PAUL KIRK: Good evening everyone. Thank you for bearing the elements, coming here this evening. Should be a very enjoyable evening. I see many familiar faces out there. For those who I haven’t had the privilege to meet, my name is Paul Kirk and I chair the board of the Kennedy Library Foundation. And on behalf of our board members, some of whom are here, and on behalf of Deborah Leff, the Director of the Kennedy Library, and on behalf of John Shattuck, who usually is in this position-- a little awkward for John to introduce himself tonight so they called in the B team-- but not only do I want to thank all of you for coming, I want to express particular thanks to the friends and institutions that make these forums possible: Fleet Boston, Boston Capital, The Lowell Institute, WBUR, Boston.com, and our neighbors at The Boston Globe.
In keeping with the ideals that were at the heart of the presidency of John F. Kennedy, we focus this evening on the topic of freedom and human rights. Within minutes of accepting the oath of office, President Kennedy told the world that his generation and his administration was “unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.”
In his book Freedom on Fire: Human Rights Wars and America’s Response, John Shattuck, Chief Human Rights Official of the Clinton administration, analyzes our country’s response to more recent attempts to advance and protect human rights around the globe. During President Clinton’s term in office, John was at the heart of the action, confronting Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade, establishing the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia, restoring a democratically-elect government to Haiti, and pressing for the release of political prisoners in Cuba.
In his book, John shares his insights on where the Clinton administration succeeded, but he also records his frustrations with the internal struggles that defined United States policy at that time. Importantly, as we look to the future, John also sets out criteria for when the United States should or should not intervene militarily in the affairs of other nations, and he offers an important analysis on whether current United States policy fits those criteria.
John Shattuck’s career spans nearly three decades in government service and in service to the nonprofit sector. He was nominated by President Clinton and confirmed by the United States Senate, served first as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, and later as US Ambassador to the Czech Republic. Before entering government service, John was at Harvard University, where he held the position of Vice President for Government, Community and Public Affairs. He began his career at the American Civil Liberties Union, where he was Executive Director for the ACLU in Washington, DC.
Joining John shortly after his remarks is our moderator this evening, Samantha Power. Samantha is the founding Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and she is the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, which examines US responses to genocide in the 20th century. From 1993 to 1996 Samantha Power covered the wars in the former Yugoslavia as a reporter and she is the co-editor of Realizing Human Rights: Moving From Inspiration to Impact.
We will begin this evening, as I said, with a few opening comments from John, and he and Samantha will then engage in a conversation before taking questions from all of you. After our session here, John will kindly autograph his book out here, outside of the Smith Center. Join me, if you will, in giving a warm welcome to his own home place, John Shattuck.
[applause]
JOHN SHATTUCK: Thank you, Paul, very much for that undeserved but very, very warm introduction. It’s always a privilege to be on this podium introducing other speakers, and now we sent the A team to introduce the speaker tonight who is normally doing the introducing.
I also want to thank Deborah Leff, the Director of the Kennedy Library and Museum, for all that she does here, and the staff here and members of the board, and Samantha Power, my wonderful friend from whom I’ve learned so much, and you will see tonight as she and I have a conversation about these issues. Thank you for joining us here.
I also want to start by dedicating this forum to the memory of a courageous Boston Globe reporter who earlier this year lost her life in Iraq, Elizabeth Neuffer, and who also graced this podium just about a year ago in a forum discussing many of the same issues we’re going to discuss here tonight with Samantha Power. So it’s particularly fitting that Samantha is back to share this dedication of this event.
My book lies at two dangerous intersections: the intersection for the author of history and memoir—it is obviously complicated to put yourself in the middle of a story that is also of historical importance-- but also the more dangerous intersection of government and human rights. Human rights often are seen as rights against government, and to put government in the position where it would promote human rights is particularly complicated.
It’s a book about the period after the Cold War, where there was so much to celebrate, at least at the outset: certainly the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Soviet empire, the breaking out of democracy in many parts of the world, the end of apartheid in South Africa. All of these events swept us along in a current of excitement in those early post-Cold War years. But there was also much misunderstanding about what these years were going to be, and that is largely the subject of my book. Certainly the outbreak of ethnic violence that led to genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia are two of the most powerful examples of how those initial events were misunderstood, as I will describe.
Let me take you into Washington briefly and give you a sense of the bureaucracy of human rights enforcement. I said government and human rights are a dangerous intersection. Harry Truman once famously said, “If you want a friend in Washington, bring your dog.” And I can tell you that I was blessed with a dog, I had a wonderful family and I had many friends, so I was fortunate, and they were all very helpful during this difficult, complicated time.
There are three bureaucratic battlegrounds in Washington that are important to understand at the outset of understanding about human rights and government: paper, phone calls and meetings. They are, of course, the stock of all of our lives. In paper Washington often drowns, and you want to do everything you can to avoid being drowned by all the papers that you don’t really need to see that are coming in your direction, and above all try to find out how to get access to those papers that no one will show you. In my case, for example, a document that called for the withdrawal of peacekeepers from Rwanda within the next 48 hours was something I never saw.
Phone calls. We all live and die by phone calls, of course. And there is a particular pecking order about phone calls in Washington, and that is you don’t find it easy to get through to someone who is at a higher level. They don’t tend to return your phone calls, even if they’re nearby, even if you have something very important to tell them that really shouldn’t go on paper. They expect to see you at a meeting or otherwise to get it on paper. So I found a foolproof way to get my phone calls returned in the human rights area, in any event, and that was to travel.
And I would travel to Sarajevo or Beijing or Port-au-Prince and then phone home, and, of course, under those circumstances I would almost always get through and they’d want to find out what was happening out in the field and what I was engaged with.
Let us look at what the post-Cold War world looked like quickly and take a photograph of it. It was a time, of course, when the US was self-absorbed. We were looking for the peace dividend for the end of the Cold War. There was a domestic focus of much of our politics. We were looking for ways of improving our economy and strengthening our own institutions. But there were two great forces that were at work in the world, one that we understood early and the other that we understood only late and in a dangerous way, perhaps too late for too many.
First were the forces of integration, which in fact were the very elements of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the other things that happened to celebrate the period after the Cold War ended. But they were also the market economic developments that occurred around the world, they were the communications revolution that made it possible to communicate across borders and to have ways of engaging people at grassroots levels on political activities in many countries. These forces of integration were the forces that seemed to be bringing the world more closely together.
But there were at the same time and very poorly understood forces of disintegration at work. And these were the forces that were at work in broken places, failed states, collapsed governments like the former Yugoslavia, and also in Rwanda and many other parts of the world, where cynical leaders were increasingly using the differences of ethnic and racial groups to fan the flames of difference and to get people to attack each other in order to advance their own cause. And these forces of disintegration by 1995 had caused three million people to be killed within their own countries just since the end of the Cold War, 20 million refugees to begin to circle in search of places to find refuge, a huge humanitarian cost of about 15 billion dollars to deal with these refugees and the crises that were caused by the forces of instability, and of course, most potently in terms of today, terrorism.
