Below is a link for an article by National Journal's Michael Hirsch where he discusses Susan Rice's record both as UN Ambassador and earlier as a senior Clinton Administration official. Critics say she has developed a habit of looking the other way at allies who commit atrocities.
http://nationaljournal.com/nationalsecurity/susan-rice-benghazi-may-be-least-of-her-problems-20121116
For a
president who rarely shows emotion, Barack Obama’s surprisingly personal blast
at Republican critics of Susan Rice, his U.N ambassador, suggested two things.
One, Obama genuinely admires Rice and thinks she’s being unfairly criticized
for giving an controversial explanation of the Sept. 11 Benghazi attack that
later didn’t hold up. And two, he may well intend to name her his second-term
secretary of State, as some reports indicate.
Obama
made a fair point when he said Rice “had nothing to do with Benghazi and was
simply making a presentation based on intelligence that she had received.” All
Rice did was to carefully articulate on the Sunday TV talk shows what the
administration knew at the time, “based on the best information we have to
date,” as she put it.
But there
are other issues with Rice’s record, both as U.N. ambassador and earlier as a
senior Clinton administration official, that are all but certain to come out at
any confirmation hearing, many of them concerning her performance in Africa.
Critics say that since her failure to advocate an intervention in the terrible
genocide in Rwanda in 1994 — Bill Clinton later said his administration's
unwillingness to act was the worst mistake of his presidency — she has
conducted a dubious and naïve policy of looking the other way at allies who
commit atrocities, reflecting to some degree the stark and emotionless
realpolitik sometimes associated with Obama, who is traveling this week to
another formerly isolated dictatorship: Burma.
Most
recently, critics say, Rice held up publication of a U.N. report that concluded
that the government of Rwandan President Paul Kagame, with whom she has a long
and close relationship, was supplying and financing a brutal Congolese rebel
force known as the M23 Movement. M23’s leader, Bosco Ntaganda, is wanted by the
International Criminal Court for recruiting child soldiers and is accused of
committing atrocities. She has even wrangled with Johnnie Carson, the assistant
secretary of State for the Bureau of African Affairs, and others in the
department, who all have been more critical of the Rwandans, according to some
human-rights activists who speak with State's Africa team frequently.
Rice
claimed she wanted Rwanda to get a fair hearing and examine the report first,
and her spokesman, Payton Knopf, says that “it’s patently incorrect to say she
slowed [it] down.” But Jason Stearns, a Yale scholar who worked for 10 years in
the Congo and wrote a book called Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, says
“that is not common practice with these reports. Even when Rwanda did get a
hearing, all they did was to use it to smear the report and say how wrong it
was.” The report has since been published.
Mark
Lagon, a former assistant secretary of State under George W. Bush and a
human-rights specialist at Georgetown, has generally positive things to say
about Rice’s tenure as U.N. ambassador, especially her leadership in the
intervention in Libya against Muammar el-Qaddafi and her revival of the
administration’s failing policy on Darfur. But he too says she has fallen short
on Africa. “In recent months, there is documentary evidence of atrocities in
the DRC [Democratic Republic of the Congo], and their umbilical cord is back in
Rwanda. These issues have not been raised in the Security Council, and Susan
has fought the U.N. raising them in the Security Council,” Lagon says.
In
September, Rice also delivered a glowing eulogy for the late Ethiopian Prime
Minister Meles Zenawi, whom many rights activists considered to have been a
repressive dictator.
Recently,
during a meeting at the U.N. mission of France, after the French ambassador
told Rice that the U.N. needed to do more to intervene in the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, Rice was said to have replied: “It’s the eastern DRC. If
it’s not M23, it’s going to be some other group,” according to an account given
by a human-rights worker who spoke with several people in the room. (Rice’s
spokesman said he was familiar with the meeting but did not know if she made
the comment.)
If true,
that rather jaded observation would appear to echo a Rice remark that Howard
French, a long-time New York Times correspondent in Africa, related in
an essay in the New York Review of Books in 2009, which was highly
critical of Rice. In the article, headlined “Kagame’s Secret War in the Congo,”
in which French calls the largely ignored conflict “one of the most destructive
wars in modern history,” he suggests that Rice either naïvely or callously
trusted new African leaders such as Kagame and Yoweri Museveni of Uganda to
stop any future genocide, saying, “They know how to deal with that. The only
thing we have to do is look the other way.” Stearns, the author, says that
during Rice’s time in the Clinton administration “they were complicit to the
extent that they turned a blind eye and took at face value Rwandan assurances
that Rwanda was looking only after its own security interests.”
Knopf,
Rice’s spokesman, says “she clearly has relationships, some of which are very
close, with African leaders, and Kagame is one of them. Her view and our view
is that these relationships have given her an opportunity to influence events.”
At the
same time, however, Knopf says Rice has been tough and forthright in
criticizing Rwandan abuses, and backed a “very strong statement out of the
Security Council in August about M23.” (The statement, though, did not refer to
Rwandan support directly.)
In a
speech she gave at the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology in November
2011, Rice took Kagame’s government to task for a political culture that
“remains comparatively closed. Press restrictions persist. Civil-society
activists, journalists, and political opponents of the government often fear
organizing peacefully and speaking out. Some have been harassed. Some have been
intimidated by late-night callers. Some have simply disappeared.”
The long
conflict in Congo has sometimes been called “Africa’s World War,” because it
has led to a staggering 5.4 million deaths — far more than any war anywhere
since World War II. Throughout it, Kagame has appeared to play a clever game of
pretending to intervene to impose peace and deliver Western-friendly policies,
while in fact carving out a sphere of influence by which he can control parts
of Congo’s mineral wealth.
Ironically,
much of the controversy that surrounds Rice’s relationship with Kagame and
other African leaders goes back to the event that Rice herself has admitted was
personally wrenching for her, and influenced much of her later views: her
failure to stop the Rwandan genocide.
At the
time, under National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, Rice was in charge of
advising Clinton’s National Security Council on peacekeeping and international
organizations such as the United Nations. “Essentially, they wanted [Rwanda] to
go away,” scholar Michael Barnett, who worked at the U.S. mission to the United
Nations then and later wrote the book Eyewitness to Genocide, told me in an
interview in 2008. “There was little interest by Rice or Lake in trying to stir
up any action in Washington.”
Received on Fri Nov 23 2012 - 10:07:44 EST
