Susan Rice: Benghazi May Be Least of Her Problems
Rights activists say she's been dancing with African dictators since the
'90s.
By <
http://nationaljournal.com/reporters/bio/42> Michael Hirsh
November 24, 2012 | 5:19 p.m.
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.
(TIMELINE:
<
http://nationaljournal.com/nationalsecurity/the-rise-and-fall-of-david-petr
aeus-timeline-20121116?mrefid=skybox> The Rise and Fall of David Petraeus)
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.”
Both Lake and Rice later said they were haunted by their inaction. In an
interview in 2008, Rice told me that she was too “junior”at the time to have
affected decision-making then, but that “everyone who lived through that
feels profoundly remorseful and bothered by it.”
“I will never forget the horror of walking through a church and an adjacent
schoolyard where one of the massacres had occurred,” Rice said in her 2011
speech in Kigali. “Six months later, the decomposing bodies of those who had
been so cruelly murdered still lay strewn around what should have been a
place of peace. For me, the memory of stepping around and over those corpses
will remain the most searing reminder imaginable of what humans can do to
one another.”
Rice’s relationship with Kagame began with her efforts to form a new African
leaders group in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. Among them were
Museveni and Ethiopia’s Zenawi. The Clinton administration “believed in an
African renaissance,” says Stearns. “She backed this somewhat naïvely,
because they were forward-looking leaders who spoke a different language.
They spoke about markets.”
While Rice was serving — and despite her later denials before Congress — the
Clinton administration appeared to back an invasion of the troubled Congo by
Rwanda and Uganda, according to a 2002 article in the journal Current
History by Columbia University scholar Peter Rosenblum. In the article,
titled “Irrational Exuberance: The Clinton Administration in Africa,”
Rosenblum called the invasion “a public relations disaster from which the
United States has not recovered.”
Received on Sat Nov 24 2012 - 18:50:52 EST