We discovered that there was a national security interest early on in promoting the forces of integration, if not by accident. Much of the Clinton policy was directed toward economic integration and moving overseas in terms of markets, and only later did the forces of disintegration become part of an effort to control, that is to say, maintain some containment of these forces so that they would not destabilize whole sections of the world.
On the ground the forces of disintegration were at work in Somalia, in Rwanda, in Haiti, in Bosnia, in Kosovo. And I want to just quickly tell you what the policy implications of a lot of this were. The human rights wars that I wrote about really started at least in this period that I’m talking about in Somalia, and “Blackhawk Down,” of course, captures much of what it was that was going on there, the film and the book. But there’s a deeper story, of course. There was a humanitarian intervention to try to save lives of people in a famine, first initiated by the first Bush administration and then continued in the Clinton administration, and a UN peacekeeping operation which went after those warlords who were causing the destabilization in Somalia. And then, tragically, the peacekeeping went all wrong. It was not well-coordinated and 18 US Rangers lost their lives in a now notorious incident in which one of their bodies was dragged through the streets of Mogadishu on CNN, in a sense demonstrating that the forces of integration had met the forces of disintegration, communications in that respect.
This led to a huge political crisis and outcry in Washington regarding peacekeeping, and Congress and large sections of the administration called for a significant reduction in US commitment to dealing with these kinds of foreign crises like Somalia. A presidential decision directive was drafted and implemented, and this led six months later to what I call the perfect human rights storm, from a policy standpoint, and that was the outbreak of genocide in Rwanda. The decision by the United States government to withdraw the peacekeepers from Rwanda just at the moment when the people planning this genocide-- and they indeed were planning it, as Samantha very eloquently describes in her book and as I go into in my book-- the signal they got from the international community is that we’re withdrawing, essentially we’re leaving the field to you. And the rest is, as they say, history, but a terrible history of 800,000 people in 11 weeks being slaughtered in a genocide that swept through the country like wildfire. And those of us on the inside who were trying to restore some basic element of peacekeeping kept coming up against this presidential decision directive that had been implemented after the Somalia debacle.
But the Rwanda genocide also led, I think, to some real soul searching inside the administration, and there was a debate that developed rather early in this process over how should we be using our force in the post-Cold War world and the doctrine of overwhelming use of force, which had been used in the Gulf War, and then the restrictions on the use of force that had been put into place after Somalia came into question. And a new doctrine was developed of diplomacy backed by force, and it was implemented in Haiti for the first time in September of 1994, where a democratically-elected regime had been overthrown, a military regime had come in and committed widespread human rights abuses and killings. Refugees began to pour into the US shores and this became a domestic political issue. And so President Clinton exercised the kind of leadership that’s needed under these circumstances and actually developed a multinational force to intervene in Haiti, and that was done in September of 1994. Unfortunately, it was withdrawn far too early for it to have the kind of long-term success that I think it should have had.
But then, finally, there was the signature crisis/human rights war of the ‘90s in the Balkans, which raged throughout the 1990s, or at least in the first half of the 1990s. Here was genocide in the heart of Europe. At first the Somalia syndrome that I’ve described kept the Clinton administration from engaging in a particularly aggressive way. And the administration before it had made a Cold War determination that there really wasn’t any strategic US interest in Bosnia or in the Balkans, so it too did not intervene. It was left to the Europeans. And there was a very weak UN peacekeeping operation, which tragically had no serious impact on the loss of lives. And by mid 1995, 200,000 people, estimated, had been killed in Bosnia.
A catastrophic event occurred similar to the one in Rwanda in that a town in eastern Bosnia, Srebrenica, was overrun by the Bosnian Serb army and the people from that town fled but all the men were missing. There were refugees, scores and scores of refugees, thousands and thousands pouring out, but there were no men between the ages of about 20 and 50. Incredibly, there was no real intelligence on what had happened to those men. I was sent by the Secretary of State to interview refugees in central Bosnia to find out where these missing men were, and I found a number of refugees who were themselves in the age range, men who had actually told stories about escaping their own executions, where mass graves had been dug, men had been rounded up, held in warehouses, and then taken out, shot, and pushed into the pits in scenes very reminiscent of the worst atrocities of the second World War.
This led to a change in US policy. There were two heroes that I always cite in my remarks in this story: two young CIA agents who stayed up all night for two nights rifling through the aerial surveillance photographs that had been taken of the area after I filed my report to find the photographs that would match the description of the places where these accounts of genocide had occurred, and they found them.
And these photographs were then taken to the UN Security Council and that led to a fundamental change in policy.
So we came out of that period … Kosovo, obviously, followed. It’s a controversial war. I’m sure that there will be questions about it. I’m not going to spend time in my initial remarks here talking about it. But there was a doctrine of humanitarian intervention that was developed during the course of these very painful years, partly in reaction to the crisis in Rwanda, the genocide in Rwanda, and certainly in reaction to the genocide in Bosnia. It was a highly imperfect doctrine but it was a doctrine that called for multilateral intervention by forces authorized either by the United Nations or by international law to proceed into saving lives in other countries.
Quickly fast-forward to September 11th and put all of what I’ve said through the lens of our current state of affairs. September 11th was certainly a wakeup call to Americans on the forces of disintegration. They were not just taking place in distant places like Rwanda or Bosnia or Kosovo, they flew directly into the World Trade Center. Americans I think woke up to not only what had been going on overseas but they were shown graphically, as a result of the fact that Al-Qaeda has been harbored in Afghanistan, they were shown graphically what the conditions of human rights abuse are out of which terrorism can grow. And certainly the Taliban regime in Afghanistan was one of the most abusive regimes and the human rights conditions in Afghanistan were horrendous. And this was a very good swamp out of which the terrorism grew.
So there was an immediate response that I think was an extension, to some extent, of the doctrine of humanitarian intervention, but it was also very much a focus of the War on Terrorism, and that was to go in and attack Al-Qaeda and the Taliban at their roots, a multilateral intervention authorized by the United Nations and certainly widely supported by countries in the world. It was a very good linking of the roots of terrorism with the crisis of human rights.
But two years later, I have to say that my own conclusion is that the War on Terrorism increasingly is undermining, not defending, human rights. Repression is being encouraged in the name of fighting terrorism in many countries who are with us in the War on Terrorism but are certainly engaged in massive repression in their own countries: Russia, Indonesia, China. And, of course, here in the United States attacks on civil liberties have become a major feature of the War on Terrorism: the USA Patriot Acts, increased surveillance and secrecy. American citizens now can be designated by the Attorney General of the United States enemy combatants, and under that designation the Bill of Rights can be basically stripped from them. Fortunately, these cases are now pending in the courts: the disregarding of international law, the holding of thousands of prisoners in Guantanamo without the Geneva Conventions being asserted as applicable. Fortunately, I think now that the courts are getting involved there are signals coming that that may have to be changed.
