearly, the unique advantage our team has on missions like this is the diverse backgrounds of our team members. Some have a deep sense of the relevant history, while others are better equipped to analyze certain aspects of the current situation. The combination of our diverse perspectives yields a far richer insight than any of us could have had individually. We leave Rwanda believing it is time for the peacekeepers to go home and declare a small success. We do not feel that in light of other priorities (like those we will find in Angola) the world community can devote significant additional resources.
While it is clear that the world community abandoned Rwanda at its darkest hour, the UN’s presence in the past year seems to have helped stabilize the country. During our visit, however, the new Government of National Reconciliation reiterated again and again that it was firmly in control of the territory. In fact, as we arrived in Angola, we heard that an operation against an insurgent base on an island In Lake Kivu had just resulted in the death of 100 rebels, and was therefore branded as a government ‘success’. As it turned out, the operation had been launched while we were meeting with the Defense Minister.
Representatives of the government expressed their need for technical assistance and dollars, and wished that the UN soldiers and high priced European consultants would go home. Given the scarcity of resources available for multilateral action, we could not see what pushed the UN member states to extend their stay. Could the peacekeeping mission serve as insurance policy for the collective guilt of the international community?
Surely, Rwanda’s ruling team doesn’t embody the values of western democracy and respect for human rights which we bring into our judgment of the situation. We do not doubt that this government will commit occasional atrocities, but does this justify expending scarce resources, which might be better used to save greater numbers of lives elsewhere? The act of weighing priorities is dependent on our learning to distinguish between atrocities and genocide. Emotionally I rebel against the need to distinguish between various forms of evil. Intellectually, I am curious.
Should the world community focus additional scarce resources on a young but reasonably stable government trying to put its house in order? Are they likely to repeat the actions of the past? We believe the Government is capable of atrocious behavior from time to time, but not likely to commit the type of genocidal acts of the prior regime. In some slightly re-assuring way, the government of Rwanda has used the issue of genocide as a means to garner world publicity or attention, and this reason alone gives me some comfort that there is less likelihood that they would risk loosing some of the credibility they have built up in recent months through further genocidal acts.
Our team leaves Rwanda for Angola by chartered plane. Our ten-seater arrives safely after five hours (no bathroom). The flight over Angola’s western region and its diamond mines far below reminds me of the flight for survival of a dear friend, and a business partner. In 1993, as I visited him in Cannes, he recounted his escape from the Nazis in the mountains overlooking the Riviera coast and how he had survived on refuse and roots. From his yacht anchored off the fashionable beaches of Cannes, we could see the hills in which he had hidden during the latter part of the War. We talked of his flight for survival, and we talked about his subsequent involvement in Africa’s diamond industry, that allowed him to go from rags to extraordinary riches. I find a striking, and somewhat unfathomable, parallel between the fate of the individuals I meet and that of the nations I try to understand. I think about my own motivations for my overwhelming interest in the search for freedom and peace by people and nations.
We arrive in Angola at a critical juncture of its modern history. The Angolan people have been at war for close to thirty-five years and the UN operation offers them the first real chance to make peace. For five-hundred years, Angola was a Portuguese colony. In 1960, Angola joined much of Africa in its own war of liberation against the Portuguese colonial powers, a fight that lasted almost fifteen years. In November 1974, surrendering to internal political turmoil and the final blow of a coup against dictator Salazar, Portugal gave Angola its independence. But Independence Day in Angola marked the beginning of a civil war which lasted another twenty years. A peace agreement was finally signed in Lusaka, Zambia, in November 1994.
The key antagonists of this civil war, in which the two superpowers fought, by proxy (one of the longest regional conflicts of the Cold War,) were the-MPLA, led by Angola’s current President Eduardo Dos Santos and UNITA, led by the nationalist leader Jonas Savimbi. The MPLA’s war effort was backed by Soviet help in the form of advisers and weapons, to which were added, in the late 1970’s, a sizable contingent of Cuban troops. UNITA’s guerrilla army received strong and consistent US support and South Africa sent in mercenaries and weapons, as well. Angola provided some of the more grotesque episodes of the Cold War. In one of the most bizarre cold war episodes, at one point, US-backed UNITA rebels were trying to take control of Angolan oil installations run by American companies but protected by Soviet-sponsored Cuban soldiers!
The death toll and the destruction brought by the civil war has been enormous. Well over 500,000 Angolans had been killed by 1991, and no one is quite sure of how many died in the last two years of the war. There are estimates that 1,000 people died every day between 1992 and 1994. I know that the Angolans are worn-out by thirty-five years of war, but do they have the strength to make peace? I remember that Yitzhak Rabin said over and over again that making peace is a lot more difficult than waging war.
