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DIPLOMATIC LICENSE
Current Events at the United Nations
Aired February 25, 2005 - 21:00:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (UNINTELLIGIBLE)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: But we can't leave the children behind.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Sorry, father, we have our orders.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We can't leave them.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We can do more.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Father, it is of no use. These men are not here to help us.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Humanity in all its sovereign states that represents all the peoples of the world failed, failed to recognize the impact of what was going on in Rwanda.
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RICHARD ROTH, CNN ANCHOR: This weekend, the most famous awards in the world are handed out, the Oscars. And in this year's movie industry ceremonies, a film about one of the U.N.'s most awful stories is in amid the blockbusters and the foreign films.
Welcome to DIPLOMATIC LICENSE. I'm Richard Roth.
The film "Hotel Rwanda" failed to be nominated for Best Picture, even though Don Cheadle, the actor who plays the hotel manager, has been nominated for Best Actor of the year.
20 years ago, the Best Picture award went to "Out of Africa." That could have also been the title of any new film about the United Nations in Rwanda, the rush by nations and the Security Council to withdraw their troops as massacres began.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You should spit in my face.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Excuse me, Kenneth?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You're dirt. We think you're dirt, Paul.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Who is we?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The West. All the superpowers. Everything you believe in, Paul. They think you're dirt. They think you're dung. You're worthless.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm afraid I don't understand what you are saying, sir.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Oh, come on, Paul. You're the smartest man here. You've got them all eating out of your hands. You could own this freaking hotel except for one thing. You're black. They're not going to stay, Paul. They're not going to stop the slaughter.
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ROTH: One of the real life people involved in Rwanda, the U.N. general whose appeals for help went unanswered, Canadian Lieutenant General Romeo Dallaire has been dealing with the genocide now for nearly 11 years. He's portrayed in that movie "Hotel Rwanda."
He saw the mass murders and couldn't stop it. The former commander of the U.N. mission in Rwanda at the time was recently honored himself by the International Rescue Committee in New York.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Romeo Dallaire was extremely forthright in calling on the world as a whole to take responsibility, to make sure that genocide did not happen in Rwanda. He was in charge of the U.N. mission there and worked very hard to get more troops, to be able to keep the warring parties apart.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Member states of the United Nations did what they did so often in the 1990s. They assigned the blue helmets a righteous task, and then they failed to give the commander the troops, the vehicles, the radios, the fuel, the guns, or even the food rations needed to achieve that righteous task.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I think him coming here is immensely symbolic in terms of his anointing General Dallaire and in effect publicly acknowledging the contribution that Dallaire has made, I believe for the first time, in this kind of way.
KOFI ANNAN, U.N. SECY.-GEN.: While the genocide showed us the very worst of humanity, Romeo showed us some of the very best as a soldier, peacekeeper and humanitarian, and above all as a fine example of what it should mean to be a human being. He richly deserves tonight's recognition and award.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: He has used the platform of being the one who was there, being the one who pleaded for outside reinforcements, to now draw attention to what is going on in Darfur, to draw attention to Rwanda, which has been forgotten, of course, in the wake of the genocide. So he is being honored, basically, for being a living witness for those that he wasn't able to save at the time of the genocide.
ROMEO DALLAIRE, FORMER U.N. COMMANDER IN RWANDA: In 1994 my mission failed an the international community failed and for that there is no honor, for ultimately so many innocent people, human beings, died, were injured and suffered.
We are right now at a crossroads 10 years later and as the government of Khartoum still maneuvers so well, as others have, in deflecting the impact we tried to bring to them. Hundreds of thousands are starving, dying and being displaced.
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DALLAIRE: It is true that the Darfur scenario is a genocide. And when the United Nations report says nearly everything except genocide, it argues the intent.
In that context, it is to me perverse that we are seeing the same type of mandate coming out of the Security Council that I had at the time, which is to observe and report.
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ROTH: And joining us now is Romeo Dallaire, former military commander for the United Nations in Kigali, Rwanda.
The last time you were on our program was May of 2000, from Ottawa. Good to have you here in person.
The headlines right now are about Sudan. Is there a comparison between the international community's failure to come to the rescue, so to speak, in Rwanda, and what is happening in Sudan and Darfur?
DALLAIRE: Well, the comparisons are so flagrant that it slaps you in the face. Everything from some articulating, as this country did, it being a genocide and no reaction to the manipulation by the Sudanese government in making everybody else dance, as they did in '94, the extremists, to the nature of the conflict, that is to say the hundreds of thousands who are being maneuvered and destroyed by forces that are essentially trying to trip them and trying to gain control.
ROTH: So what should be done?
DALLAIRE: Well, the solution is intervention, but in the context of protection. That is to say we got to go and protect them and ultimately bring them back to their villages and solve, of course, in parallel with that, the pastoral and the sort of urban scenarios that exist there.
ROTH: I mean, since Rwanda, there have been hundreds of seminars, investigations, papers, can't happen again, yet the Security Council, critics say, just sits there and the reports (AUDIO GAP)
DALLAIRE: Well, Darfur has totally dropped from the scene, let alone the Congo, is a perfect example of we have now prioritized in the post- colonial era, who counts and who doesn't in the world.