And then most tragically, at least in my view, in terms of humanitarian intervention, is the replacement of the doctrine of humanitarian multilateral intervention with a new doctrine of unilateral preemptive war. And that is, of course, what has happened in Iraq. And Iraq and the conditions in Iraq I think are largely a result of the way in which the United States chose to intervene under those circumstances.
And then, finally, I think we have seen a serious erosion of what I would call US soft power. That is, the power of a country that abides by the rule of law and is seen internationally to abide by the rule of law, even though haltingly it sometimes may not have. And the change of the US from a beacon of freedom, which I think has been the way it has been seen in the past by many, to essentially an armed and, to many, dangerous fortress.
Now I don’t believe that it has to be this way, and I’m not campaigning in any respect here other than to say that I think there’s a set of criteria and lessons that come out of the experience, painful as it was, that we had in the 1990s dealing with the forces of disintegration and developing the doctrine of humanitarian intervention that can be applied to today. And here are some very simple basic ones. First, unilateralism does not work in the context of this kind of humanitarian intervention. Of course it’s even questionable about whether Iraq should be called that in the sense that it was originally undertaken for other reasons. Certainly had a unilateral US intervention taken place in Bosnia or in Haiti or in Kosovo, I think the same kind of circumstances that we face today in Iraq would have occurred in those countries: a lack of real broad acceptance and legal basis for the intervention.
Second, I think the strategy of dealing with these forces of disintegration should be prevention wherever possible, not necessarily military intervention. And there are many things that can be done and should have been done in the 1990s: warning leaders who are planning a genocide of the consequences that would follow, as in the case of Milosevic, for example; or seizing weapons of the genocide planners in Rwanda, which should have taken place; or imposing arms embargos; or freezing the bank accounts of human rights violators the way we now do for terrorists or drug lords; jamming the hate radio stations that may be spewing forth the kind of message that will get people to commit the kinds of terrible crimes that have occurred.
And then, third, when prevention fails I believe that military force should be used as a last resort, but when clear criteria are met: first, the genocide and crimes against humanity are ongoing; second, that there is a multilateral authority, preferably the UN, in support; and third, that there is no risk of a wider war or increased terrorism.
Finally, I think intervention should never be undertaken without a clear plan for reconstruction. It’s essential, I think, that we avoid the pitfalls of Iraq, which was a unilateral occupation compounded by unrealistic planning that was initiated or didn’t take place where we thought Iraqi exiles could come back and run the government and we thought that this would lead to a rather soon transformation in the Middle East. I believe that we need to go forward in Iraq. This is the biggest human rights crisis in the world today and it needs to be addressed through very strong measures. And I think the only way forward is first to renounce the doctrine of unilateral preemptive intervention of the kind that has been undertaken in Iraq; second, to get broad UN support through a new UN resolution that would turn over forming the new political authorities in Iraq to the United Nations so that there is legitimacy to that. I think that would also attract more troops from other countries and more assistance from other countries, so that the 87 billion dollar price tag of the Americans wouldn’t necessarily be as high. And, finally, I think we should open the contracts for economic reconstruction to a broader range of participants than seems to be now the case in Washington.
Let me close by quoting President Kennedy in his library. He challenged the preemptive unilateralists of his time in a warning that they were risking undermining international security. In a famous statement in an even more dangerous time than today-- the Cuban Missile Crisis-- after the crisis, after his successful negotiation of that terrible 13 days, he said the following: “The United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscience. We are 6% of the world’s population. We cannot simply impose our will on the other 94% of mankind. There cannot be an American solution to every world problem. There must be a world solution.”
Finally, let me close with a quote from Vaclav Havel, who succinctly states what I believe about human rights and what I write in my book. He says, “I am not an optimist because I do not believe that all ends well. Nor am I a pessimist, because I do not believe that all ends badly. Instead, I am a realist who carries hope, and hope is the belief that freedom has meaning and is worth the struggle.”
Thank you very much.
[applause]
SAMANTHA POWER: Hi there. It’s great to be here. I’m so honored that John wanted me to share his coming out party on his home turf. I have to say that he is the only US official among nearly 300 that I interviewed who would ever willingly ask to be interviewed publicly on the questions of the genocides of the 1990s by me. So I’m especially honored.
And I want to say just first that this is a book that describes a lot of bureaucratic calisthenics and acrobatics, a lot of frustration. John describes himself as the skunk sometimes in the bureaucracy who wanted to impact unpleasant messages to summon people to their moral principles, which some of them had left at the door in the morning. So he wasn’t a very popular guy. In a lot of cases it’s a story of failure. But if all you ever achieved, I think, for the rest of your career was to simply get off your butt and go to Srebrenica or go to Tuzla and interview the refugees and get the names of the places where they had been butchered and pass them along and make it possible to be the only US official to make it possible for those CIA analysts to stay up all night, and for those CIA analysts in turn to come upon the evidence that was needed to push a very recalcitrant bureaucracy over the tipping point, if that’s all you did, you’d go upstairs. So I think you should be very, very proud of that. And it’s an important story in here, but I just want to ratify it from the outside. That intervention would not have come about without documentation of what had been done in Srebrenica. It was a belated intervention, of course, but a very important one.
Second, just an introductory comment, I just want to say a word about Elizabeth, in part because just being here reminds us all, I think, of what a difference a year can make. Not only have we lost an incredible friend and trusted and tireless colleague in this business, but the victims of atrocity around the world have lost their most reliable future voice, prospective voice, the person who would have put her pen and her voice to their suffering. And so I see a lot of young people out there in the audience who came, I think, with their classes. We need you, because we’ve lost somebody really great. We need more people willing to devote themselves to giving voice to the voiceless.
The other thing about coming back here, of course, after a year, is to be reminded of what a difference a year makes in other ways. The debate that we had less than a year ago, not only did we have Elizabeth right here with us, but we were able to debate almost the mechanics and the politics of harnessing American power on behalf of good. We were able to have an extended debate about doing that, using American force on behalf of noble ends. And you see to some extent how anachronistic that debate would feel right now, not only because our military is so overstretched but because the kind of acceptance, if not welcoming, that the rest of the world would have given those initiatives, maybe not a year ago but at least a few years ago, I think has really faded away.
So one of the questions that I’ll come to towards the end is about what it means for thinking about human rights in the country. We used to think about the US government as one-stop shopping on behalf of things we really cared about. What does it mean now when so many people around the world see the United States as the principal threat to human rights, or at least to international law? What does that mean for advocates and people who care about these principles?
And then a final comment, and then I’ll launch into my questions. Two warnings. One, I attended the Kennedy School forum last night and it was my first time ever attending Chris Matthews’ “Hardball” show. But I just want to warn you that maybe some of his tics may have worn off over the course of being near him.