In contrast to what we have witnessed in Rwanda, however, and despite the devastation of 35 years, Angola has almost unlimited economic potential. It is said that each of its 18 districts is potentially capable of feeding the entire nation.
Unfortunately, the economy is so depleted and agricultural production is so diminished that thanks to generous U.S. help, humanitarian agencies have carried out the largest airlift of food in history, which has been the critical factor in saving millions of lives. Rich in diamonds, oil, and other minerals, Angola has a theoretical potential to even surpass South Africa’s economic achievements. Even in its near death state, Angola’s Cabinda province exports to the U.S. 7% of our foreign oil, fully 25% of our non-OPEC oil imports! After Nigeria and South Africa, Angola is the U.S. ‘s largest trade partner in Africa. Even today, both the Government and UNITA rebels fill their coffers by exporting diamonds and other minerals. How much more economic growth could be generated if peace truly came?
Despite the death and destruction, our visit gives us reasons for optimism. The new UN operation in Angola-the third since 1989–has been strengthened to 7,000 troops. The first operation, sent in to monitor the departure of Cuban soldiers from Angola, withdrew in 1991 after successfully fulfilling its mandate. When a peace agreement was signed in Portugal in 1991, the parties to the Angolan civil war requested a second UN operation to monitor the implementation of the accord. But the UN underestimated the troop requirements to monitor a country twice the size of Texas, and when elections were held in 1992 to form a new government of national reconciliation, there were not enough UN observers to deploy at all polling stations. The results of the elections were almost immediately contested by UNITA and the war resumed with increased violence.
This time, the UN seems to have adopted the right formula: sufficient staff, a clearly-defined mandate; and a charismatic and remarkably capable Special Representative, Maitre Alioune Blondin Bey, a former Foreign Minister of Mali.
Maitre Bey has much going for him. He is African with an intrinsic understanding of the region; he is a legal expert; and he has been associated with the Angolan process since 1993. Some credit him with bringing to completion the negotiations that produced Angola’s blueprint for peace–the Lusaka Protocol. In fact, he personally wrote parts of the Protocol.
November is a busy month in Angola. Independence Day and the one-year anniversary of the signing of the Lusaka Protocol were both celebrated during our visit. During this year, the number of cease-fire violations has dramatically decreased (they are one-tenth of what they were a year ago), but progress has been slow on the fundamental issues of demobilization, integration of soldiers into a joint army, and creation of a government of national reconciliation. The country is still divided into two separate zones–almost two separate governments–with the government in control of the large cities on the coast and UNITA controlling much of the interior.
With the Cold War over, the international community has united in its effort to help the Angolans make peace, and it is growing impatient with the lack of progress. One of our last meetings, this morning, was with the American and the Russian ambassadors who sit on the Joint Commission–a body created by the Lusaka negotiations and charged with monitoring violations of the Protocol. Through their mutual engagement in this process, Russia and the United States demonstrate that they have more to gain from peace in Africa than from a war by proxy–no more zero-sum game.
Yesterday, after a meeting with the young and all powerful Chief of Staff of the Angolan Army, we flew by UN plane to the regional city of Huambo where a Russian helicopter waited to take us across UNITA territory to Bailundo to meet with Dr. Savimbi, the UNITA Rebel leader. The day of our visit was another anniversary: a year ago that day, the Government took over Huambo from Savimbi’s control and forced UNITA to flee to the village of Bailundo, which now serves as’ headquarters for the UNITA leader and his close entourage. Bailundo is a two-street, bombed-out town where thirteen year old machine gun and bazooka-carrying UNITA rebels stroll through the remains of the town. Dr. Savimbi’s location apparently changes from day to day in an effort to keep the whereabouts of his revolutionary command a secret.
Driven in jeeps from the helicopter to the ‘center of town’, we were ushered into a room that obviously serves as guest-house and were served sodas and beer, bits of grilled chicken, peanuts, and fried plantains. The twelve of us were accompanied by our UN escort from Sao Tome, our interpreter from Ghana, a couple of unarmed military observers from Sweden and India and two soldiers from Uruguay and Brazil.
Dr. Savimbi had sent four officials to greet us: his Chief of Staff, his representative to Washington, and a couple of other ‘advisers’ whose titles were left to our imagination. There appears to be more “four-star· generals and ministers in UNITA’s shadow government than in the whole of the Pentagon and Presidents Cabinet. Savimbi’s emissaries gave us UNITA’s version of the deadlock in the peace process and we listened attentively. But we came to see Dr. Savimbi, who was negotiating with Government officials in a secret location in this deserted town. Two weeks before. UNITA halted all discussions with the government after Savimbi’s negotiator, a general known as Ben-Ben, was the victim of an alleged assassination attempt in Luanda, where he had come to participate in reconciliation talks. His body-guard was killed in the incident and UNITA is extremely upset about the whole affair. Although to be expected, there is little in the way of formal evidence that the bodyguard’s death was directly linked to any attempt on the General’s life, and we are naturally suspicious about the extent to which UNITA is using this incident as an opportunity for political maneuvering.