ROTH: So when you hugged at a dinner in New York recently, and I think people wondered what would be the interaction. Here is a man who was on the receiving end of your cries for help.
DALLAIRE: Kofi Annan was rendered incapable of taking the actions there because the sovereign states that pull the strings in the United Nations did not want to intervene nor take any risks for black Africans at that time.
ROTH: How can you have Madeline Albright, who I believe has a blurb on your book, "Shake Hands with the Devil" -- and Madeline Albright was, as she says in her book, she had no help for you and she was making sure from Washington that Rwanda did not move forward, that there were no troops.
DALLAIRE: Exactly.
ROTH: So why accept her blurb?
DALLAIRE: Have I accepted anything? I haven't even read her review of my book. And certainly I have questions about her personal interventions at that time.
The day the whole thing started, when it was stated that the United States not only is not going to intervene, it's not going to help anybody that it going to intervene, and a few weeks earlier President Clinton signed presidential directive 25, that said outright, the United States is not going to intervene if it is not its self-interest, and by the by, you, United Nations, it may be time that you stop saying yes to supporting people that need help.
ROTH: A couple of months ago on the program we talked to Major General Henri Quami Anioto (ph), your deputy. He told us that it wouldn't have taken that many troops, the visibility would have scared off Rwandan perpetrators. Do you agree?
DALLAIRE: I was commanding 5,000 troops before going. I needed half that to reinforce what I had and we would have been able to curtail it right from the start. But there wasn't a country -- even though they gave and put in Kigali 2,500 troops from France, Belgium, Italy and the Americans in Bugabula (ph), to pull out all the whites, none of them were given even the opportunity to offer their capabilities to me to stop that killing that they were witnessing as they are taking the white people out.
ROTH: Briefly, how accurate is the film "Hotel Rwanda"?
DALLAIRE: The movie is fine. It plays with the history, however the concerns, the quandaries, the ethical and moral dilemmas are presented, and anything that will keep that genocide alive in our eyes, I'm for it.
ROTH: Nick Nolte as you as sort of a.
DALLAIRE: Don't ask me about that.
ROTH: You don't like his portrayal?
DALLAIRE: I have my opinions. He did, I suppose, what was told to him.
ROTH: What about the use of the word genocide now, in Darfur, the United States says it's happening, but in the Commission of Inquiry they say it's not happening.
DALLAIRE: Whether you use it or not, it's ineffective. I mean, we used it finally six weeks into the genocide in Rwanda --
ROTH: Boutros-Ghali used it --
DALLAIRE: -- nobody came. I mean, no one came, and right now, over the last months, the Bush government used it. I haven't seen any troops on the ground and I haven't seen them squeezing middle powers, like Canada and Germany and Japan, to get there.
ROTH: It's like a slow-motion thing, more than -- Rwanda was fast. It may have been three months -- that seems slow -- but it was more -- it was quick, bloody, machete. Here, it seems like you can't see it and everybody hopes it goes away, don't they?
DALLAIRE: Well, it's more remote than Rwanda was. It's greater territory. However, it is still in a pace that is not rivaling Rwanda but is rivaling very much ex-Yugoslavia, and we poured people in there by the tens of thousands and billions of dollars into ex-Yugoslavia, in a very similar scenario. Nobody came to Darfur.
ROTH: You know, the book, "Shake Hands with the Devil" is the title, that reminds us of an anecdote I think you about a Canadian priest asking you about, I believe, do you believe in God.
DALLAIRE: Yes, and I said I believe in God becaues I shook hands with the devil, negotiated with him and discussed with him how to be able to bring people between the lines and stop slaughtering in a certain area, and they were discussing stopping slaughtering with blood on their hands, as if it was chopping wood. And so they weren't human.
Many quandaries that we have now in these conflict missions, should I be negotiating with them or should I take my pistol and shoot them right between the eyes.
ROTH: Well, what is the ethical conflict here, now in these dilemmas the world was set up a certain way for the United Nations to operate, and now you've got a different set of -- unlike classic warfare from World War II.
DALLAIRE: Exactly. We're into a whole new era. This is not a blip. We don't need generals who only know how to fight. We need capabilities that not only have the experience or base of fighting and protecting and the warrior spirit, but they need an added capability, a new dimension to it, which is conflict resolution skills, that come from intellectually based assets, so that they're not just standing there, do I shoot or not, but they're actually a value added in the alleyway, saying what is that problem again, and can I provide some solutions to it.
ROTH: In Congo, U.N. peacekeepers accused of trading sex for food, for refugees. Comment on how much of that you saw in the past and what you think of it now.
DALLAIRE: Many of these countries are sending troops that do not have fundamental beliefs in human rights or the training or the background in regards to the complexities of these missions. And the reason why many of them are coming is because the white and developed countries are not providing anymore, as we did during the Cold War. And so you will have catastrophic failures in the field for troops that do not have either the background, the training or the discipline, and trying to adjust to the new cultures at the same time.
ROTH: Yes or no, unfair question, should the Security Council be abolished the current way -- they've been talking about adding more seats and more members.