And the second warning is, lest you think that you’re in the friendliest audience you could possibly be in, your home crowd, let me just share a story. I had survived the Council on Foreign Relations on my book tour, I had survived the Midwest, and I finally, finally landed at the stoop of the Holocaust Museum and I thought I was going to have the most welcoming, reception-- I mean, you know, I should have been a poster child for their effort in documenting US failure to stop genocide-- and I realized that nothing I was saying was going over well, a lot of scowls, nobody was laughing at any of my black humor. And then it came time for questions and answers. And one of the things I had done in my book was simply acknowledge something that is a historical fact, which is that a genocide was carried out against the Armenians in 1915. And what I gathered, once the questions began and not a single question asked about anything other than the Armenian genocide carried out against the Turks, that what I thought was my most receptive audience was in fact an audience of people who had been basically sent and bussed in, I think, by the Turkish embassy. So you never know who is out there.
All right, onward. John, okay. There are a number of historical cases. For those of you who haven’t yet read the book we should all read and is available for a reasonable price in the bookstore, the book looks at a number of cases, historical cases: Rwanda, Bosnia, Haiti, China, Kosovo. I want to begin with Rwanda; it’s where you begin, and as you say, I think in a brilliant formulation, it is the perfect storm, the perfect humanitarian storm, or tragedy.
One of the things that I observed in talking to people like you, people who had served on the inside during these crises, is that there are a couple different kinds of knowledge. There is factual knowledge and then there is knowledge that kind of hits you in the gut and makes you cry. What was your moment where the abstract idea of a lot of dead people far away became something utterly different to you and something that made you unable to live with yourself without doing something?
JS: Well there were really two moments that I want to recount. First, I was sent to Rwanda on a totally failed mission to meet with the leaders of countries in the region, Ethiopia, Tanzania, several other countries in the region, Uganda, to see whether a local/regional peacekeeping force could be formed to go in after the terrible withdrawal of the UN force after Somalia. And I had some support in Washington for that position. I kind of pushed my way out to try to be able to go out there. And of course when I got out to the field, whenever I called back I would say, you know, I’ve got the President of Ethiopia ready to sort of form troops, etc., but I’d be told that back in Washington there was no logistical support or any other kind of support that would be coming from the Pentagon for this. So that ended up being a real tragedy in that we really just didn’t even seem to want to help local countries to try to put it together.
SP: But why did you care?
JS: Well let me describe exactly the event that captured for me this genocide more than any other. I flew in a small plane with just three people, I think, in the area and I flew over the Kagara River, which divides Rwanda from Tanzania. And at several thousand feet it looked as if there was a saw mill somewhere in the area. I knew there weren’t any sawmills anywhere nearby, so what looked like logs in the river I wanted to look at more closely. And we got to about 500 feet and the entire river was flooded, choked with bodies. That to me was the moment where I saw what was happening more dramatically than any other moment.
The other moments-- and I know you want to hear why I got interested or concerned-- the other moment was right after the genocide. I was the first international traveler to go through Rwanda with a number of other … I was the leader of a mission to go through Rwanda. It was the most extraordinary scene. This country was deathly silent, the entire countryside. There was no sign of anything. And it was beautiful. And there were crops that were growing that had been planted just a few months earlier and no one to harvest them, of course. The stench was overwhelming. There were bodies not visible on the road but we could see them further off. And my colleague from the State Department, who went with me, coined the phrase which captured for me very well what this genocide was all about. He said this was the machete equivalent of a neutron bomb: total destruction.
Why me? I had the human rights portfolio. I was very upset that the troops were, that the peacekeepers were withdrawn without any knowledge or involvement on my part. There was some discussion of what to do about the Rwanda genocide as it broke, but at that stage it looked like violence and it was not clear what it was heading toward, at least in the first few days. But the troops were withdrawn very early, and that upset me greatly, so I set out to try to find some way to recapture this.
Finally, there was a Rwandan woman, Monique Mujawamariya, who I write about in my book, who I had introduced to President Clinton exactly ten years ago tomorrow on Human Rights Day 1993. I took her to the White House. She had been given a recognition by Human Rights Watch as a heroine in dealing with the problems of human rights in her own country. So I met her, and so had the President.
Immediately after the genocide broke, I got a call from Holly Burkhalter, who is the Human Rights Watch person, and she said, “Monique is missing, we don’t know where she is.” So Monique to me began to symbolize the whole thing. And I traced her and we tried to find her, and remarkably we did find her. And she returned, she came back to lobby the US government to try to do something about the Rwanda genocide.
All of those examples, I think, are why I got engaged.
SP: Now, what people at the National Security Council say who were with the President around that time is that actually because he had met Monique, when he learned of her disappearance he became very concerned about what was going on in Rwanda-- it was the first time he had really, really focused on it-- and was very demanding of the people who worked for him, as he can be. But what they say is that because he so empathized with a single person, that once she was actually found …
JS: Well, stories do drive Washington. Anyone here who has served in Washington knows that it is the stories of victims, the stories of people who come and lobby the Congress or the administration who actually achieve more than many other people. They also drive the press. And when the story is so vast, as it was in Rwanda, without faces attached, other than Monique’s, it doesn’t get followed as closely. I don’t think there are any real excuses, and I know how strongly President Clinton feels about this today … I’ve talked to him even within the last several months about this. I mean, this he regards as the greatest catastrophe on his watch, and I the same, of course. He was certainly preoccupied by other things at the time, he was also politically weak, he was heading into the 1994 Congressional elections, he was facing a lot of opposition in the Congress. The Somalia crisis, which I described in my remarks, really was the straightjacket, if you will, which the US had put on itself after Somalia in order not to get involved in any more of these kinds of things. So the Somalia crisis kept us from engaging in Rwanda.
SP: You mention this vivid scene that you were privy to of what you thought to be logs floating down the river. Given that you do have the human rights portfolio at the time and thus you’re already suspect in many, many corners of the Washington labyrinth as the touchy-feely guy, as the emotional guy who is going to care about these kinds of things, these places in Africa that really are off the beaten path and not terribly pertinent to our national interest, what’s going through your mind, then, when you’re deciding what to play back to the people that you’re actually talking to on the telephone? I mean, did you share this scene with them and the emotion, or did you try to contain that emotion and put on your national interest hat and make the case for why it was in our interest …
JS: No, I sent a series of cables back, which are in my book, on my several trips to Rwanda, which captured quite graphically what I’d seen. I felt that one of the jobs of the human rights person in government, if they’re going to do anything, is to be a witness. And I did much of my job out on the field being a witness. I was often under no illusion that being a witness was going to lead to a fundamental change in policy back in Washington, but I always wanted to make sure that truth wasn’t the ultimate victim, so I felt that it was important to bring whatever I could back.
And in the case of Rwanda, I think there was a kind of … I don’t want to say there was an allergy to truth, but there was certainly an unwillingness to confront what was happening. The word genocide, for example, was a very controversial word inside the US government. And when I saw those logs that I just described which were not logs, they were bodies, I actually went to Geneva and had a press conference after that, and I kind of broke the silence inside Washington and said that what I’ve seen certainly represents genocide. I’m not going to reach a conclusion about precisely how it was done. That was a very touchy subject in Washington, because there’s a convention, the International Convention on Genocide, which in my view carries obligations on the part of governments who sign it to take steps to try to stop genocide.
