Romeo Dallaire is one of the great, tragic heroes of our time, a great man who was prevented from taking effective and courageous action to stop the genocide by the U. N. under who he worked as a peacekeeper and the Bill Clinton administration which refused to take the simplest of measures, either blocking or bombing the transmitter of the mass media that played a central role in the genocide, Radio Mille Collines, a shock-jock radio station that would, translated, fit right in with American style hate-talk radio. Here is a bit about that from an old Atlantic article about the criminal negligence of the Clinton administration and other Western countries and the U. N. to act.
Dallaire never spoke to Bushnell or to Tony Marley, the U.S. military liaison to the Arusha process, during the genocide, but they all reached the same conclusions. Seeing that no troops were forthcoming, they turned their attention to measures short of full-scale deployment which might alleviate the suffering. Dallaire pleaded with New York, and Bushnell and her team recommended in Washington, that something be done to "neutralize" Radio Mille Collines.
The country best equipped to prevent the genocide planners from broadcasting murderous instructions directly to the population was the United States. Marley offered three possibilities. The United States could destroy the antenna. It could transmit "counter-broadcasts" urging perpetrators to stop the genocide. Or it could jam the hate radio station's broadcasts. This could have been done from an airborne platform such as the Air Force's Commando Solo airplane. Anthony Lake raised the matter with Secretary of Defense William Perry at the end of April. Pentagon officials considered all the proposals non-starters. On May 5 Frank Wisner, the undersecretary of defense for policy, prepared a memo for Sandy Berger, then the deputy national-security adviser. Wisner's memo testifies to the unwillingness of the U.S. government to make even financial sacrifices to diminish the killing.
"We have looked at options to stop the broadcasts within the Pentagon, discussed them interagency and concluded jamming is an ineffective and expensive mechanism that will not accomplish the objective the NSC Advisor seeks.
International legal conventions complicate airborne or ground based jamming and the mountainous terrain reduces the effectiveness of either option. Commando Solo, an Air National Guard asset, is the only suitable DOD jamming platform. It costs approximately $8500 per flight hour and requires a semi-secure area of operations due to its vulnerability and limited self-protection.
I believe it would be wiser to use air to assist in Rwanda in the [food] relief effort"
The plane would have needed to remain in Rwandan airspace while it waited for radio transmissions to begin. "First we would have had to figure out whether it made sense to use Commando Solo," Wisner recalls. "Then we had to get it from where it was already and be sure it could be moved. Then we would have needed flight clearance from all the countries nearby. And then we would need the political go-ahead. By the time we got all this, weeks would have passed. And it was not going to solve the fundamental problem, which was one that needed to be addressed militarily." Pentagon planners understood that stopping the genocide required a military solution. Neither they nor the White House wanted any part in a military solution. Yet instead of undertaking other forms of intervention that might have at least saved some lives, they justified inaction by arguing that a military solution was required.
Whatever the limitations of radio jamming, which clearly would have been no panacea, most of the delays Wisner cites could have been avoided if senior Administration officials had followed through. But Rwanda was not their problem. Instead justifications for standing by abounded. In early May the State Department Legal Advisor's Office issued a finding against radio jamming, citing international broadcasting agreements and the American commitment to free speech. When Bushnell raised radio jamming yet again at a meeting, one Pentagon official chided her for naiveté: "Pru, radios don't kill people. People kill people!"
The reports on the refusal of the Clinton administration to take that minimal step to save hundreds of thousands of lives had and have had a continuing effect on my thinking. I remember reading a defense of Clinton and his people, that it would have violated "freedom of the press" to have bombed the transmitter or to have jammed the signal based in the most recited bromides of American style liberalism, the artificial entities, "presses" in such thinking having rights more important to lawyers and judges and justices and politicians than the people they are getting murdered. Looking back on it over the years, it, the non-action of Bill Clinton, Sandy Berger and others even as they knew that the mass murder was being directed by radio telling murderers where their victims might have been hidden, it made me realize the very limited range of moral concern among that class of Ivy League trained lawyers and journalists and other professionals.
I would recommend listening to the entire interview, including what Romeo Dallaire says about his current work to try to abolish the practice of turning children into weapons of war as well as the profound toll that it has taken on him. I can hardly imagine the difference between how it has damaged and destroyed the professional soldier, the warrior, as it, clearly, has not changed the civilians, the politicians, the lawyers, the journalists, etc. who prevented him from saving lives.
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