DALLAIRE: Absolutely not. We are wasting our rations on trying to rebuild it. It's there, how do we treat it in regards to its options, and there the middle powers have presented themselves as absent from bringing solutions to that Security Council.
ROTH: How do you feel personally? You have been through great mental strife, a lot of medication, nightmares. Not surprising considering what you saw. How do you feel now?
DALLAIRE: I feel in fact balanced because of that and I feel terribly fearful for the vast numbers of casualties you're going to get from Iraq, because they're going through the same traumas of whether to shoot/not shoot, is it an enemy/is it a civilian, and those things will play out in years to come in those soldiers and in their families.
ROTH: The book, "Shake Hands with the Devil," General Romeo Dallaire. It use UNAMIR, that was the name of the U.N. force there. Thank you very much and good luck in the future, and thanks for coming by here on DIPLOMATIC LICENSE.
Of course, while in Rwanda, General Dallaire couldn't hear the speeches inside the Security Council, though it is fascinating now to listen back. The deputy Nigerian representative speaking after the Security Council voted to pull out the troops from Rwanda, despite the unfolding genocide.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: As the world witnessed the carnage and slaughter which has gone on now for weeks in Rwanda, many have wondered whether we as a community have really exerted our best efforts to assist the people's of Rwanda or have we simply been content to say that the responsibility is for the Rwandans alone, and it is they who must take full responsibility for their actions.
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ROTH: Welcome back to DIPLOMATIC LICENSE.
Another busy week at the United Nations and correspondent Liz Neisloss has this update for us.
LIZ NEISLOSS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: This week the deadliest attacks so far on the U.N.'s peacekeepers in the Congo. Nine Bangladeshi peacekeepers were killed in the northeastern Ituri region of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There are armed groups in Ituri which do not want the situation to stabilize and so they see that as we take a stronger posture, the prospect of that stabilization is increasing, and for that very reason they are prepared to increase their attacks, and we are prepared to retaliate in kind.
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NEISLOSS: For years, the United Nations had debated what to do about the problem of the world's child soldiers. Right now, some 250,000 children are being used as combatants, porters, spies and sex slaves. This week the U.N. Security Council began to consider steps, including targeted sanctions on governments and rebel groups.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): The parties involved pursue a targeted policy of widespread recruitment of children with the clear intent to dehumanize them, to make them war machines, true cannon fodder.
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NEISLOSS: But the United Nations itself didn't go unscathed in that meeting. As we've discussed on this program, the United Nations has been shamed by reports that its own peacekeepers have been sexually abusing children, most recently in the Congo.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The notion that some peacekeepers would use their position to prey on local children and women in this way is a particularly shocking and unacceptable betrayal of trust.
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NEISLOSS: There has been pressure on the United Nations to name and shame those peacekeepers. For the first time, the United Nations is naming governments and groups exploiting children for war. A list too long to give you here, but if you are curious go to www.UN.org/docs/sc and click on reports of the secretary-general.
On Thursday, the head of the U.N. Refugee Agency formally stepped down from his post, bringing to close another turbulent chapter for the United Nations.
Ruud Lubbers had been accused of sexual harassment by one of his colleagues. Lubbers said it was just a hand on the back and called the story made up. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan had found an internal investigation too flimsy to support the charges, but a leak to the media last week of the internal report dragged the ugly mess back in front of the public.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: While the secretary-general has accepted legal advice that the original allegations made against Mr. Lubbers could not be substantiated, the continuing controversy has made the high commissioners position impossible. He is therefore pleased that Mr. Lubbers has made this decision in the wider interest of UNHCR.
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NEISLOSS: Lubbers told his staff he wasn't going away in anger and urged them to turn the page.
And now I turn it back to Richard Roth.
ROTH: Think your country has had some interesting history? Well, try Russia.
The United Nations did recently. A special exhibition dedicated to witnessing 100 years of history seen through the eyes of one Russian news agency. The Russian Revolution, the rise and fall of the Soviet Union and everything in between.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Congratulations to the (UNINTELLIGIBLE) on its 100th birthday and thank you very much for this exhibition.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Iter-Tass is the oldest Russian news agency. We are maybe thought of as the only Russian institution which without interruption served for the nation, for the country, 100 years. For all Russia, for the Soviet Union, and for democratic Russia too. We produce the news. News is our profession. News for our lives. News in pictures. It's our profession.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It was just such a rich archive. It was really hard to make the final selections from the thousands of photos that I was able to see.
First cosmonaut that went into outer space. First cosmonaut that did the first manned space flight. I have a few and actually have the Sputnik hanging in the front lobby.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: There are some images that are quite disturbing, you know, the conflict images, the treatment of the Jews. It's very powerful. The pictures, the historical aspect.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's impressive. It's very provocative. It's a striking exhibiting.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm especially pleased with the (UNINTELLIGIBLE) parade. In fact, we hope he's going to speak Russian as well at some point.
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ROTH: Iter-Tass says it offers today 45 news cycles and six official languages.
That's it for this week's DIPLOMATIC LICENSE. I'm Richard Roth, In New York. Thanks for watching.
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