There’s a lot of controversy about this. There are those, including some good friends of mine here in the audience, who might not see it that way, who think that the genocide convention actually only applies to the obligation of countries within their own states; you’re not allowed to have a genocide in your own state but when it comes to overseas you’re not supposed to go and intervene in somebody else’s. That’s not my view.
In any event, that was one of the examples of how this topic was played out inside the bureaucracy; do we call it genocide or not?
SP: Let me ask you about Haiti, which gets probably the strongest endorsement, I think, in the book-- maybe Kosovo, the intervention in Kosovo-- but as at least a partial success for human rights war, I suppose. But one of the things you write in a way-- I don’t want to say it contradicts it, but slightly undermines your endorsement of the intervention, and you yourself say it, is that once our state had actually been returned, there was very little follow-through when it came to the actual hard business of nation-building. There was very little funding, police training, security quickly evaporated for people who had trusted in the promise of this intervention and believed that it was going to be more than a one-off.
Instead of focusing just on that case, because obviously these patterns repeat themselves-- Afghanistan, probably eventually in Iraq and elsewhere, certainly in Kosovo-- let me ask you just as a human rights advocate, given what we know about the American attention span, about the difficulty of bringing politics to meet ideals, bringing politics around, getting the kind of congressional support and funding you need, given that we know all that, do you think-- and Haiti is I think the best example in your book of this-- do you think that one has to take that knowledge of what lies ahead more into account than one has in the past as to whether to recommend intervention in the first place?
JS: Yeah. I think this whole topic of intervention is now heavily fretted with Iraq and the disaster on the ground that’s befallen the intervention following the military side of this. I think, as I said in my remarks, I think we need to think all of this through in advance. One of the lessons of the 1990s interventions, and Haiti is the best example of it, is that you can’t just go in and then immediately seek an exit strategy.
SP: But you do.
JS: Well, you do but you don’t. I think if you do it right, if you do it multilaterally, if you engage the organs of the United Nations, the UN Development Program and a number of other multinational organizations, I think you can, as we’ve shown over time in Bosnia, where we still are, but we’ve greatly withdrawn, significantly reduced US forces. But that has been a continuing effort of nation-building.
Now nation-building, this is a term that of course was featured in the 2000 presidential debates, and President Bush scoffed at the whole concept of nationbuilding. And it is a kind of Herculean task, and maybe one that should never be undertaken, in the sense that who can build someone else’s nation? But I think that we have to look at these catastrophes, the genocide, the two genocides that have occurred since the end of the Cold War, Rwanda and what happened in the Balkans, and recognize that if the world is going to give meaning to the commitment to try not to have people kill each other for their ethnic and religious background, and to try to bring some basic elements of the rule of law to bear internationally, we have to confront all of the consequences of intervention, including nation-building.
So as I say, I think what’s happening in Iraq today is the biggest human rights issue to be faced, and to the extent that some people were opposed to the intervention-- I certainly was, the way it was done-- I think we need to get over it, in the sense that we need to get over it and find a result that works. We need to find a method of building an international coalition that can work for the Iraqi people, to liberate them from the catastrophe that they’re in now and the one that they were in under Saddam Hussein.
SP: So it sounds as though … I mean, because while I share your belief that we need to get Iraq as right as we can get it from this point forward, despite all the mistakes that were made in the past, I think that there’s a broader issue and problem, in that a lot of the advocacy … If you want to focus on Iraq, let’s focus on Iraq. Take Tom Friedman’s columns in advance of the war, which I think tipped very much in favor of the war but which embedded, to use a loaded term, a variety of requirements that he brought to the intervention. Michael Ignatieff, my colleague at the Kennedy School, was quite similar. Yes, this war can be justified on moral grounds and on strategic grounds, and I think both of them would have made both arguments, but the following preconditions have to be met. And yet there was no evidence, even before the war, that the individuals who were shaping the policy were prepared to meet the preconditions, and yet the advocacy was still very much in favor of the war.
I think many of us in the sort of soft sidelights of the 1990s, more strictly humanitarian cases, sort of did the same thing. We said, just as you have, yes we need to do this, we need to do that, but that ultimately our experience at some point anyway has to at least caution us or chasten us to the belief that because it’s the right thing to do and the smart thing to do, to make the mistake of believing that it will be the thing that gets done.
And so my question to you, and I don’t mean to belabor it, but is your belief that it can be done somehow colored by a belief that even when you look back at Haiti, Kosovo and Afghanistan, that even though the follow-through wasn’t there in the way that you would have wanted it, that you still believe that all those interventions achieve more good than harm?
JS: Yes. I do believe that. And I also don’t want to lose sight of something which I probably haven’t said enough about here-- I say a good deal about it in my book-- which is that this is not all done under the sort of banner of human rights in a … We have a human rights banner and then we take out a lot of other banners, and many of them are higher than human rights because they’re a greater interest to the United States than human rights sometimes. These are issues of national security.
These issues of intervention, including nonmilitary intervention to try to head off these catastrophes, all relate to what I call the forces of disintegration. We have a national security interest in developing a way of addressing these, containing these forces. And there’s a wide range of methods for doing it.
I fear what was done in Iraq was that a number of guys got together some time ago, probably around 1998, and looked at Iraq as a very good example of what the United States could do to demonstrate its military power in the post-Cold War world, for a variety of reasons. The first reasons, of course, that were cited were weapons of mass destruction. Those proved not to be real reasons after time. And so the humanitarian one was sort of put on as a piece of clothing that didn’t fit very well.
But this loses sight of the fundamental national security interests that we have in containing forces of disintegration through means other than military intervention whenever possible. I stand behind what was done in Kosovo and Bosnia belatedly, and I wish it had been done in Rwanda, and certainly I agree with what was done in Haiti, at least initially, because these were necessary; we had run out of diplomatic options. There were no further means to be used. Milosevic was not going to back down unless the Bosnian Serbs were bombed.
SP: Okay, let me shift gears a little bit to China, which isn’t a place anybody is, that I’m aware of yet anyway, maybe Richard Pearl is contemplating military intervention in China, but I don’t think anybody is heading in that direction. And the story that you tell in your book is the story of the effort to make most favored nation trading status conditional on human rights performance or compliance.
Let me again try to step back from China and ask you a question about the larger issue in that debate, which is that it’s probably, it seems in some ways the fight that you felt in a sense most personal ownership of, and in some ways it comes across as one of your greater disappointments. But the question I have is that the larger issue that I think all of us grapple with is questions about isolation, about human rights abusers, and the debate over whether to isolate them, which often becomes an excuse, frankly, to just wash your hands of them and say, well we’ve expelled them from the Commonwealth or from the Council of Europe and we hope that their human rights record improves. That’s the danger of isolation. Sometimes it can, in the case of South Africa and other historical examples, it can motivate people within a country or engagement, which is often called constructive engagement, as you write about in your book, but is often just a recipe for appeasement. How do you figure out where isolating a regime is appropriate?