After hours of delay, sunlight was fading and our UN military escort–an Indian Major-pressed us to leave. UN regulations forbid flying helicopters at night in such isolated areas. But as he was about to force us back into the jeeps, a UNITA official informed us that Dr. Savimbi was ready to see us. I was glad I had managed to hold off the Indian Major. Back in the jeeps, we were routed to Savimbi’s headquarters. We found him jovial and upbeat. He welcomed us into a hall in which he had just finished negotiating with the government representatives. The room was about 50 feet long with pink-painted concrete walls and faux leopard skins on the chairs–the kind of tacky accessories one finds at cheap department stores in America. Savimbi was wearing a two-piece dark blue “leisure” suit adorned by the “required” gold watch and heavy gold rings. He walked with a stick capped by a gold medallion.
He was clearly feeling positive about his meeting, which ended late because “there was much to talk about,” he said. He wanted to assure us that the peace process was back on track and that he gave the negotiators a piece of his mind regarding the alleged attempt against Ben-Ben’s Iife. Our meeting was short, but, as I looked at him, I understood why this imposing character had managed to inspire a guerrilla army for the past twenty years and survive all the internal feuds, the power-fights, and the assassination attempts which must have plagued his career. His general message is that he wants us to be fully aware of his commitment to the peace process, and expectation that the process will pick up momentum in the coming months.
We communicate to him, as we have to the senior members of the Government, that there appears to be too big a gap between the rhetoric of progress and the actual accomplishments- noting that the Lusaka Protocols had been signed one year before. In general, we feel compelled, when given the opportunity, to reflect our sense that there is a growing impatience within the international community to continue to allocate extra-ordinary financial and personnel resources if the pace of progress is not accelerated. To be sure, progress has been made, but at too slow of a pace to be acceptable. Our return flights by helicopter and then plane to Luanda in the dark is uneventful- which on these trips is always a welcome status.
Back at the hotel, I catch a few Images of Rabin’s funeral on TV. The lineup of dignitaries who have come to pay their respects to Rabin’s family in particular, and the citizens of Israel in general, but who had refused to do so during his life is mind-boggling. Is death a prerequisite to forging the links that could not be tied in life? Like Rabin and Arafat three years ago, Angola’s leaders are at a crossroads. Will they have the courage and blessings to forge peace during their lifetimes? We clearly are witnessing an important point in Angola’s peace process and we all come away believing Angola has the potential to be a text book case for United Nations peacekeeping.
As I try to bring perspective to our activities over the past week, I keep coming back to this central question: Is it enough for these leaders to have courage and luck? What other factors might really make a difference? What general insights have we had, and what propositions of others have been reinforced or discredited through our own observations?
Drawing on the lessons learned during my past peacekeeping inspection trips and through my own activities in Israel, I have begun to develop a check-list of the requirements of peace:
- The warring populations must be war-weary.
Unfortunately, too often we believe that people don’t want war when in fact they have a thirst for it, or at least one side to a conflict does. In the classical distinction between peacekeeping and peace enforcement, unless both sides are worn out, it is premature to contemplate peacekeeping.
- Leaders have come to the conclusion that they will not defeat one another in battle and that mutual recognition to live side by side in peace is the only viable option. The courage required to break from the past and the capacity of leaders to ‘sell’ the new vision to their peoples are critical elements of the equation.
In many of these situations, a huge, unrealized economic potential further wets the appetites of the countries concerned, and of the international community, for post-conflict benefits. In contrast to Angola, Rwanda’s economic potential is rather limited, which does not improve its prospects for peace.
- The presence of an effective agent for peace-mediator, facilitator, or in the case of Angola, the Special Representative–is essential to relay positions, prod and encourage the parties, allow them to walk uncharted territory; help them to define a common ground, and give the final push when peace is at hand.
We embark on’ our flight home with a sense of optimism and purpose. The failure by UN member states to act decisively in the former Yugoslavia and the damage caused to the UN operation in Somalia by a poorly managed public information campaign have perverted the recent perspective on the benefits of UN peacekeeping. Angola gives us the first opportunity in a long time to tell the American public about the ‘good uses’ of UN peacekeeping and to report that peacekeeping operations are a cost-effective tool for the stabilization of regional conflicts — when certain conditions are met and when the resources are adequate to the mandate.
It is said that a butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing can change the weather in New York. I wonder how far I will spread my own wings, and in some small way, continue to make a contribution to the promotion of peace. I am going home hoping to make the work of the men and women that serve in UN peacekeeping somewhat better-known and determined to increase the support they deserve for making the world we live in a little more stable.
Perhaps you will join me.