And I know the Bush administration is thinking about this as well in the context of North Korea. Engaging. And specifically when you think about China, why was big business wrong, or why did you believe at the time that they were wrong, that simply trading with China would actually be the best kind of Trojan horse mechanism for expanding the rights of the Chinese?
JS: Well, I’m basically across the board in favor of engagement. That doesn’t mean that I think every regime under every circumstance always ought to have an ambassador from the United States, but I am in favor of finding ways of talking whenever possible, even with those whom one disagrees. And I take that from the president in whose library we sit. I think that was really a very important instrument of his diplomatic vision.
And when it comes to a country like China, it is very hard. And I think the flaw in our policy toward China over a long period of time is that we have oscillated between we want to hug them and engage them fully in so many different ways, or we want to isolate them and push them off. And I think there’s a balance between the two which has never really adequately been struck.
What happened in the Clinton years that I write about was what was essentially an experiment that failed, and I think it was probably an experiment that was almost bound to fail, and it was an experiment of linking human rights promotion with trade status of China. That is, China has a status of most favored nation, which doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the most favored nation, only that they get certain trade benefits from having that status, and that was annually reviewed. And the decision was made early in the Clinton administration to link the renewal of that trade benefit to certain basic elements of human rights: the release of some prisoners from the Tiananmen Square period, inspection of Chinese prisons where political prisoners were being held, a number of things. Fairly modest kinds of change. The problem was that this was a very, very big weapon for human rights to be carrying in a huge country with enormous strategic and economic ramifications for the United States, the relationship between the US and China.
So I think, and as I write in my book, I think this was a flawed instrument from the outset. It was a policy-- and I don’t wash my hands of it-- it was a policy that was in place when I came into office and I worked to try to implement it. And it was a policy that was then changed very dramatically by President Clinton after a year, when he just said it’s not working and we’re going to essentially turn it all over to trade and economics to try to seek human rights improvement.
I don’t think that’s enough, and I don’t think President Clinton thought it was enough either. That is to say, you can’t simply grow a country economically out of its human rights problems if it has a government that is centralized, nondemocratic, and is clamping down and continues to do so, even when the economy improves, on those who may have different political points of view.
So there needs to be a way of working with China within an international context, and I write about some of that in the book, using rule of law exchanges, working through the UN Human Rights Commission, etc. But it is a real conundrum. How you deal with a big powerful country that is authoritarian in nature and is violating human rights? It’s a challenge.
SP: Last question about your cases and then move to a couple contemporary issues. Kosovo. You mentioned a number of times in your remarks, and, of course, I know this is your firm belief and my firm belief, that multilateral interventions are desirable. Why is Kosovo not, in fact, an example of the United States-- just happens to be your United States, the Clinton folks-- actually setting a precedent, an important precedent for what the Bush administration has done in Iraq? From the standpoint of those in the developing world-- let me anticipate your response, which is that, of course, it was a NATO intervention and not a unilateral intervention-- but from the standpoint of much of the developing world, NATO might well just seem like the United States or might be in a sense unilateral, but Western. Why isn’t Kosovo part of the reason that we’re in this mess today?
JS: Well it is a very good question. Certainly the administration cites the Kosovo precedent to justify what they’ve done in Iraq. But I think there are a number of very important differences between Kosovo and Iraq. As a practical matter, the biggest difference is that all of the countries in the region of Kosovo, with the exception of course of Serbia, which was part of the country of Kosovo-- I mean, Kosovo was part of Serbia, excuse me-- all of them supported the intervention. They all, indeed, wanted the intervention. The NATO intervention was undertaken regionally, by regional organizations, to deal with a regional problem, where there were vast numbers of people being expelled from their homes and it looked as if the whole situation was going to follow suit with Bosnia. And in a sense it would have been like not intervening in Rwanda the second time. That was certainly the way I saw it and the way many saw it.
Iraq is a situation where the country is, of course, surrounded by neighbors who were deeply opposed to the intervention and the intervention was undertaken in such a way as to-- because it was unilateral in nature and didn’t even have the broader support that the Kosovo intervention had, it had the United Kingdom to be sure but that was it-- it inflamed the region, it led to an increase in terrorism in Iraq itself, and, above all, there was no real plan for an authority to be developed inside of Iraq once the intervention was over, and that’s the terrible crisis that we’re in today. So I think the two are very distinguishable.
I also believe that the Kosovo intervention was justified because of the genocide convention that I cited earlier. There are those who disagree with that position, but I think my position has integrity, and I also think that it probably would prevail if it were put to some kind of a legal test.
SP: Sunday night you’re having Robert McNamara I guess not in this particular room but somewhere here in this complex. What do you think of Robert McNamara? [laughter] It’s kind of off the record, right?
JS: He’s a member of the Kennedy administration who has spoken here frequently and who is always interesting to listen to. [laughter]
SP: Oh man. What do you think? [laughter] Let me put it another way. Has …
JS: She’s got to get better at asking questions.
SP: As one who has had the challenge both of working within a bureaucracy which arguably certainly allowed sinister acts to unfold on the international stage, and also, whether it's in the realm of farm subsidies and their effect on African agriculture or with missiles that went astray, also harmed human life, so as one who has sort of been on the inside and seen how good intentions or response to domestic constituencies can go awry from the standpoint of people abroad, one, and two, as one who has written a memoir of sorts and tried to explain without seeming to justify, do you have more sympathy for Robert McNamara do you think than you would have prior to 1992, when you might have been on the outside just judging outcomes?
JS: Well, I’ll answer with partial humor by saying Robert McNamara would have been one of those people, were he in the Clinton administration, who wouldn’t have returned my phone calls. It may be that if I traveled somewhere he would have, as I found was possible. So …
SP: Because of his title or because of his …
JS: No, no, because of his title. You’re asking me a bureaucratic question, and I think it was his title that would have kept him from engaging with some Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights over in the State Department. You’ve heard something about the relations between State and Defense, I think, and they haven’t changed significantly, although they were actually considerably better, I’d say, in the Clinton administration.
Yes, I guess I have some sympathy for Robert McNamara’s position, but I don’t have a lot of … I can’t say that my own experience in addressing these issues that I write about and that we’ve been talking about helps me particularly understand the tragedy of Vietnam, in which there are so many contexts that are different, and I’m not sure that I can put myself back in the Pentagon in 1963 or ’64, ’65 …
SP: Let me ask you this. Why are US officials traditionally characterologically so reluctant, do you think, to look back and admit profound error? And why do they never, with the rarest of exceptions, which we can, of course, cite President Clinton being a real exception on this score, never, ever, ever apologize?
JS: Yeah, I’m not sure that that’s an accurate characterization, but let’s assume that it is …
SP: What other official besides Robert McNamara has ever admitted profound error?
JS: You know, there …
SP: President Kennedy. Bay of Pigs.
JS: Yes, that’s a very good example. Yeah, I think there are examples, but there probably is something about representing the government where you are rarely, unless you’re at the very top, as President Kennedy was or President Clinton was, where you’re going to take responsibility for all the things that the government did. But having said that, there are I think many, many heroes inside of government. I cited two of them tonight, these CIA agents that I talked about. People who act on their conscience-- you write about them in your book-- and also work within a framework of government.
Working in government is an extraordinary thing to do, to be able to represent the United States, flawed in many ways that it is, is a great experience. And I think how it is that an official comes to either write the kind of memoir that I’ve written, which is really not particularly critical of individuals but is certainly critical of policies, or do what President Kennedy did so heroically, I think, which then gave him the way to deal with the Cuban Missile Crisis. I’m not pessimistic about the prospect of serving in government and being able to both follow your conscience and hopefully advance some of these issues that we’re talking about here.
SP: Let me just ask you about what I mentioned at the beginning, sort of how far we’ve come, or gone I guess, in the last year or two, in terms of the United States’ ability to speak on behalf of human rights. You, I’m sure, would have said in your time that probably the demand of consistency in government would be a recipe for never getting anything done. But in seeing the Bush administration’s perhaps more extreme version of selective application of principle, touting human rights in Iraq on the one hand and until recently anyway being pretty consistent in one’s backing of Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan and some of the other abusive regimes, and then also the Bush administration’s extreme unilateralism, sort of extreme versions of things that we actually have seen in the past, selective application of principle and a disdain for international institutions and treaties, I mean, are you really convinced that they’re so different? Or, do we actually have to grapple with sort of the nature of America and the human rights beast, that we’re going to be selective, that we should take what we can get, better to get half a loaf than nothing at all, and that the Clinton line, which was let’s do it multilateral when we can, unilateral when we must, as distinct from the Bush line, which is unilateral when we can, multilateral when we must, that that is a meaningful difference?
JS: I think there is a big and profound difference, and let me state it briefly. The people who are pursuing the objectives of the United States internationally today in government at the highest levels, I believe have a view of US power: the moment in history where that power is as predominant in the world as it is today must be used in this moment, the moment must be seized. And I think the idea that the intervention in Iraq would transform the Middle East is a very good example of that use of power, the power should be used, we have it, we should use it. This is their view.
I think that’s an extremely dangerous view. I think it’s a view that will result in the isolation of the United States, the loss of the soft power, which is the most important power that we have, the power of the rule of law and the way to project that in other countries. And, in addition, we will be isolated in that we will be left with all of these problems ourselves. And the fact that we’re paying an 87 billion dollar price tag in Iraq when the price tag for the first Gulf War under the first Bush administration was far lower because it was multilateral I think is a very good example.
So I think these people really see the world fundamentally differently, and that’s what’s at stake in foreign policy. And I think that’s why foreign policy issues are going to be at the center, or should be at the center, of the presidential campaign.
SP: Okay, well do you agree with that? Let’s take your comments and questions. [applause] We have about ten minutes, maybe a little more, for questions and comments. Maybe identify yourself, I guess, before.
LARRY MCCARTY: Larry McCarty. I spent some time behind the Iron Curtain in East Berlin and in Prague, and as an American I kind of got the idea of what a loss of freedom is. But it seems like you only get that sense when you actually run into it, and I think the East Berliners and the people in Prague gave me a good idea in the time that I was there of what was at stake. And my question is, in wars of human rights and wars of freedom that exist around the globe, whether they succeed or not, how much is based on the individual people or the individual countries that are seeking freedom, and how much is it based on the big power, global politics around the globe? Like when we fought the Revolution of Independence it involved France, Britain, other nations were involved in our war of freedom, and wars of freedom will continue to go on. When is it up to the people themselves as to whether they succeed, or how much is it up to all these other big nations and their influence and how they impact it either negatively or positively?
JS: Well my answer is that the wars of liberation that you describe, using that term in a broad sense of people coming together to try to seek freedom themselves, I think have had an enormous impact over history and in recent history as well. And I know that it’s fashionable to say that the Cold War ended because of a variety of geopolitical forces and that the United States was largely behind that. I, too, have spent time doing human rights work in countries that are facing terrible difficulties, and I think it is the people in the end who make the biggest difference.
I’ll tell you just one story, and this is partly in answer to your question. It’s a story that dramatizes to me what the end of the Cold War was most about. In 1988 I went to Prague as an Amnesty International vice chairman. I was on a human rights mission to do work to find out what the conditions were of the dissidents who were then in prison, including Vaclav Havel and others. And my contact at Amnesty had arranged for me to have a contact person there, and that person, a wonderful woman who refused to meet with me anywhere indoors for fear that she would be overheard by the Czech equivalent of the KGB who would have had her thrown in prison-- she was heroic and brave to come and meet with me and give me the information, which I then reported back to Amnesty.
Eighteen months later I was riding a train between Washington and New York, and I opened up the newspaper, The New York Times, and there was this woman staring me in the face. Her name was Rita Klimova. And she had just been named by President Vaclav Havel to be the first Czech ambassador to the United States. Two dissidents who made the Velvet Revolution.
And I don’t mean to give you an emotional answer, but I do think that there’s a lot to be said for the people who are engaged in their own struggles. These geopolitical forces are important but the most important forces are often what’s going on on the ground.
LM: So you’re saying it’s the people themselves?
JS: Yes.
SP: Please.
PENELOPE VANTILE: Hi. My name is Penelope Vantile. My question is about North Korea. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that situation, because you have two things that play here: you have an enormous security threat, and then you have enormous human rights violations. What do you think the US role should be in that case and how something could be done about it?
JS: Well, North Korea is like China, but different from China, one of those most difficult cases, both for human rights, and in this case for the real crisis of weapons of mass destruction. And there’s been a kind of an oscillation of policy over a number of years about how to engage with North Korea. I think the Clinton administration worked reasonably successfully to find a way to try to walk North Korea back from its nuclear weapons crisis and the ability to use nuclear weapons.
What was then used, at least in the initial stages of the Bush administration was an isolation strategy, a real isolation: not to engage North Korea in any way, shape or form. Over time that has developed into a strategy of working with China and other neighbors to try to engage North Korea. Seems to be bearing some fruit. But North Korea is a very, very difficult case for security purposes.
And then when you get to the human rights catastrophe in North Korea, it is certainly not a, shall we say, a candidate for unilateral preemptive intervention. I mean, were that to take place, I think you would see a real catastrophe on the Korean peninsula. North Koreans would almost certainly strike, probably with their nuclear weapons, into South Korea. And I think going down that road is a very dangerous road to go down.
Having said that, I think it’s important for North Korea to know that the world is watching closely what it’s doing, not only on weapons of mass destruction but on human rights. And I happen to be on the board of an organization called Human Rights in North Korea, and we have just put out a report by a very distinguished former Amnesty International Executive Director, David Hawk, which for the first time really shines a spotlight on the human rights conditions in North Korea, and it got a great deal of public attention. That’s the kind of thing that needs to be done.
PV: As far as your talking about diplomacy with force under the Clinton administration, it seems to me that North Korea would know that nobody really wants to trigger the nuclear attack on South Korea. So where is the force there? Where is the real oomph behind the diplomacy or the human rights publications?
JS: Well North Korea wants other things. It wants food, and above all it wants some degree of recognition. It claims that it wants, and I think it does, some assurance that it’s not going to be attacked, so it is not a one-way street. It’s not simply us wanting to change the situation involving weapons and to basically change the regime, it’s that there is room for some discussion in the context of North Korea, I believe, because there are things that North Korea also wants.
NIM JONGON JEE: Hello. I’m Nim Jongon Jee. I’m originally from Rwanda and am a genocide survivor. [applause] I wanted first to thank you for writing these books, because as I always say, you are one of the few of those who cared and dared to tell the story of our loved ones. My question is we have talked about national security, sometimes national interest, human rights issues and foreign policy, and thinking about that, but also now the presidential elections we have coming up, the question is about if there was another Rwanda today, how far have we gone with the issue of accountability? It seems like anything can be done and, again, there’s no accountability.
JS: Well, first of all, I salute you. And as a representative of all of those who went through the terrible, terrible trauma of that period, I can only imagine what it must have felt like to be so isolated. We’ve been talking about isolation here, but the ultimate isolation is to be in a country where genocide is sweeping through, where the world has proclaimed that there will be no genocide and where in fact it’s occurring and occurring to you.
Accountability is very important in this area, and I had a role in the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, a very flawed but still important international justice instrument. I was glad to see that finally the Tribunal has convicted of genocide the people who pervade the hate radio on Radio Milles Collines and convicted a number of others. Accountability is crucial. You cannot have, I believe, peace in any country that has undergone genocide without justice, which is why the two Tribunals, the one in Rwanda and the one in Yugoslavia, are so important.
At the same time, I know that there are important justice issues that are being addressed inside Rwanda, and it’s a challenge for the government of Rwanda to do that, rebuilding its court system and trying to try people who have committed these horrendous crimes. I myself have several times visited the Rwandan prisons and seen the extraordinary … Here are people crowded who are themselves responsible, probably, or some of them may not have been.
Accountability is a critical element of bringing peace to a country that has undergone genocide. So I will just put in a plug here for the international institution that I think needs to have life, and that’s the International Criminal Court, which takes the two Tribunals, Rwanda and Yugoslavia, and makes them global in nature. The United States, tragically I think, is now campaigning actively against this Tribunal. I think it may be flawed but it’s far better to go on the inside and try to work the changes than it is to stand on the outside and try to attack it.
SP: Thank you so much, sir. I think what we’re going to do is just take these three questions in succession and that will discipline both of us. And then we’ll wrap up, because we’re well over time.
MAC SHORE: My name is Mac Shore. And I was wondering if you could talk about-- perhaps we don’t have time-- but vital interests and what is America’s vital interest and when can human rights become part of our vital interest, and when does a detraction on international law become a conflict of our vital interest?
SP: Thank you.
EDGAR CHEN: My name is Edgar Chen. I was formerly with the Coalition for International Justice in Washington. I had a question about rewards for justice program. In the 87 billion dollars earmarked for Iraq, two million goes to, I believe, tracking down information leading to the capture of suspects wanted by the Sierra Leone Tribunal. And Nigeria is particularly upset about this since they’ve offered Charles Taylor asylum.
I’m wondering what your views are on bounties essentially that may incentivize the sort of trans-border transgressions that these people are wanted for and mercenaries, versus the United States actually putting its money where its mouth is, and essentially whether this is getting justice or buying justice. Thank you.
SP: And finally.
JOSH RUBENSTEIN: I want to raise a country we haven’t mentioned, which is Russia. We’re just a few days after these very dramatic parliamentary elections in Russia. During the ‘90s, during the Clinton administration, we were in a crucial set of years in the immediate post-Soviet period, and a lot has been written about it. I’m curious how John looks back on either the failure or the success in helping to nurture some democratic institutions in Russia in the post-Soviet period, which now under Putin seemed so fragile.
JS: Which of those do you want to answer?
SP: No, no, no. This is the greatest night I’ve ever had, to sit and listen to the questions.
JS: On the vital interest question, as I said earlier, I believe that it is a US vital interest to try to contain what I call the forces of disintegration, not to do it alone but to do it with others. That’s why we have a vital interest in preventing the destabilization of whole sections of the world, as happened in Southeastern Europe during the Balkan crisis, as happened and continues to happen throughout Central Africa after Rwanda. We have a vital interest. That doesn’t mean that we have an interest in militarily intervening in all of these cases, but we have an interest in which we should do more.
I was in the Congo this summer, was there to review a UN peacekeeping operation, and then tragically the United States was totally missing in action there, not involved in what I think is one of the more successful UN peacekeeping operations in this period of time. Not only are we not involved, but remarkably, we have lifted an arms embargo that the UN was trying to impose in the region. We lifted our own embargo on Rwanda. So Rwanda, which was providing arms to some of the warlords in Northern Congo, now is free to obtain weapons from the United States, which I think is a tragic, tragic use, and a lack of recognition that our vital interest is not being served there.
I’m not totally sure I understand the bounties for justice question. I mean, I am in favor of rewards for turning in criminal suspects, and I think they can work. We used them to some extent in Bosnia. And I’m certainly not interested in finding a way to buy off suspects so that they disappear, if that’s what you’re saying. But I do think the use of rewards for turning in war criminals is not an unreasonable thing to do.
Josh, Russia is a huge topic, and one that we should have a forum on. You should be the main speaker. Looking back-- and I should say, Josh Rubenstein is one of the great experts on the Russian dissident movement and has written extensively on this subject-- I think looking back at the foreign policy the US followed in the immediate post-Cold War period as Russia changed so dramatically, I think there were some important things that were done, but there were some major mistakes that were made. It was hard to predict where the whole thing was going. I think probably the biggest mistake-- and those who were involved in this policy I think have so much as said so, my friend Strobe Talbott, who was the Russia expert in the Clinton administration-- I think we may have put too much emphasis on the individual relationship between the US president and in this case Boris Yeltsin. I think that’s being replicated once again with the Bush relationship with Putin. I think Russia is much more complicated than the relationships at the top.
And I also think that, tragically, the human rights catastrophe that has developed in Chechnya has developed without a great deal of international pressure being brought to bear on Russia to try to soften the way in which it’s pursuing its interest in Chechnya so as not to commit these massive human rights crimes. I don’t put that blame specifically or only on the United States, but I think it’s something that has gone on for some time and it’s true, and Europe, I think, has a large responsibility there as well.
SP: With that hard question and promise of a future forum, we’ll wrap up. But John, congratulations. And again, the book is available right outside for purchase.
[applause]
JS: And yours is too.